Popular Science: What is an Ethereum core developer?

以太坊爱好者

特邀专栏作者

2020-07-02 11:00 (UTC+8)

This article is about 2611 words, reading the full article takes about 4 minutes

These are the people who are making important contributions to the development of the underlying protocol of Ethereum.

AI Summary

Expand

These are the people who are making important contributions to the development of the underlying protocol of Ethereum.

Editor's Note: This article comes fromEthereum enthusiasts (ID: ethfans)Editor's Note: This article comes from

, Author: Hudson Jameson, translation: A Jian, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

history

definition

The name Ethereum's "core team" dates back to July 2014 in an "Answered Questions" thread on the Reddit forum, answered by the early Ethereum team. In the post, the Ethereum team added a word to their name, thus becoming "Ethereum core team". By the end of 2015, Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood created a Gitter channel called "AllCoreDevs", where Ethereum's core developers can communicate development matters of the protocol. The first Ethereum core developer video conference was also organized in this channel. I also expanded on the history of the "AllCoreDevs" video conferencing in my old post "Ethereum Protocol Development Intellect and Network Upgrade Collaboration".

secondary title

definition

Here's another definition I wrote a few years ago and put in a repository of core developer meeting minutes to define who can attend a meeting:

Low-level protocol developers, client developers, and core Ethereum researchers are invited to participate in the conference. In general, every Ethereum client is represented, along with key members of the Layer-1 research/scaling solutions team. Sometimes, people who are not core developers but have professional experience in a certain field are invited to discuss specific topics. Please contact Hudson Jameson at hudson@ethereum.org if you think your presence at the conference would be helpful.

secondary title

How do researchers classify it?

Now there are many "technical ecology conferences", such as Ethereum core developer conferences, Eth2.0 conferences, and stateless Ethereum conferences. People sometimes think that the Ethereum core devs only include those who attended the Ethereum core dev conference, but this is not accurate. Ethereum 2.0 researchers and others who are doing important research (such as beam sync and stateless ethereum) are also core developers, in my opinion. I think Ethereum 2.0 researchers are called "Eth2 researchers" first and "core developers" later, just because of the names of the conferences they participated in and things related to them. After all, it is easier to distinguish core developers from Eth2.0 researchers by conferences rather than code commits to GitHub repositories.

secondary title

Who decides if someone is a core developer?

No one can make such a decision. No one is designated to decide who is eligible to be an Ethereum core developer. It is a mutation process driven by contribution and reputation. The following sentence, from Jameson Lopp's excellent blog post "Who Controls Bitcon Core?", illustrates how a Bitcoin Core maintainer is defined:

Who counts as Bitcoin Core maintainers? Contributors who have made high-quality contributions over a period of time and thus have considerable social recognition.

Can anyone call themselves a core developer?

There is nothing hard and fast to stop someone claiming to be an Ethereum core developer. Originally, anyone could contribute to the development of the Ethereum protocol (although their contributions would not necessarily be accepted). In the Ethereum community, we haven't had a big problem with "impersonating core developers". If such issues arise, I guess it's up to the community to point them out. And even then, in the end it's just a hat, and we shouldn't take it too seriously.

I've had situations where people have asked to strip someone of their core developer title (because of that person's opinions and behavior in the community). Since the title itself is not assigned by someone, the community as a whole has every right to declare that someone is not a core developer. But this neither writes off someone's contributions to the Ethereum protocol, nor does it mean that they can no longer participate in core developer meetings. It simply means that the community as a whole feels that someone is not worthy of the title. As far as I know, this has not happened so far.

secondary title
Who are the current core developers/development team?
There are too many teams and individuals developing for the Ethereum protocol to count. In addition, there are people who are developing the protocol but don't want to be called the title or appear in any blog. The beauty of Ethereum client development is that both Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0 have multiple clients written in different languages, providing redundancy to the network. Clients are committed to implementing a technical specification, rather than making a certain client itself a specification for everyone to follow. Because I am deeply involved in the ecology of Ethereum 1.0 client development, I will list a few active Ethereum 1.0 clients here. This list does not include other important teams such as the testing team and the ConsenSys Quilt research and development team.
geth (Go language)
Nethermind (.NET Core language)
ethereumJS (JavaScript language)