Taking a sabbatical from Bitcoin FOSS from an undermined period of time. I won’t review or make code contributions to bitcoin core anymore neither the lightning dev kit and decline future coredev invitations. I don’t have the interest to keep being involved, though in practice I’ve not been very active there recently so things won’t change a lot.

Two main reasons behind this decision:

a) The open feud with some people at Spiral and Chaincode, whatever significant are their contributions to bitcoin. Those people had my trust and confidence, they broke them and I’m not Mother Teresa. This has been ongoing since almost 2 years now, I guess this will take as long or even more to solve and I prefer to allocate the best of my time and energy to arrange a resolution satisfying everyone. Long-term principles at stake concern every other open-source dev.

b) Focus on the growth of my business activities. More and more clients demands coming, their projects are growing and this ask for more and more of my attention. Long-term, when the market is more mature, I’m aiming to build my own hedge fund company and reach the $100m or $1b of personal wealth milestone (after all if you’re working on bitcoin FOSS you might be targeted by $$$ adversaries like a man who pretends to be satoshi, and you have to in measure to defend yourself in consequence). Reaching this level of FU money will be without doubt hard and take 10 to 15 years. This is deeply fulfilling to dedicate oneself to move the society forward by working on bitcoin open-source or serve the public interest. All that said at some point in life it’s good nurture its own private interests and seek a better equilibrium.

About lightning, I believe I consistently made my technical opinions on the state of infrastructure and the implementations quite vocal. There is a significant stack of systemic risk affecting the networks, addressing all of them in a robust fashion might take a decade or two. In the meanwhile, all the end-users and lsps funds are quite exposed to be powned or continuously DoSed. I think the reality is the most active players of lightning infrastructure development are VC-funded, have low-term time horizons and in competition to attract as much users as they can, even with safety workarounds.

Therefore I’m not confident there will be an acceleration of mitigations development before we see massive security hacks in the wild over the coming years. Or even worst that the lightning community goes the easy road of relying on trusted third parties to solve security issues and swallow the bullet of a centralized and permissioned network.

About bitcoin base-layer, I’m more optimistic. The technical foundations are solid, there has been a crazy amount of work put to harden the bitcoin core codebase, existent exploitation if any ask from a very high technical bar and high-level of attackers capabilities and ressources. The current team of contributors is competent, seasoned and dedicated. Yet the technical state of the mempool, the nurturing of a sane blockspace demand market and sufficient long-term reward of miners hashrate production should be a worry in every bitcoin’s mind, in my humble opinion. There are few other systemic risks to be aware off (e.g advances in quantum computing), though overall the robustness of the system is reasonably okay.

I’ll keep an eye on consensus changes and sometimes keep doing edge security research, more as a personal challenge to stay performant and competent. Beyond I pray the bitcoin community to not expect more open-source contributions from my side. I know there are some personal projects and great technical ideas I’m leaving in an open state. With luck, some smart people will find a technical interest in them and carry forward. If I did promise you a review on one of your PRs and I have not done so, feel free to bump me privately, I’ll have a look. As said elsewhere, I’ll still finish the transmission on some lightning issues, by loyalty towards some people there. Though as one of my bitcoin core peer often told me, “bitcoin needs you, more than you need bitcoin” and today I’m acting in consequence.

I hope the ecosystem will be able to attract and retain future security and protocol designs talents in the future, nurture a better culture for them and that way keep bitcoin alive. Yet it is good to be conservative, diversify your financial portfolio, personal skills and professional interests as a hedge if the bitcoin experience would come to fail or stagnate to a point where it lost the properties of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Cheers, Antoine