Michael Ford (known as fanquake) is a maintainer of Bitcoin Core, the reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol.
Bitcoin Core
Ford has been one of the most active contributors to Bitcoin Core, focusing on the project’s build system, dependencies, and reproducible builds. His work ensures that Bitcoin Core can be compiled consistently across different platforms and that users can independently verify that released binaries match the source code — a critical property for trust-minimized software.
He was granted commit access to the Bitcoin Core repository and became one of the core maintainers alongside Gloria Zhao and Ava Chow as part of the distributed maintainer model adopted after 2022.
Contributions
Ford’s work includes maintaining the Guix-based build system that produces deterministic, reproducible builds of Bitcoin Core, managing dependency updates, and reviewing cross-platform compatibility. He has been instrumental in reducing Bitcoin Core’s dependency footprint and improving its security posture through build system hardening.
Related people
Bitcoin Core
