On March 1, the private company zkSNACKs, which supports the development of the Wasabi wallet and Bull Bitcoin, a Bitcoin trading and software company from Canada, donated 0.86 bitcoin (USD 36,000 at current price) to Luke Dashjr (known as Luke – Jr) to support the development of Bitcoin Knots.
Knots is a Bitcoin client that offers high levels of security, privacy and stability. It is part of the backbone of the network as it helps it by accepting transactions and blocks, validating them, and forwarding them to other nodes. Bitcoin Knots can be used as an alternative to the Bitcoin Core client.
Wasabi is a wallet that handles high levels of security and privacy thanks to the implementation of Bitcoin Knots, developed by Luke-Jr. Although Wasabi is backed by the private company zkSNACKs, their software is mostly open source.
Bull Bitcoin is an exclusively Bitcoin trading platform. Its mission is to build financial infrastructure, software for Bitcoin and maintain resistance to censorship, privacy and decentralization. Bull Bitcoin also indirectly benefits from Bitcoin Knots, as it uses technology from Wasabi to increase privacy .
In the digital finance ecosystem many projects are open source and exist thanks to the contributions of independent programmers like Luke-Jr who normally work ad honorem. For this reason it is important that they receive incentives and donations.
Luke-Jr, Essential Bitcoin Developer
Luke-Jr, in addition to being the head of Bitcoin Knots, is a prolific developer of free software and the Bitcoin protocol. Although Satoshi Nakamoto (creator of Bitcoin) was the one who presented the documentation describing how it works, the network protocol has been developed (and continues to be) by a community of programmers . Luke-Jr has participated with more than 200 contributions to the essential development of the blockchain.
With more than 23 years of career, Luke-Jr has always presented himself as a freedom activist. He advocates the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. That is why it has been classified as cypherpunk. With so many contributions in his career, he seems rightly deserving of this donation.
Incentives are a key element for the development of open source protocols
The advancement and improvement of Free and open source such as Bitcoin can only happen with the participation of developers willing to invest their time and talent. For this reason, it is important that they receive adequate stimuli so that the project can continue its course.
In the ecosystem of cryptocurrencies it is not uncommon to see these incentives and a good example is the one that CriptoNoticias unveiled in 2020, on a page specialized in this subject that exposes Bitcoin developers and facilitates connection with donors.
