No good things are for free in this world. It applies to both real and virtual worlds. Bitcoin Core agrees to this fact and that’s probably the reason why they recently announced that they are open for sponsorships.
As the competition brews between different Bitcoin Improvement Protocols, the opinions and loyalties are split. The Bitcoin ecosystem has moved on from the concept of “one CORE to rule them all” as everyone is trying to find what they believe is the optimal way to rescue Bitcoin network from stagnating.
The Bitcoin Core Sponsorship Programme calls for the Bitcoin industry and the community to come forward and get involved in the development of bitcoin by facilitating projects, research, and development. The announcement on Bitcoin Core website also mentions that even though Bitcoin is an open source protocol which was developed as a community project, it is now hard to get developers with the right domain experience to work on the project without incentivizing them. Even though Bitcoin Core still powers a majority of the Bitcoin network infrastructure, the community is not being able to retain the necessary technical resources to continue with the research and development.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Core also makes it clear that a sponsorship does not necessarily guarantee the inclusion of a sponsored feature into the Core. There will be an evaluation, peer review of the new features, and it will be included into the Bitcoin Core only if it passes these evaluations. The Bitcoin Core sticks to the decentralized aspect of the digital currency protocol by announcing beforehand that it will be the community that decides which software to run or not to run.
According to the announcement, there will a sponsorship screening mechanism put in place to review the proposals before they are accepted. The sponsorships received will be utilized to procure skilled manpower, communications, public relations, documentation and other resources.
The sponsorship programme may turn out to be beneficial not only for the Bitcoin Core but also to the businesses that are working on Bitcoin 2.0 and Bitcoin 3.0 projects as they will be able to work alongside Bitcoin Core to ensure a more positive outcome. Companies willing to sponsor Bitcoin Core can do so by following the procedure listed on this page.
Ref: Bitcoin Core
