A Canadian software developer is fusing two of the most interesting open source projects of the 21st century: Git and bitcoin. Yurii Rashkovskii calls his project Gitchain, and it's now backed by about $10,000 raised on the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

Git is the software that drives GitHub, a popular way for software developers to collaborate on their own coding projects, while bitcoin is new-age digital currency software driven by a vast network of machines spread across the globe. At first blush, they seem to have little in common, but what Rashkovskii aims to create is a version of Git that runs on a bitcoin-like network of machines, a network that isn't controlled by GitHub or any other single company. If you spread Git across a distributed network, he says, you're less likely to lose access to the code you're working on.

>If you spread Git across a distributed network, you're less likely to lose access to the code you're working.

Rashkovskii, formerly chief technology officer with a bitcoin startup called Bex.io, says he dreamed up the idea a few weeks ago while trying to work on a software project from a beach on the island of Lembongan, southeast of Bali. He couldn't reach his GitHub repository, but he thought that if he created a new system that was structured a little more like Bitcoin, this sort of thing might be less of a problem.

"With Gitchain and a sufficiently big network, the chances of all nodes containing replicas of your Git objects going down at the same time are much slimmer," Rashkovskii says. He's coding Gitchain from a startup workspace located next to a rice field on Bali.

Rashkovskii is writing his Gitchain code from scratch, an effort that he expects to take several months. But marrying the ideas behind Bitcoin and Git is certainly a neat idea. Git–and its web-based cousin, GitHub–gave software developers a brand new way of sharing, hacking, and tracking each other's code. Bitcoin rebooted the decades-old idea of digital money, and it did a lot more, too. Rashkovskii hopes his new project will expose Git-loving software developers to the ideas behind bitcoin and cryptography, something that could "ultimately lead to new breakthroughs."

The plan is not only for Gitchain to run across myriad machines, but for it to store some Git metadata–user names and permissions, for example–in a cryptographically verifiable format similar to the bitcoin blockchain. This would allow software developers to prove that their code hasn't been tampered with–just one example of how the project could be expanded in new ways.

The trick lies if getting people to set up computers that can run this Gitchain network. Unlike bitcoin, gitchain doesn't reward computer owners with shares of a brand new crypto currency. Their reward, Rashkovskii says, is knowing that they're helped create a cool new peer-to-peer network for software development–ideally one that's so robust that it will even work on the beaches of Bali. "I'd love to have such a network," he says, "and I am sure I am not alone."