Gavin Andresen
Satoshi Nakamoto's successor as Bitcoin's lead developer, author of BIP-101 and BIP-109, and later a casualty of Craig Wright's claim.
The wiki's angle: a central big-block figure in Fork Wars, and on S16 E60 Jonathan Bier argued his support for Craig Wright did the big-block side lasting damage.[10][7]
Early Bitcoin
Andresen first encountered Bitcoin in 2010 and created the Bitcoin Faucet, which gave away bitcoin[1]. In September 2010 Satoshi Nakamoto told him he was working on other projects and, over the following months, handed him control of the SourceForge repository and the network alert key[1]. He founded the Bitcoin Foundation in 2012 and stepped back as lead maintainer in 2014 to focus on it[1].
Block size proposals
Andresen authored BIP-101, which proposed 8 MB blocks from January 2016 doubling every two years, and shipped it in Bitcoin XT[2][3]. He withdrew BIP-101 in February 2016[4]. He also authored BIP-109, the one-time 2 MB increase behind Bitcoin Classic[5]. In May 2017 he was named individually on the New York Agreement supporter list[6].
Craig Wright
In May 2016 Andresen supported Craig Wright's claim to be Satoshi, a claim that was later discredited[1]. His ability to change Bitcoin's main code was revoked[1]. On S16 E60, Jonathan Bier said that “Gavin coming out in support of Craig Wright hugely damaged Gavin's reputation”[7].
2017 replay-protection draft
On 15 June 2017 Andresen published a GitHub gist titled “OP_RETURN replay protection patch”[8]. The patch marks a transaction as replay-protected when one of its outputs is exactly an OP_RETURN carrying the bytes of “!segwit2x”; patched nodes treat such a transaction as non-standard and reject any block containing one with the error “bad-blk-replay”[8]. The block rule carries the comment “TODO: hard fork condition...”, so the draft did not yet say from which block it applied[8]. In August 2017 Jeff Garzik's btc1 pull request #117 for SegWit2x said it was based on this gist, using a different marker, “OP_RETURN 'RP=!>1x'”[9]. See Replay protection in the 2017 forks[9].
References
- secondaryWikipedia, “Gavin Andresen” [archived]
- primaryBIP-101 (Increase maximum block size), Gavin Andresen [archived]
- secondaryBitcoin Wiki (en.bitcoin.it), “Bitcoin XT” [archived]
- primarybitcoin/bips pull request #329, “Withdraw BIP 101 proposal” (Gavin Andresen, Feb 2016) [archived]
- primaryBIP-109 (Two million byte size limit with sigop and sighash limits) [archived]
- primaryDigital Currency Group, “Bitcoin Scaling Agreement at Consensus 2017”, Medium, 23 May 2017 (Wayback Machine copy)
- episodeS16 E60: Jonathan Bier — Craig Wright “inadvertently” helped the small blockers▶ listen at 2:20:47timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
- primaryGavin Andresen, “OP_RETURN replay protection patch”, GitHub gist (created 15 Jun 2017) [archived]
- primaryjgarzik, btc1/bitcoin PR #117 “[consensus] Add opt-in transaction avoidance” (opened 23 Aug 2017, closed 12 Oct 2017) [archived]
- btkFork Wars: the block size war timeline (Bitcoin Takeover) [archived]