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At what point is Bitcoin Core considered good enough to have its next version upgrade be 1.0? I understand there are good reasons to be conservative about versions numbering, but I genuinely wonder what critical milestones are left in terms of software development.

Some would argue bitcoin is not an experiment anymore. It seems hard to say when bitcoin can be considered enough secure, stable, efficient, scalable or private though. Will it ever be <insert_word> enough to be upgraded to 1.0? There are still plenty of PRs to be reviewed, open issues and now multiple organizations sponsoring its research and development. That is great, but also could open the door to abuse. Of course, there are other implementations besides Core.

Anyway, I saw that this question was asked about the client almost 12 years ago, and I feel the answer is still to be determined today.

Vojtěch Strnad
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thibm
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1 Answers1

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Bitcoin Core is currently at version 25.0.

After version 0.21.0, it was realized that the 0. prefix had become meaningless, and 0.x.0 was effectively treated as stable major release x. Thus, it was decided to drop the 0, and 0.21.0 was followed by 22.0.

There was no special event where suddenly a threshold of stability was reached, that corresponded to this. It's just that over time things had gradually matured, and the numbering scheme had become outdated.

Pieter Wuille
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  • Thanks. I never realized this until now. I could almost feel ashamed for asking this question! Humbling, bitcoin is. – thibm Jul 16 '23 at 20:22