on the crypto
Born from an idea by Pierre Rochard, BitcoinACKs has been around for a couple of years, but Rochard has just rolled out a new feature - a commitment option that allows users to commit funding for a specific protocol improvement and pay developers a once that improvement has been integrated into Bitcoin Pro.
BitcoinACKs
BitcoinACKs was born out of scalanility issues, Rochard said. “After the 2017 scalability drama, I decided to learn more about Bitcoin's open source development process and see if I could find ways to be useful.
One challenge I faced was finding pull requests with specific criteria that I was interested in: pull requests that were old but with good reviews, pull requests that were rejected by reviewers, etc., ”he said.
“There are 13.600 closed pull requests and 388 open requests. For most contributors this is an intractable amount of data to digest! A second challenge was that all pull request discussion data is stored on GitHub and I wanted a local copy to query quickly and with SQL. It was then that I decided to create BitcoinACK, ”Rochard said.
A way to track pull requests and pay for Bitcoin developments
The website aggregates developer pull request comments on GitHub to allow developers to stay up to date on the status of a pull request. With this latest update, Rochard has included a “commitment” feature whereby anyone can commit to pay contributors for their work on specific pull requests. These commitments can be paid for through Lightning or on-chain payments processed through BTCPay Server.
Development funders will be able to choose which developer they want to pay for a given pull request. Additionally, Rochard added that there are no penalties if a user fails to deliver on their commitment; it is up to the user to decide when and if he wants to pay a commitment based on whether he is satisfied with the job or not. If too many users are not making payments, however, Rochard said he will take action to correct such misconduct.
"Driving Bitcoin with free market principles"
The BitcoinACKs crowdfunding mechanism is the first in the Bitcoin open source landscape. Previously, you could sponsor individual developers, but not directly finance individual upgrades.
Rochard's tool makes this possible with its offer to drive Bitcoin development with free market principles by aligning user wishes with developer incentives.
This quid pro quo offers its users the opportunity to express their wishes for the development of the Bitcoin protocol, offering developers another source of revenue. Ultimately, Rochard sees BitcoinACKs as another key element in financing Bitcoin's development.
