In Wake of 'Major Failure,' Bitcoin Code Review Comes Under Scrutiny

As the community reels over the vulnerability that was hiding in the code for two years, and that could have been exploited to print more bitcoins than the 21 million is hard-coded to be produced, developers are wondering: Is there a way to prevent such a severe bug from being added to the code again?

That's not to say the event hasn't prompted discussion about how bitcoin works and how similar bugs in the cryptocurrency's most popular software implementation, Bitcoin Core, can be identified and resolved in the future.

"If all of Bitcoin Core's policies and practices are kept the same, then it's inevitable that a similar failure will eventually happen again, and we might not be so lucky with how it turns out that time."

That said, there's an argument to be made that Bitcoin Core, powered by an open network of global participants, now has a more robust process for code review than at any time in the technology's history.

"Bitcoin development is largely bottlenecked by code review and there are not a large amount of people out there who are able to do that," Hilliard told CoinDesk.

"My main problem with a lot of the backlash is people pointing at specific developers to assign blame. The entire project is open, there is no 'membership' and users have just as much of a responsibility to audit code as developers actively contributing," pseudonymous bitcoin enthusiast Shinobimonkey told CoinDesk.

Such a sentiment was shared by Bitcoin Core maintainer Wladimir van der Laan who tweeted, "It was wrong that the buggy code was merged. Yes, we screwed up but the 'we' that screwed up is very wide. The whole community screwed up by not reviewing consensus changes thoroughly enough."

Today in bitcoin, there's one main bitcoin software, Bitcoin Core, run by 95 percent of bitcoin nodes.

One idea is to make more bitcoin code implementations.

There are lesser-known code implementations, such as Bitcoin Knots and Btcd. Elsewhere in the cryptocurrency world, this is becoming the norm.