No, haven't seen them share anything publicly on LN.

That said, from the data it looks like when they open a channel with a node and usage is high, they keep adding more channels over time. Definitely a sign of real usage

https://sorukumar.github.io/plebdashboard-ln/profile.html?node=03a1f3afd646d77bdaf545cceaf079bab6057eae52c6319b63b5803d0989d6a72f

Here are the latest dashboard enhancements:

1. Revamped the Product Pulse page
2. Added a summary of discussions on the home page
   
   

3: Fixed most of the bugs with timeframe-based dev filtering. The UX still needs some work to make it more intuitive. It is on the list for next week.

One more source to check: Bitcoin Data Labs shares this kind of Lightning data on X every day.

Here's the post: X post

For the detailed dashboard: plebdashboard-ln

By the way, these two nodes have 14 public channels between them, with over 50 BTC in total capacity.

don't see it as extreme either.

In fact, if and when Bitcoin gets big, having a dedicated dev deeply involved in Bitcoin will probably become pretty normal for large companies rather than not.

After all, we'd generally find it more acceptable for big companies to direct resources toward common goods — Bitcoin being one — than not to. It's like how we expect them to contribute to the Linux kernel.

a common observation in the space is that Brink and similar funders tend to support younger devs more often.

• on one hand, younger contributors are usually more flexible and open to new ideas — which helps move things quickly. In big tech I’ve often leaned that way myself, where young talent is preferred for exactly that reason.
• but, on the other hand, this same flexibility can sometimes make them easier to influence (even unintentionally), while more experienced, opinionated veterans with different POVs often get passed over because they can be harder to align or manage. even though you already support some solid older contributors.

How does Brink think about this balance? Are there any intentional approaches to support a broader range of experience levels and viewpoints?

And how do you think Brink should manage or counter this perception? What kind of data or metrics could be tracked and shared with the wider community to build more trust in the process?

Or maybe Brink doesn’t worry about it much. there will always be criticism, and with multiple funders in the ecosystem, these things tend to balance out overall.

Great report, Mike!. Really appreciate the transparency and all the work supporting Core.

A few friendly pieces of feedback. assuming the goal of the report is to maximize transparency and build community trust that there’s no undue influence on Core:

1. Donor Breakdown
   Anonymous donations were huge this year (~60%). It would be helpful to know the total number of contributors broken down a bit more (e.g. individuals vs organizations) without revealing any private details.
2. Branding/ Framing of Supported Developers
   I know this is nitpicking, but referring to them as “Brink engineers” might unintentionally suggest closer control than exists. Using something more neutral like “Bitcoin Core contributors funded by Brink” could better reinforce independence and transparency.
3. Grant Selection Process
   The report mentions the Grant Committee but doesn’t describe how grantees are chosen. A short note on the criteria and any safeguards against bias (personal, ideological) , or donor influence would be very helpful for trust.
4. Conflict of Interest / Governance
   Would be great to see a brief overview to how Brink handles potential conflicts of interest — especially between board/grant committee members, large donors, and grantees.

Overall, fantastic job . the high program ratio and impact are impressive.

let me think through it.

One way could be to have an LLM review the full discussion and output a file with predefined metrics (like collaboration vs conflict signals could be one). We could store that and pull it into the dashboard. Since these patterns don't change often, running it every 3-6 months would probably be enough.

that said, there might be a smarter, cheaper, and deterministic approach using proxy variables. I'll keep thinking on it.

Thanks. Will check out “Email para newsletters” next and fix it.

On the influence map: I’m still trying to make it genuinely useful and easier to read. Right now I’m tweaking a few knobs, mainly the time-decay [exponential decay, λ=0.15] and the way communities are detected, to see what gives the graph a better shape. Ideally, the clusters should start reflecting different generations of developers, with old-timers in one part of the graph and newer gen in another. If that works, someone like sipa should show up as a bridge between those groups [high betweenness centrality].

You’ll also notice the shaded box on the graph. That is meant to capture expertise clusters, basically grouping people by what they tend to talk about. For that, I’m building topic fingerprints and comparing them using similarity scores [cosine similarity, Louvain detection]. I think we still need to be smarter about how we assign expertise, because the top contributors will likely show up across multiple areas rather than fitting neatly into one bucket.

The harder part is that these expertise clusters do not line up neatly with the main network, which is built from who replies to whom [reply graph, PageRank-weighted]. So the challenge now is how to show both layers without making the whole thing confusing. Maybe that means switching between views, or maybe using color and layout in a better way.

Let’s see if I can make the graph genuinely insightful. Otherwise, it’s just a profile map of all devs.

Stories told through numbers hit different.

for sure a masterclass in making abstract privacy risks feel real. Great share.

I wouldn’t attribute it to a lack of understanding, but more to indifference , or simply not being high on their priority list.

Here’s how I see them approaching it:

1. Their goal is to follow privacy laws, not to go above and beyond for user privacy.
2. They only anonymize name and address for two practical reasons: to avoid legal exposure, and to keep you coming back for more data enrichment (recurring revenue matters).
3. Often the analysts getting the enriched data aren’t even supposed to do the kind of re-identification you described, it’s more about controlling who can access PII under compliance rules

That said, I’m sure the analysts and management at the bureaus understand the math. Some salespeople probably do too, but they might be trained to sidestep those questions.

This comes from my experience partnering with credit bureaus and data companies from inside big tech on multiple projects. Really interesting story though. thanks for sharing it.

Here is POV from a Hindu guy:

Children and religion

I would lean towards saying nothing.

My experience: As a single man, I rarely visited temples or observed religious holidays. However, as a father, I make it a point to take my children to the temple and maintain religious practices at home. The two part reason is

1: I seriously believe in the absence of religion you may get influenced by bad ideas ( one example, decline of religion resulted into the rise of wokeness)

2: to me, essentially a philosophy. As a child, I loved reading parables, fables, and Zen stories, and I still find them incredibly enriching

Interestingly, as a teenager, when I got intoxicated with the idea that we may have created god as a psychological defense mechanism (Fear-Origin Theory). My mom said, it does not matter. God does not ask you to believe in Him. what you are is Nirguna ( one who believe in formless God ). did not find a good link with quick search, so here is a gemini summary[https://gemini.google.com/share/03172ec12ac9]. So, I was never an atheist.

Religion feels like a scam:

Feeling disillusioned, hold your horses. it will pass. . ZEN Short Story: It Will Pass!

What to do next

If you don't feel like it. don’t force it. You don’t need to go to church or pray as often as you currently do .It is also okay if kids also don't go to church as often as they go now. Instead of formal worship, consider reading. I ended up reading a couple of pages of Ecclesiastes [https://www.biblestudytools.com/nkjv/ecclesiastes/1.html} once, and i found it incredibly profound...so there is a lot of learned from there.

Remember, as the zen master, buddha says, it will pass, and you won' t feel and think like what you are doing now!

By the way, many Hindu story emphasize that God's fav are those who are "good human beings" and fulfill their worldly responsibilities with integrity, rather than those who only pray. central theme of "Vaishnav Jan To," Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite bhajan. I love it too. it has subtitle [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbvww26oMQ4]

Thanks. I'll take a look, and try to understand that part in more detail.

could anything be cooler than this!

Here is an update on the work. I want to make sure we don’t read too much into it.

Earlier I used Foundry’s average share since 2021 (~24%) for the 7+ streak propensity calculation, which made the streaks look dramatically high.

That was the wrong baseline because Foundry was still ramping up through early 2022. The 'correct' window starts in November 2022, when its share was already established.

Using that period, Foundry’s 7+ streak propensity is only about 1.19× expected — roughly 20% above the fair baseline and within normal variance.

The dashboard has been updated to reflect this more reasonable number

agree on v2, and your thought process there.

To your question: no, the dashboard only records the winner of each block. It doesn't see the 'stale' blocks that were found but lost the race.

However, if a pool is consistently winning those 'split-tip' races, it confirms the suspicion: those 7-block streaks aren't just a statistical events, They are a result of structural edges.

One way to interpret this: while we attribute ~32% hashrate to Foundry, their effective hashrate, when they want it to be, is actually higher because of these 'other' technical edges

thanks. feedback welcome as you explore

i’ve been debating whether to expand the pool profile/behavior section. would be great if it actually helps miners decide where to mine!

Thanks. I was out on vacation . I will pick this analysis back up in the next couple of weeks

• Consolidated Boris Nagaev, Rijndael (rot13maxi), and Adam Gibson (waxwing/AdamISZ) under canonical names.
• Removed 'admin' from the developer network.
• Switched to a log-damping heuristic ($1 + \log_2(n)$) to avoid biasing the map with raw volume counts. This is a judicious manual choice for now; still exploring more data-driven ways to model this. let me know if you have thoughts.

I used BIP data to categorize messages and thread headers. Will show more data on orange-dev-tracker. If you have ideas on what kind of BIP analysis we should do, let me know