As we all know by now, the Bitcoin ecosystem consists of users, miners, software developers, and applications, such as exchanges, wallets, and blockchain explorers. Other stakeholders are expected to get increasingly involved as well. It is highly likely that regulators and government agencies will pay more attention to the ecosystem in future. The following diagram represents the Bitcoin ecosystem:
All participants in the Bitcoin network run software, which is developed and maintained by software engineers.
Bitcoin was first developed as a software protocol by Satoshi Nakamoto, who produced the initial code base. Shortly after the launch, Satoshi passed on the continued development and maintenance of the code to a group of software development enthusiasts who embraced the idea. This initial group has evolved into the core development team of Bitcoin. That said, Bitcoin is an open source project, and everyone can review the code and contribute with development proposals.
Bitcoin Core is the open source software code base that powers Bitcoin. It is known as the reference implementation of Bitcoin, meaning that it is the main point of reference of how the Bitcoin system functions. It determines all aspects of the system, such as wallets, transactions, block validation, node setup, and network protocol in the peer-to-peer network.
Now, we will move on to the key software applications used in the ecosystem.