三年来首次，比特币第6位核心维护者诞生

Author | Golem (@web3_golem)

On January 8th, the Bitcoin Core team promoted developer TheCharlatan (X: @sedited) to Core Maintainer, making him the sixth member to hold Trusted Keys. The other five Core Maintainers with Trusted Keys include: Marco Falke (promoted in 2016), Gloria Zhao (promoted in 2022), Ryan Ofsky (promoted in 2023), Hennadii Stepanov (promoted in 2021), and Ava Chow (promoted in 2021).

This appointment marks the first addition of a Trusted Key holder since 2023. Over the past decade, only 13 people have been granted this privilege, demonstrating its importance and the rigor of the selection process.

Bitcoin Core Core Maintainers: The “Editors” of Bitcoin Developers

Bitcoin Core is currently the primary development and maintenance team for the Bitcoin mainnet. It is responsible for writing, maintaining, testing, and releasing the software suite used by most full nodes, along with supporting tools and documentation. Bitcoin Core operates on a non-profit basis, relying primarily on funding from external companies.

The Bitcoin Core development team consists of 41 members who have contributed the vast majority of the project’s code. Of these, only 6 developers are granted the status of “Core Maintainer”—they are the only 6 people in the world with the authority to merge code into Bitcoin Core and sign released executable files (binaries).

6 Core Maintainers’ Signatures

To draw an analogy, Bitcoin Core Core Maintainers are like the “editors” of bitcoin network developers. Anyone can contribute code and submit PRs to the repository, but only Core Maintainers have the authority to merge code into the official repository and sign releases. It’s like editors reviewing manuscripts and deciding whether developers’ code will be accepted and published or sent back for revisions.

The signatures of Bitcoin Core Core Maintainers guarantee security, assuring all nodes and users that the release is “official and unmodified.” However, Bitcoin Core Core Maintainers do not have the direct power to trigger changes in on-chain rules. For example, even if Bitcoin Core Core Maintainers have signed and released the software indicating that the bitcoin network will undergo a soft fork or hard fork, whether the upgrade actually succeeds depends on adoption and consensus from users and miners, not solely on the signatures of Bitcoin Core Core Maintainers.

When Bitcoin first emerged, Satoshi Nakamoto was the sole Core Maintainer with the exclusive authority to modify the core codebase. Later, Satoshi Nakamoto passed this privilege to Gavin Andresen, who subsequently passed it to Wladimir van der Laan. In other words, for a long period, the power to maintain and modify the bitcoin network code was concentrated in one person’s hands. It wasn’t until 2022, when Wladimir van der Laan stepped down and became entangled in litigation with Craig Wright (who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto), that this power began to be decentralized.

Nevertheless, the role of Bitcoin Core Core Maintainer remains important. Those who become Core Maintainers typically enjoy high trust and reputation in the community, or have made outstanding contributions to the bitcoin network.

For example, Ava Chow, one of the Core Maintainers, is a transgender female developer who, in 2024 when Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr attempted to restrict Ordinals transactions at the consensus level, rejected Luke Dashjr’s PR on grounds of “lack of consensus and creating noise,” preventing a potentially serious bitcoin network consensus split and becoming an unsung hero.

Ava Chow attended the Bitcoin 2024 event

For information about other Core Maintainers and their contributions, please refer to previous articles (Related Reading: Who Guards Satoshi’s Legacy? Insights into the 41-Person Army Behind Bitcoin’s Trillion-Dollar Market Cap). Next, we’ll introduce why TheCharlatan has become the 6th Core Maintainer.

TheCharlatan: Ten Years of Cryptography Development Experience

TheCharlatan graduated from the Computer Science Department at the University of Zurich and is from South Africa. He focuses on reproducibility and Bitcoin Core’s verification logic. In a 2024 blog post, he claimed to have been developing this project for over two years. TheCharlatan’s work systematically deconstructs, organizes, and modularizes Bitcoin Core’s verification logic, enabling other users to safely reuse it.

TheCharlatan

TheCharlatan is widely popular among Bitcoin Core core developers. During the process of promoting him to Core Maintainer, at least 20 members expressed agreement. When nominating him, glozow praised: “He is a reliable reviewer with extensive work experience in critical areas of the codebase, thoughtfully considering what we deliver to users and developers, and has a deep understanding of the technical consensus process.”

Bitcoin Core core developer group chat content (translated)

According to his Github account information, TheCharlatan first entered cryptocurrency development in 2015, developing a cryptocurrency price tracking display tool—a simple Linux desktop widget with built-in price alert functionality that can trigger notifications when prices reach set thresholds. After 2017, his cryptocurrency development activities became more frequent, and starting in 2018, he formally began contributing code to Bitcoin Core. Therefore, it can be inferred that TheCharlatan first engaged with Bitcoin Core approximately 8 years ago, qualifying him as a veteran contributor.

It’s also worth noting that during 2021-2022, TheCharlatan also contributed to the codebase of a Farcaster project. This project allows people to exchange Bitcoin and Monero in a peer-to-peer manner with anyone running a Farcaster node.

TheCharlatan indeed has a “soft spot” for Monero. In 2020, he researched potential destruction issues when using hardware wallets to transfer Monero, and explored time-lock vulnerabilities in Monero.

Of course, true technology experts can be difficult to decipher. TheCharlatan frequently retweets technical posts on the X platform but rarely expresses his own views (as of May 2025, he posted that he hated NFTs even more), but starting from June 2025, he has repeatedly posted a tweet every month with the content “Cash on the internet. No auto-updates.”

I’m worried this might be some kind of code or catchphrase among Bitcoin technology experts that I’m unfamiliar with, so I asked AI to explain what these two sentences mean. AI said these two sentences actually express an extremely radical Bitcoin purist viewpoint:

“True internet-native cash should be as simple and immutable as physical cash. Once you start implementing auto-updates, governance voting, and frequent rule changes, it’s no longer cash—it has become another centralized/semi-centralized/manipulable ‘digital bank account’.”