Untangling Bitcoin: Why Russell Yanofsky Is Taking Apart Crypto's Oldest Code

Features • Bitcoin • Technology News
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Developers often use words like "monolithic," "blob" and "tangled" to describe the code underpinning bitcoin.

These words paint a picture of how difficult the code can be to comprehend and, in turn, work with, and it's not exactly a comforting thought for a network supporting $61 billion in investor dollars. That's not to say bitcoin doesn't work – it does – but the state of the codebase does leave something to be desired, both for users who might desire more flexibility and the developers who want to improve it.

So, although changes like the code optimization Segregated Witness (SegWit) and the philosophy of so-called "hard fork" upgrades have attracted the most attention of late, several bitcoin developers are working under the radar to untangle bitcoin's messy architecture.

Chaincode's Russell Yanofsky, for one, is attempting to tackle one part of the problem with something called "process separation" in the Bitcoin Core code, the most used of the software options.