Bitcoin Projects on Github Surpass 10,000

In the world of open source code, Bitcoin is already one of the most popular projects and protocols being worked on today. Like price, regulations, and merchant adoption, software development is a major metric that can be used to gauge the growth of Bitcoin. The number of projects involving Bitcoin on the leading development platform and repository, Github, crossed over 10,000 last week and is currently sitting at 10,055 at press time.

Also read: Zeronet Wants to Replace the Dark Web by Marrying Bitcoin to Bittorrent Over Tor

Popular Open Source Projects

Like Bitcoin, most projects on Github are open source, meaning that anyone can copy them to make new versions with the changes they want. These spin-off projects are called ‘forks’. Bitcoin currently has 7,535 forked projects on Github, many of which are altcoins.

Meanwhile, a search on the site for “Bitcoin” yields 10,055 Bitcoin-related projects. Putting this number into perspective, Bitcoin.com examined the search results for other protocols for comparison.

Protocols with more projects than Bitcoin

The largest protocol, Http, which all website developers use, has 291,882 projects on Github today. Wifi is another extremely common protocol but only has 14,889 projects listed while Bluetooth technology has 13,624. Since Bitcoin currently has 10,055 projects and is climbing, it could surpass Bluetooth this year.

Protocols with fewer projects than Bitcoin

Bitcoin has already surpassed so many other popular protocols. For instance, FTP, the old standard for uploading files from desktops to any servers, has 8,657 projects on Github today while Secure Socket Layer (SSL), used for standard website communication, only has 7,129 projects.

VPNs have 4,036 open source projects, which include all reputable VPN service providers. SMTP mail server projects total 3,693, and surprisingly, the basic protocol of the internet itself, TCP/IP, only has 1,861 projects on Github currently.

Top Money Protocols

Bitcoin is already the most popular protocol for money over the internet. The entire category of cryptocurrency, excluding Bitcoin, has 2,147 projects running today. Meanwhile, Paypal and Visa only have 3,904 and 1,672 open source projects respectively, since at least some of their code is closed source.

In other categories of protocols, home automation is one of the largest niche markets to compete with Bitcoin, currently having 5,161 projects. Bittorrent has 1,940 projects while the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) has 777.

Most Popular Projects Using Bitcoin

The vast number of complementary projects to Bitcoin on Github represents the greater Bitcoin ecosystem. They include everything from wallets to code libraries to exchanges and even bitcoin trading bots. Many reputable companies like Bitpay and Blockchain place the code for their products on Github to help create transparency and build confidence among their customers.

Projects are also ranked by popularity on Github. Other than Bitcoin’s code libraries and other versions of the Bitcoin code itself, the most popular Bitcoin projects include Zeronet, the Brave Browser, a Bittorrent/Github fusion called Gittorrent, Andreas Antonopoulos’ book entitled “Mastering Bitcoin”, Bitpay’s operating system called Bitcore, a trading bot called Gekko, the Electrum wallet, an Arbitrage trading bot, and the classic CPUMiner software.

What do you think of the number of Bitcoin projects on Github? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and Github

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