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Gavin Andresen Steps Down as Bitcoin’s Lead Developer

Gavin Andresen
Bitcoin’s lead developer Gavin Andresen is stepping down, and handing the reins over to colleague Wladimir van der Laan, also a very experienced bitcoin core developer.Andresen, who was responsible for maintaining the core code that underpins the bitcoin ecosystem, said he was taking a step back to focus on broader bitcoin issues as Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, the body that standardizes, protects and promotes the use of bitcoin across the globe.In a blog post published yesterday, Andresen wrote:Today, I find it harder and harder to keep up with all of the great Computer Science or Economics papers related to bitcoin and other crypto-currencies […] to be clear: I’m not going to disappear […] I’ll just spend a little less time writing Bitcoin Core release announcements, and a little more time catching up on the latest bitcoin-wizards thinking on how best to implement transaction history pruning.Wladimir van der Laan, a Dutch computer scientist with a PhD in computer graphics from University of Groningen, will be taking over as Bitcoin Core Maintainer.Van der Laan, who has already been working full-time on maintaining the core code, is the most prolific bitcoin contributor with the highest number of commits on GitHub (although, of course, when it comes to development it’s not all about quantity).Congrats to Wladimir @orionwl; he has agreed to take on the Bitcoin Core Maintainer (aka lead developer) role https://t.co/AssvzRtZ8G— Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen) April 7, 2014Previous projects by van der Laan include Dropship, which in 2011 enabled the sharing of private files on DropBox and thus exposed the poor security practices of the service. DropBox moved to kill the project, asking van der Laan to remove it from Github and then filing DMCA notices against people who mirrored the files on their own Github accounts.Van der Laan and Andresen were unavailable for comment.Image courtesy of Gavin AndresenBitcoin FoundationBitcoin protocolGavin AndresenWladmir van der Laan
Original author: Kadhim Shubber