'Building' Bitcoin's Software Just Got a Bit More Trustless

Like it or not, there's a bit of trust involved in the process of setting up, or "Compiling," the software at the heart of bitcoin - but a recent code change could help.

Featuring container software Guix, code was recently merged into the most popular bitcoin implementation, Bitcoin Core, meaning it's now ready for real users to try out.

"It's been quite a journey, but #Guix support for deterministic, bootstrappable Bitcoin Core builds has landed in master," the main developer behind the project, Carl Dong, tweeted last month.

Dong claims that's not enough in terms of security of the building process, as he detailed in a presentation on the topic at the conference Breaking Bitcoin in Amsterdam.

"Currently, Ubuntu influences both the availability and security of Bitcoin Core's release binaries. In the long term, placing trust in un-auditable, opaque binary downloads from third parties like Ubuntu seems like a recipe for disaster."

He found that he wasn't the only one, and once he joined Chaincode Labs, a hub for bitcoin protocol development in New York City, the project took flight, getting help from Bitcoin Core contributors Russ Yanofsky and Cory Fields, among other active contributors to the Bitcoin Core software.

"What we do achieve is much better auditability of our third-party provided toolchain. This project's use of Guix allows us to have unprecedented visibility into what our set of trusted binaries is, and how we derive Bitcoin Core's build environment from it," he went on.

"If this works, it means that future Bitcoin Core developers will be able to build previous Bitcoin Core versions and produce binaries that are bit-for-bit identical to when they were released. This reproducibility-across-time allows us to recreate the exact behavior of previous versions, which is valuable for testing and debugging purposes," he said.

Although it's a rather technical change that might sound arcane, developers are praising Dong for his work in making bitcoin more secure.

Bitcoin developer Cory Fields via CoinDesk archives.