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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin has a single popular client. There are people who work on that client.

Ethereum has five execution clients, developed by independent teams, and another five proof-of-stake clients, also developed by independent teams, plus an open community of researchers where anyone can participate. The Ethereum Foundation funds some of this, but not all of it.

If the various teams don't agree to do something, it won't get done. You can verify for yourself that no one party is in charge, simply by listening to the public dev calls.

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Not really. If one of the clients interpreted a part of the spec in a different way, event if they are right, they would have change it to follow an officially approved code because that's the consensus.

There are examples like https://github.com/openethereum/parity-ethereum/blob/55c90d4...

"Officially approved" specs are talked about amongst the devs in all client teams on the Ethereum calls, with proposals having to go through the EIP process, which are then implemented by each team.

Also, Parity Open Ethereum is deprecated.

Right, maybe it's less visible now and Parity is not in use anymore. But it doesn't change the fact and the link proves that it indeed happens. I guess it's a hard truth nobody wants to talk about.

Actively used alternative implementations:

https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd

https://bitcoin-s.org/

https://bcoin.io/

https://bitcore.io/

https://bitcoindevkit.org/

None of these clients will likely ever compete with Bitcoin Core.

https://coin.dance/nodes

They're clients, they interoperate.

It isn't a competition. Some are more suitable for certain use cases, and all those listed are actively in use with real funds on the mainnet network.

The site you linked is interesting, but it can only show public nodes.

Edit: not to mention that a single node can serve huge numbers of light clients, e.g. one of those public btcd instances could be serving hundreds of neutrino clients

What I'm trying to say is that anybody who wants to implement new features not accepted by the Core maintainers will never catch on, precisely because the share of other clients being used is so low.

A more distributed, equal % amongst all of the different clients would not only decrease the chance of critical issues with the main client implementation, but should also increase innovation, and make it easy for others to signal their support for that. Which is precisely why Core maintainers will likely see that as an "attack" on Bitcoin.

> Bitcoin has a single popular client.

False.

> Although there are many different implementations, the original implementation, Bitcoin Core, is by far the most popular, and it is used as the reference implementation

https://river.com/learn/what-is-bitcoin-core/

Since it is the reference implementation, other clients have to follow its lead. And that's the lead of a fairly small group:

> Over the years, the code has had more than 800 contributors. However, only seven people serve the role of “maintainers” nowadays.

https://bitcoinist.com/who-funds-bitcoin-core-developers-her...

Bitcoin-core is currently about 97% of bitcoin nodes.

Geth is about 80% of ethereum execution layer nodes.

But the bigger difference is cultural - alternative clients are a core part of ethereum's development culture and is actively supported and nurtured. This is complete with social campaigns to get folks to switch away from majority clients to prevent situations where a bug in one client could cause big issues in the network. The same kind of environment is not present in bitcoin land.

Exactly this. There was a recent community push for consensus layer clients to be more decentralized, which seemed to have worked. Next is the execution layer clients to have better % in use.

It's true. Bitcoin Core is the most used, so development is basically centralized.

https://coin.dance/nodes

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