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hi there. i'm the management behind btcd, an alternative full node bitcoin implementation, and i can say that it is very unlikely the original code is the produ

hi there. i'm the management behind btcd, an alternative full node bitcoin implementation, and i can say that it is very unlikely the original code is the product of a single person. additionally, the amount of work that must have gone into testing and setting the myriad constants for bitcoin is huge, far more than a single person is capable of in a few-year period. i won't share all the magic but consider this: have you noticed how there are big and little endian flips littered throughout the code, especially in the script code? do you think that a single dev would just arbitrarily assign endianness throughout the code, then have the script code be big endian?

oleganza 12y ago
All instances of BE are due to openssl bignum math. When serialized in bitcoin messages, ordinary ints are LE because it's just simpler (all popular CPUs are LE today). So it's a bit of a mess with endianness, but entirely possible to be done by a single guy, just because of the openssl and CPUs. Author of CoreBitcoin, objc implementation of bitcoin.
betterunix 13y ago
"do you think that a single dev would just arbitrarily assign endianness throughout the code, then have the script code be big endian?" I have seen crazier things. A single developer who works on the code a bit, takes a break, then works on it a bit more can easily have switched conventions.
kzrdude 13y ago
It could be that a single coder took over or merged previous codebases from other people.