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
This is very sad.
I remember when we met at the Chaincode Labs Summer Residency in June 2019.
Bitcoin needs independent-thinking developers and vulnerability researchers like you -- even if, and perhaps particularly if, they are from different cultures and languages.
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Thanks Jon for your work on bitcoin since all those years and I share the same kindness about the said memories.
Looking forward to keep contributing on ensuring we have a bitcoin development space for everyone, especially people from different cultures and languages. Building bridges across cultures take time and patience.
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In the meanwhile, all the end-users and lsps funds are quite exposed to be powned or continuously DoSed.
What a weird complaint. It's perfectly feasible for professionals to run Lightning nodes in such a way that they don't expose any public IP's to DoS attack. Binance is a good example: their lightning node has $5 million worth of channel capacity without a public IP. And for outgoing connections, there's lots of anti-DoS proxies out there that terminate outgoing connections in such a way that people on the receiving end don't get a unique IP address to DoS attack.
This feels like the rant of someone who is just butt hurt that their exploit didn't get as much attention as they wanted. Or maybe they were annoyed that their "OMG LIGHTNING IS BROKEN!" exploit got quickly fixed in multiple different ways, none of which were invented by him.
Drama drama drama...
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Binance is a good example: their lightning node has $5 million worth of channel capacity without a public IP. And for outgoing connections, there's lots of anti- DoS proxies out there that terminate outgoing connections in such a way that people on the receiving end don't get a unique IP address to DoS attack.
I don’t need a node public IP to launch a channel jamming of your node, as long as you’re announcing your local topology to the rest of the network.
This feels like the rant of someone who is just butt hurt that their exploit didn't get > as much attention as they wanted. Or maybe they were annoyed that their "OMG > LIGHTNING IS BROKEN!" exploit got quickly fixed in multiple different ways, none > of which were invented by him.
Feel free to share your Lightning node pubkey. My pleasure to do a public demonstration of the fixes “robustness” at your own expenses. As a note, I suggested most of the fixes implemented by LN open-source maintainers.
Drama drama drama...
Lessons of human sciences, conflict is not necessarily a negative situation as it’s an opportunity for newer norms, ideas and solutions to emerge.
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Why don't you just release channel jamming code? If it's a real exploit, people should be experimenting with it openly.
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First reason, I don’t know who you are, I have no public track records available on your intentions and what you would do with such offensive toolchain.
Second reason, I’m not your bitch and I don’t owe you this code.
As a side-note, other lightning researchers have already done demonstration of channel jamming: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/good-griefing-a-lingering-vulnerability-on-lightning-network-that-still-needs-fixing
On replacement cycling attacks, I’m still looking for volunteers, you’re free to share me your lightning node pubkey, though I would need a social proof or fingerprint this is really your node and you’re fully consenting to your funds being powned as a bug bounty.
I’m sure the community will thank you for your financial contribution to the advance of Bitcoin research.
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First reason, I don’t know who you are, I have no public track records available on your intentions and what you would do with such offensive toolchain.
The fastest ways to get issues fixed is demonstrations. Same as the rest of the security industry has learned. And it may make for better fixes as more people can experiment with the issues and find ways to improve on the attacks.
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As is posted on the mailing list at time of disclosure, I’ve been looking for someone among other lightning devs run and play the “defensive” side in replacement cycling attacks, in a traditional “blue / red” fashion. No one has raised the hand.
You’re still free to publish your mainet lightning node pubkey and give me your private consent for demonstration / experimentation. Beyond, I did test replacement cycling attacks locally and it was working well.
We did test some lightning attacks in the past in a real-world setup, though I think you’re missing point than you have so much known attacks affecting lightning that senior protocol devs don’t have time to test, experiment, research and fix them anymore. And as such, jeopardizing their end-users bitcoin financial interests.
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Not every form of Lightning DoS requires use of an IP address. Channel jamming and other attacks on liquidity, for example.
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Unfortunately bitcoiners don't want to hear the truth on this sort of thing.
It'll take a while for bitcoiners to separate their bitcoin itself from just one early L2 implementation.
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"LN is broken!" "Reach 100 m dollar hedgefund"
These do not really show humility, a trait that I think would be very important to collaborate on Bitcoin.
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I’ll appreciate the comment on humility if it was coming from one of my bitcoin technical peer working on the protocol. Otherwise it’s pointless, and to be honest if you’re working on bitcoin security you’ll need toughness and character before humility.
I don’t misappreciate humility as a virtue and it’s good to have some - I’m just saying this might not be the supreme principle to collaborate on a Bitcoin.
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Welcome back!
Ah there we go with the "developer privilege". Serves my point I guess.
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“Developer privilege” ? I don’t get it. Let me know if I’m missing some post-modern reference :)
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Privilege - working for free without any guaranteed salary. 😁
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See ya next week
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Another "Mike Hearn moment" in Bitcoin history?
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Don’t take for granted that Bitcoin developers owe you their time, energy, dedication and personal genius.
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Each participant in Bitcoin network have its own role, energy, dedication. Some will write code, some will run nodes, some will do mining, some will write tutorials, some will onboard newbies etc.
You are not more special than others.
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Philosophically, on one hand I share your sentiment that each participant in the Bitcoin network have its own role, energy, dedication and no contribution is more special than other.
On the other hand, not all contributions are bringing the same value (if we take bitcoins as a common scale of value), otherwise we would tread the same someone correcting a non-significant typo in core documentation, than someone reducing the usage of the network to everyone else by finding some new scaling solution.
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Interesting to see how stackers are still throwing sats to a quiter... is like a black hole. Somebody should tell them... bitcoin is scarce and they will regret it later.
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This is a bit insulting to be called a “quiter” by someone who has never made a substantial technical contribution to bitcoin or lightning, to the best of my knowledge.
Though as a note, even Satoshi did “quite” Bitcoin. Nature of open-source, if successful your projects are growing beyond your personal outreach and what you can master by design.
I bet you even Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Ray Dalio would quite Bitcoin FOSS if they were working on it.
Like said, keeping an eye on consensus changes and I’ll keep doing a bit of security research. I love security research for its own sake, and the taste of solving hard and unique problem.
Generally, those types of contributions create more value for the ecosystem that 90% of the bitcoin developers will do during all their careers.
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Everybody in Bitcoin network is contributing... not only you.
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Feel free to show me your contributions to Bitcoin.
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Social contributions will do more than code updates ever could.
All heroes will be killed.
Good luck with your hedge fund. Try not to end up in fincen prison
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I’ll wait you for you telling me if a security disclosure is a social contribution or a technical one, like a code update, in a constructive and argumented fashion.
In my opinion, security disclosure are social contributions, as they’re setting risks standards among the Bitcoin ecosystem.
On the fincen prison, if you don’t know it already, I’ll inform you than writing and publishing bitcoin code is protected under the First amendment by US federal courts and running a hedge fund is protected as a commercial activity under the “Commerce Clause”.
Social contributions will do more than code updates ever could.
interesting take, can you elaborate?
writes this and then joins the mess, lol
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mempool.psace is the best out there. I am biased but it's the truth.
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I thought it was common knowledge 😅. Do post, more need to know
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1121 sats \ 1 reply \ @usagi 13 Nov 2023
Interesting that the personal wealth milestone is mentioned in dollars ;)
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Bitcoin is an experience.
Diversify your financial portfolio (at the very least as an hedge on supply chain and hardware security issues on your key material).
Would love the day where assets are all denominated in bitcoin the currency, though today it’s still a very volatile asset.
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Code devs value their wealth in $ ?
I guess only the ones who quit and want to start hedge funds.
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I guess only the ones who quit and want to start hedge funds.
Until miners rewards are paid mostly on a substantial fee market, Bitcoin is an experience.
Good to diversify your financial portfolio with multi-class of assets, which are yet still globally denominated in dollars, whatever we think of the $ has a worthy monetary standard.
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Mining is a free market. If one miner isn’t profitable they will turn off and another miner will take their shares.
The indication is hashrate and it’s at ATH daily.
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The point is on diversifying your financial portfolio with uncorrelated assets.
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I would love the day when BTC has enough real-world adoption to be leveraged as a stable measure of value in business dealings. That might take two or three decades.
I can only recommend Frank Knight works on the necessity of a stable common scale of value in the planning of business endeavors.
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Thank you for your service.
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@theariard, thanks for all the FOSS work you've done! I wish you the best for your future business endeavors, short and long-term. Though, I hope to see you back in FOSS at some point in the future :)

On a different note, I recently came across your RFC: Introducing Watchdog, a cross-layer anomaly detection module again and took some notes of things I want to implement actual anomaly detection and alerting for. I've been collecting some of the data - just not really doing anything with it yet.
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Thanks for the words!
Glad the watchdog idea is still useful, don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions on it for data collection. The https://github.com/0xB10C/miningpool-observer is a very neat idea.
Being back in FOSS, well on my side it’s good to enjoy a half-sabbatical, fix some things as priorities and take time to learn and play with new things like machine learning and LLM :)
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Life is made of changes, and these changes make us stronger. Thank you for your contribution.
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Thanks for all the hard work! Good luck on your projects!
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Thank you for your service. Good luck to you
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Note to myself: build a proprietary trading firm instead of a hedge fund. A lot of advantages not being a public-facing entity :thinking:
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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
Good luck with that. I don't know you or your background but I'm not sure you really understand how difficult that is.
But hey, if you can pull it off I'm happy to stand corrected. It would make one hell of a story.
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I do .I know it will be fucking hard and one has to be very focus to be successful.
Harder than designing and carrying on Bitcoin consensus changes or mastering security of second-layers, I don’t know time will tell.
Building a hedge fund, a lot of math, physics and hard engineering challenges and working with smart and interesting people daily, all what I appreciate. Even more interesting if all assets trade can be bitcoin-native. Financial success more a metric of achievement and staying on track, journey matters over outcome.
Ultimately, Bitcoin is a lot about financial autonomy and self-sovereignty. Building a successful business is one of the best way to achieve those values, and be “master of your fate”.
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I respect your dedication. I was in a bit of a bad mood the other day when I responded, sorry if it came off a little harsh.
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if the bitcoin experience would come to fail or stagnate to a point where it lost the properties
Bitcoin have solid base. He'll not fail.
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Foundations are solid. Yet if the community never recognize the potentiality of systemic risks, and how they could be a source of failure, the community will never do the work of actually fixing those systemic risks.
Beware cargo cult in all aspects of life.
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Yet if the community never recognize the potentiality of systemic risks, and how they could be a source of failure, the community will never do the work of actually fixing those systemic risks.
This is the point. I recognize problems in L2 and am looking for solutions. When you showed possible problems, I was one of the few developers who had the courage to talk about it. While others remain silent.
Beware of cargo cult in all aspects of life.
Cults will exist anywhere, including the FIAT world, hedge funds, etc. Thank you for the tips.
Oh, I have no cult on Bitcoin issues, just solid foundations.
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Thanks, appreciate people are taking the L2s issue seriously.
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love the discussion you guys!
Follow your dreams, good luck!
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Take a break. Everything will be fine.
Hope to see you back. Maybe as a new nym?
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Good to take a break. I’m confident things will be mostly fine.
On the pure hacker ethos, I’ve done a circle of bitcoin protocols (lightning, bitcoin core, consensus changes, L2s). I’m not stretching neither challenging myself, or learning new skills just working on Bitcoin FOSS.
Always take on new challenges, that you fear in the morning not to suceed :)
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Thank you and the best of luck in your business endeavors.
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Thank you for your work.
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However, I find it funny that narrative "LN is dead" seems to be contradictory to "Bitcoin security is under threat" since if there is no robust 2nd layer, many transactions should settle onchain hence there will be some demand anyway.
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Not necessarily. A scaling ceiling without a viable second layer will prevent a lot of usecases from coming to bitcoin. Or will force those usecases to use custodial bitcoin.
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My point is that they will use onchain transaction anyway.
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