About
The Bitcoin Operations Technology Group (Optech) works to bring the best open source technologies and techniques to Bitcoin-using businesses in order to lower costs and improve customer experiences.
An initial focus for the group is working with its member organizations to reduce transaction sizes and minimize the effect of subsequent transaction fee increases. We provide workshops, documentation, weekly newsletters, original research, case studies and announcements, and help facilitate improved relations between businesses and the open source community.
If you’re an engineer or manager at a Bitcoin company or an open source contributor and you’d like to be a part of this, please contact us at info@bitcoinops.org.
Funding
Optech does not exist to make a profit, and all materials and documentation produced are released under the MIT license.
Seed funding was provided by Wences Casares and John Pfeffer to cover outside contractors and incidental expenses. Resources are provided by Chaincode Labs to support Optech.
Our generous member companies pay an annual contribution to cover expenses.
Optech Contributors
All material produced by Bitcoin Optech is open source and released under the MIT license. Anyone is welcome to contribute by opening issues and pull requests, reviewing newsletters and other material, and contributing translations. Our most regular contributors are:
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Adam Jonas
GitHub"I am excited about the opportunity Bitcoin has before it as it grows. I hope to contribute my small part as a liaison to help businesses take advantage of all that Bitcoin has to offer as well as gather feedback for the open source community so that we can together bring this wonderfully evolving technology to the masses."
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Carl Dong
GitHub"New Bitcoin technologies, and more importantly, their rationales will always take some time to propagate from the engineers working on the bleeding-edge to the services and businesses focused on serving their customers. I'm honored to be able to help Optech accelerate this process."
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David A. Harding
GitHub"The terrible thing about a consensus system like Bitcoin is that every on-chain action we perform affects every other user of the system. That makes all of us neighbors, so we're faced with the choice of either being the bad neighbors who complain endlessly about each other or the good neighbors who work together to solve problems and find ways to coexist in harmony."
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Gloria Zhao
GitHub"As a developer, it feels like Bitcoin development innovates far too quickly for anyone to keep up! But engineering isn't enough to translate technological advancement into tangible improvements in a real person's life. Optech has been an incredible resource throughout my journey; I hope to help it be the same for the thousands of builders, designers, educators and trailblazers we'll need to bring Bitcoin to a billion people."
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Mark Erhardt
GitHub"The Optech newsletter has been one of the most informative and reliable resources for any Bitcoin engineer since its inception. With its workshops, the Bitcoin Optech Group is bringing together the engineers in the space and paving the road for adoption of best practices and new protocol features."
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Mike Schmidt
GitHub"Bitcoin has a pipeline of innovations flowing from the open source community. I am excited to help with the blocking and tackling needed to help roll out these innovations with the wider community of businesses, wallets, exchanges, and users."
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Shigeyuki Azuchi
GitHub"Bitcoin is a very exciting innovation, and many protocols and cryptographic improvements are still being proposed. Understanding these is important for Bitcoin services and businesses, and Optech is one of the most useful resources for that. I hope to contribute to making Bitcoin technical information available to a wide range of people."
Founding Sponsors
Our founding sponsors have generously provided funds and resources to cover our start-up and ongoing costs.
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Wences Casares
"It will take a very large ecosystem of trustworthy companies to ensure that Bitcoin succeeds and can be used by the entire world. By helping Bitcoin companies adopt the best technology and spreading knowledge and best practice among Bitcoin engineers, Bitcoin Optech is contributing to the success of the most important leap forward in the democratization of money we've ever seen."
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John Pfeffer
Twitter"I’m an investor and believer that everyone who has a stake in Bitcoin has a duty to contribute and give back to Bitcoin development, including hodlers! Wences, Alex and I hope that everyone will pitch in, contribute and do their bit to help make this grand challenge to scale Bitcoin a success."
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Alex Morcos
Twitter"John and the Optech team have really taken the initiative to help build a higher level of communication and collaboration between industry and the open source development community. We're just at the beginning of realizing the potential of Bitcoin and related technology, and I'm excited to see how much we can all accomplish working together."
Former Optech Contributors
We thank all of our previous contributors for their efforts.
