Key Takeaways
- Gloria Zhao is the sixth developer to be granted commit access to Bitcoin Core.
- Her key is added to the set of trusted keys via Bitcoin GitHub, and she can directly access Bitcoin Core’s code to merge new code changes.
- Over the years, the developer has made contributions to the Bitcoin code in the areas of mempool and node policy.
Gloria Zhao, an American coder, just became the first woman to own Bitcoin Core, marking an important but somewhat tardy milestone for a currency that has been available for 13 years. The Bitcoin Core software is designed to select the block chain that has the most valid transactions. The Bitcoin Core block chain is the one that everyone else wants to use because its users will only accept transactions for that chain.
Developers that have the authority to approve any modifications to the Bitcoin programme are known as Bitcoin Core maintainers. As a result, the group of maintainers is typically small because they are charged with a heavy duty of ensuring the maintenance of the cryptocurrency code.
Gloria Zhao broke down the behind-the-scenes activity in this week’s episode of “Bitcoin Bottom Line,” which featured hosts C.J. Wilson and Josh Olszewicz as well as Gloria Zhao.
What initially drew you to Bitcoin? Wilson questioned Gloria. Zhao answered,
“There are many philosophies there from the beginning that I found extremely intriguing, and on top of that, there are many very exciting engineering technical difficulties to work on. Naturally, as a student of computer science, I was interested in that.”
The same episode features Zhao explaining how we spend our lives online and how much is at risk. She believes that everyone should pick up some basic coding skills or arm themselves with tools to stay safe online.
Zhao continued the conversation about security in relation to Bitcoin by stating that people care about trying to operate in this system because there are honest players who need money in these systems, and other altcoins where they are not operating under that threat model, and possibly doing something or solving an effective technological challenge that is beneficial in other aspects, but they don’t have — “what I think is — Bitcoin’s core value proposition which is its security model”
As a result of nominations from numerous code contributors and current maintainers, Gloria Zhao was appointed a Bitcoin Core maintainer on Thursday (07).
Pieter Wuille, a Belgian engineer who has worked on Bitcoin Core since 2011, left his position as maintainer at the same time as Gloria Zhao’s arrival.
Gloria firmly adheres to the ideas that privacy and censorship resistance should be the norm. She believes we can not continue to evaluate technology or applications based on how practical or affordable they are.
“We need to start thinking about how private they are.”
Maintainer Michael Ford appreciated Gloria’s active workings and contribution towards Bitcoin core for over two years, primarily on mempool and validation code.
“She recently evaluated and contributed to improving the wallet, and I know she has a lot of ideas for how to make the technology around her better.”
John Newbery, the creator of Brink, was mentoring Zhao at the time of the interview with Portal do Bitcoin in El Salvador last year, and he provided more information about her work on the Bitcoin mempool: “Glória is concerned with putting together packages transactions, a very crucial project for the Lightning Network that can make the network more secure.”
Gloria is adamant that recruiting more people to work as Bitcoin Core developers is necessary for the further growth of bitcoin.
