In this article, I'd like to make an excursion to GitHub and comparing the GIT repositories of Bitcoin and 3 of its forks. It is astonishing, how the price, the perception of a coin and the work on the code base can differ. A look into the GIT repository can reveal great insights.

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Image by EivindPedersen - Source: Pixabay.com

Introduction

Almost every project in the cryptocurrency space is open source and provides its codebase in a public GIT repository hosted on GitHub. The public GIT repository allows everyone to check the code or to participate in the development of the project. GitHub provides several insights for a repository, which enable everyone to see who is contributing and check the current progress of a project.

Bitcoin (BTC)

As the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin also became and remains the largest one by many factors. It has the largest amount of hashing power to secure the network, is the biggest chain, has the most users as well as the highest value and market cap. Having a look at the GitHub repository adds most developers as well as most frequent commits and merges to the list. Bitcoin counts 500+ developers and sustained an increasing rate of development over the last years:

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Screenshot of Insights/Contributors from Bitcoin Repository on GitHub

From April 10th to May 10th, 39 Authors have contributed new code, 55 issues were closed and 24 new ones caught. The pull requests refer to a specific change to be merged into the master branch from which new releases are published/generated. 127 of these pull requests were merged into the master branch while 96 were proposed and are waiting to be peer-reviewed.

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Screenshot of Insights/Pulse from Bitcoin repository on GitHub

Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin and was created by forking the code of Bitcoin in 2011. In this process, the whole codebase, including the history of contributions, became a new project. A project with its own, independent GIT repository on GitHub. The founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, changed some attributes like total supply, the hashing algorithm as well as the block time. The rest of the project remained and remains, very similar to Bitcoin. The Genesis Block of Litecoin was launched in October 2011.

The Pulse graph of Litecoin shows that the project activity remained active even after the fork of the code. This means that several developers started to work and continued working on the newly created project / GIT repository.

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Screenshot of Insights/Contributors from Litecoin Repository on GitHub

One fascinating aspect about the Litecoin contributions is that several Bitcoin development contributions seem to have found their way into to Litecoin as well. Although the contribution history is only shared until 2011 and is completely separated from that point in time, a lot of development contributions were added to both repositories. This resulted in a very similar contribution history of Bitcoin and Litecoin.

Litecoin - Top 10 Contributors
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Screenshot of Insights/Contributors from Litecoin Repository on GitHub

Bitcoin - Top 10 Contributors
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Screenshot of Insights/Contributors from Bitcoin Repository on GitHub

Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash is another, prominent fork of Bitcoin. Other than Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash kept the whole transaction history/chain from Bitcoin. Block 478558 is the last common block of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. After this block, the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash Blockchain went separate ways. Since Bitcoin Cash has multiple client implementations, thus various GitHub repositories, it is difficult quantitatively comparing its activity to other projects. The Bitcoinxt repository shows decent activity, but also shows a different frequency and new contributors, which leads to the assumption that in contrast to LTC and BTC, the deviation of development paths between BTC and BCH is bigger.

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Screenshot of Insights/Contributors from BitcoinXT Repository on GitHub

Bitcoin Cash is wholly separated from Bitcoin, has its own development path and will probably further deviate from the implementation of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Cash Github Repositories

Ravencoin (RVN)

Another, and rather a new fork of Bitcoin. Similar to Litecoin, Ravencoin was forked from Bitcoin, changed some of its attributes and launched an entirely new, independent chain.

"Based on the extensive development and testing of the UTXO model of the Bitcoin protocol, Ravencoin is built on a fork of the Bitcoin code. Key changes include a block reward time of one minute, a change in the number of coins issued, but not the weighted distribution schedule and the addition of asset creation and messaging capabilities" - Ravencoin Whitepaper

The fork of the codebase on GitHub was done mid-2017, and the Genesis Block was created in January 2018. This means that until mid-2017, the contribution history of Bitcoin and Ravencoin is shared, which is reflected in the following statement in the whitepaper:

"Thank you to the Bitcoin founder and developers. The Ravencoin project was launched based on the hard work and continuous effort of over 430 Bitcoin developers who made over 14,000 commits by the date of the Ravencoin code fork. We are eternally grateful to you for your diligence in making a secure network and for your support of free and open source software development. The Ravencoin project is built on the foundation you built." - Ravencoin Whitepaper

The contribution statistics show that, from the moment the repository was forked, Ravencoin started development with its own contribution history and own developers. Similar to BCH there doesn't seem to be any shared development path with Bitcoin anymore. Unfortunately, Ravencoin doesn't seem to have a significant community of developers. Neither the contributor's graph nor the pulse statistics show a number of developers, contribution volume or frequency which is even remotely comparable to Bitcoin.

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Screenshot of Insights/Contributors from Ravencoin Repository on GitHub

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Screenshot of Insights/Pulse from Ravencoin Repository on GitHub

To be fair, it is a young project, and new developers might start to contribute. Unless this happens, it will only progress very slow and has almost no chance for long-term success.

Conclusion

A look into GIT repositories on GitHub can provide valuable insights and might help to qualify the status of any given project. Furthermore, it can give information on things like the fruitful coexistence of Bitcoin and Litecoin. In case a project forks into an entirely new path, with new developers and new approaches to solve problems, such as Bitcoin Cash or Ravencoin, GitHub statistics provide information about the size of the team, the frequency of contribution, and other information crucial to the success of the project.

I hope I was able to provide a sneak peak in regards to how a GitHub repository and its statistics can be useful to determine the state of a project. I appreciate any question or feedback in the comment section below, so feel free to get involved!

Thanks for reading and have a great day!

Sources and Additional Information

General

Cryptocurrency Market Capitalizations | CoinMarketCap

Bitcoin

Litecoin

BCH

RVN

More from Hive account@sblue on Steemit

If you're interested to read about technological aspects of cryptocurrencies, feel free to check you one of my latest posts:

Bitcoin and its forks