GitHub has been home to Bitcoin Core and many other software projects in the Bitcoin industry for more than a decade, but it wasn’t the first collaborative version control platform to host the digital currency’s code, and it may not be the last.
Recent performance issues at GitHub have sparked a new wave of criticism of the platform, reviving old concerns and dissatisfaction with its design and reliability. Longtime Bitcoin core contributor Matt Corallo took to X recently to announce the decision to migrate off the platform, not Bitcoin’s core codebase yet, but Rust Lightning Development Kita code base in which he is closely involved.
In the matter of retweeting Quote X which comes back across several viral posts complaining about the platform, Corallo said“Our organization currently has no CI (quality testing processes) because GitHub wrongly flagged a contributor, not an admin or moderator, just someone new who opened some pull requests. We’ve escalated the matter through our corporate account managers and still basically nothing.” He added after a week or so: “GitHub has decided that our open source project has been permanently blocked without any explanation or option to appeal, citing terms of service that clearly do not cover anything we have ever done.” – “I think it’s time for Bitcoin projects to leave GitHub.”
It appears that the banned contributor is Louis Schwab, who answered “My account was banned twice in a week ‘accidentally’. Relying on GitHub’s good faith is not a good long-term strategy.” Many other Bitcoin and cryptocurrency engineers responded with similar experiences, saying they too had been migrated off the platform or banned with no recourse, such as Roman stormwho responded, “In 2022, GitHub closed my account due to Tornado Cash sanctions. I am a US citizen. They asked me to get OFAC authorization to access my private account. The sanctions were later ruled illegal and were revoked. The account is still locked. I submitted ticket after ticket – and now they haven’t even responded. GitHub cancels.”
Corallo blames the AI wave on recent mass account bans and increasingly aggressive actions taken by the massive platform. The popularity of enthusiast programming has brought a new wave of interest, hobbyist projects, and automated bot-like behavior to the already overburdened platform. Today, GitHub Claims to host Over 420 million repositories and over 4 million organizations worldwide. Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018This also explains, for some, its continued downfall.
Even Andrew Poelstra, another major Bitcoin Core and Rust Lightning contributor, who has over a decade of experience in the industry, wrote a devastating review of GitHub, defending the migration decision. “This site has a huge amount of LLM messages, and they have no intention of stopping it, though They wrote this crazy blog post and took credit for FOSS “As a way to acknowledge the problem,” he began, going on to explain that merging code into the main repositories had been “down for several days.” This caused cascading problems that confused the Merge Script, a security program that makes sure updates to the code base are made correctly.
The bug meant that tracking and merging pull requests – which are contributions from other developers – did not work as expected. “PR tracking is the only thing GitHub is supposed to do, and it’s broken. It’s no more convenient to stay here than to leave, and it’s the only reason we’ve stuck around for so long,” Poelstra continued. “The usual issues where diffs and comments are hidden, the site is slow and unreliable, the permissions model is crazy and broken, locking, bad and slow API, etc. (all of them) that we can live with if the core functionality was working, but it’s not working.”
As a result, it could be the next destination for Rust Lightning and perhaps other Bitcoin projects in the industry formulationa lightweight GitHub alternative optimized for self-hosting and high agency projects. Corallo confirmed to Bitcoin Magazine that “Rusty Bitcoin is already starting to move on git.rust-bitcoin.org“And Rust Lightning will follow.
Repositories will likely continue to host a copy on GitHub, although no public statements have been made about any kind of long-term mirroring strategy for the codebase, meaning it will eventually live on. On their own site.
