Follow Friday: Wladimir van der Laan
Wladimir van der Laan is Bitcoin's second-generation Lead Maintainer, a role equal in power to Satoshi Nakamoto's former position. When Bitcoin's mysterious creator(s) Nakamoto retired as the Lead Maintainer of Bitcoin's GitHub repository, s/he/they appointed Gavin Andresen as successor. In April 2014, Andresen appointed van der Laan as his successor.
Although van der Laan is far more active on GitHub, casual readers may appreciate reading his curated, infrequent tweets.
Today, van der Laan tweeted, "closed source software is dying," in reference to WSJ's investigation into a U.S. government contractor that embedded phone-tracking software into hundreds of millions of phones.
Also today, van der Laan publicly requested feedback on zapwallettxes. He says he is considering removing or retooling this command line daemon of Bitcoin's network node software.
- Van der Laan finds that another daemon, abandontransaction, has deprecated the apwallettxes daemon.
- The bitcoind wallet option abandontransaction makes a bitcoin wallet forget about one transaction instead of all transactions.
Prior to today, van der Laan's last meaningful tweet was during the July 15 Twitter hack.
He confirmed the hack, saying something "fishy" was happening and warning readers that everything with write permission into Twitter's system was potentially at risk." He wisely advised his followers to avoid CryptoForHealth's scam, "Whatever you do, don’t click the link."
Wladimir van der Laan always tweets fascinating albeit technical tidbits about the inner workings of Bitcoin. He is the leader of the powerful Bitcoin Core developer community, responsible for maintaining a cryptocurrency worth over $200b.
Follow him and enjoy reading a couple of curiosities per month!
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