For everyone awareness in the bitcoin community, there is an ongoing discussion among the lightning developers and contributors to the Lightning protocol standard on adopting moderation rules.

There is a current proposal championed by TheBlueMatt, which is abnormally gaining approvals by other moderators, without any kind of written motivations or justifications. This proposal is also at the complete opposite of the one which has been adopted on the bitcoin core side, as for an external observer it can appear as very ideologically marked or suspected to be put in place to favor the corporate interest of TheBlueMatt’s current employer (Block Inc) as the detriment of newer industry entrants in the development of the Lightning protocol.

See the following comment about Rusty Russell weird behavior: https://github.com/lightning/bolts/pull/1207#issuecomment-2457109597

More generally, and despite the fact that Rusty Russell is a linux kernel + lightning protocol veteran, the bitcoin FOSS stage sounds to me to suffer from a principal vs agent problem (well-known in economics) where even veteran FOSS like TheBlueMatt or Rusty Russel are exposed to be influenced in their bitcoin open-source activities by monetary gains or a simple salary (and contrary to some elders FOSS devs e.g some OGs Blockstream they do not have the personal staunchness to say no, or the wisdom to put in place preventives measures to avoid falling themselves in such situation). If I remember correctly, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb said in one of his book, an employment salary is as much an addiction than cocaine, and realistically that apply to FOSS devs too. Most of them are above-the-average human beings, but still human nature still apply to them.

Zooming out, those new moderation rules, in their current stage are coming as a pain in the ass, to speak not so much politely, if there are spec fixes or improvement to land in the lightning protocol in face of newer security vulnerabilities. And no, as the recent btcd non-disclosure bug is reminding it, open-source maintainers with many years of experiences cannot be trusted to spontaneously fixes bugs they’re privately aware off. Said bugs affecting end-users (i.e likely you the reader) funds safety.

I’ll take occasion to observe while it has been more thana year I’ve officially say fck to care about putting in place communication channels of handling security issues for the common sake in Lightning (cf. https://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org/msg13035.html). In the meantime, no one skilled enough in the fcking lightning community has step up to do, as apparently people are more eager to prey or try to control each other behavior, rather than caring about the end-user…They might be more busy on feeding twitter or nostr threads playing the “Bitcoin FOSS dev” than actually doing the hard work…That tell you a lot about the current level of ethics in the lighting community.

To finish, I did already express myself on the subject of moral, ethics, conflict of interests in the bitcoin space in the past, and how it can badly collude with security or consensus issues. Following that I’ve been reached out by major publications and other medias, I knowI’ve not been able to give interview to everyone (apologies for that, there are more billionaires in the world, than actually people competent to find and responsibly see to fix > $1B issue affecting the bitcoin ecosystem). Though I’m fairly easy to reach (and I say clearly when I don’t have time to do an interview) but I’ll see to make a more in-depth interview on those subjects in the coming future.

PS: If some people are thinking this is defamation, I’m inviting them to sue me, saying the truth based on fact is well protected under the 1st Amendment.