Bitcoin’s Ecosystem

The Bitcoin ecosystem consists of parties who perform different roles. Miners and bookkeepers focus on building and maintaining the blockchain itself. Wallets make it easy for people to use cryptocurrencies. Exchanges and cryptocurrency payment processors bridge between the fiat and crypto worlds.

While there are around 10,000 nodes who perform bookkeeping tasks and who relay transactions and blocks, they are mostly running the same software written, and therefore controlled, by a very small number of people. They are known as the ‘Bitcoin Core’ developers and the software is known as ‘Bitcoin Core’. The various versions, or implementations, that are not Bitcoin Core all have slightly different rules but are not different enough to create incompatibilities. Some, for example, may have additional flags to signal that the bookkeepers would be prepared to adopt a rule change if enough participants also signal the same intention.