Long-term Support for Josi Baker

We're delighted to announce Josi Baker as our newest LTS grantee.

Josi will receive long-term support from OpenSats for his continued work on Bitcoin Core. His work will consist of pull-request reviews,¹ supporting major release cycles, and his own contributions.²

In the next couple of months, Josi plans to work on the libbitcoinkernel project as a reviewer, tester, and contributor. The libbitcoinkernel project is an attempt at modularizing the Bitcoin codebase and extracting consensus logic into something other applications can reuse. This has a number of benefits, namely improved testing and code separation of consensus code within Bitcoin Core and enabling application-specific programs to be written outside of the Bitcoin Core project with increased confidence these applications will be in consensus.

In addition to his work on Bitcoin Core, he will continue to work on BIP-352: Silent Payments, focusing on adoption in wallets outside of Bitcoin Core and supporting mobile clients.

Silent Payments are a privacy and UX improvement for Bitcoin wallets that allows static, reusable payment codes without address reuse. The key improvements over existing reusable payment code solutions are improved privacy for the sender and receiver due to eliminating the need for a notification transaction and no additional cost for senders. The proposal also separates sending and receiving, which enables broader adoption. These improvements are particularly relevant for activists wishing to use Bitcoin as a means of raising funds in a private and censorship-resistant way.

The mission of OpenSats is to support and maintain a sustainable ecosystem of funding for free and open-source projects and contributors, especially Bitcoin-related projects and projects that help Bitcoin flourish. Regular contributors reviewing and maintaining Bitcoin Core are critical to the project's continued success. Sustainable funding allows contributors to build expertise over multiple years, which is why we introduced the OpenSats LTS program.

You can apply for the program here:

• opensats.org/apply/lts

Support for Josi's work is sourced from our General Fund and made possible by generous donors like you. If you would like to support work like Josi's, consider donating to the fund.

Footnotes

1. PR reviews by @josibake ↩

2. PRs by @josibake ↩