Yes sir!

That’s a good question.

Not super familiar with Hornet or Floresta, a bit more with libbitcoin.

Anyone is free to correct me if I’m wrong, but Hornet iiuc is more a formally verified re-implementation of the consensus rules, aiming to offer all of this in clean and modern C++ code. Backbone is re-using directly libbitcoinkernel which is shared with bitcoin core, this is an engineering advantage to ease the support of future consensus change (e.g bip54), where for Hornet, any future consensus change would be to have independently re-implemented and re-tested.

About Floresta, from what I understand, it’s more a lightweight client which is leveraging utreexo as a validation backend. It’s very interesting and imho it’s worthy to follow a client building on utreexo principles. However, one has to be aware off that utreexo is trade-off (disk I/O vs bandwidth), so as all trade-offs it’s all trade-offs (tautology).

Libbitcoin is more a complete bitcoin development kit (i.e a library and a full-node) written in C++. Dunno if you remember the history of Libbitcoin, but the historical goal was to have a fully FOSS free bitcoin service stack by combining Electrum and Libbitcoin (never really delivered on, though one can see bip 33 for ideas).I think it was a great idea, and it was never really pursued consistently. Somehow Backbone is more similar to this (being a full node and not a lightweight one like Floresta or Hornet) and written in rust.

I have strong thinking in terms of security and it’s aimed to be very conservative in terms of consensus. For the usage, it’s not very aimed to be a “ready-to-deploy” full-node for the bitcoin hobbyist that is not familiar with running a full node, more to be a stable backend for people that wish to build bitcoin native services.

E.g if you’re a team of 2 and you’re building a collaborative custody service and you wish to have a watchtower for your collaborative custody (e.g on a given tx format, do some tx broadcast or whatever), I’m interested to talk with you. I would say for now think about Bitcoin Backbone as a stable backend for bitcoin native services run by SMBs (small medium businesses).

In my view, we have one single well-maintained bitcoin full node software, and somehow alone it’s powering a 1T bucks ecosystem. My wonder is what if we have half a dozen of high quality full nodes, would this grow the ecosystem to 2T bucks, 3T bucks, 4T bucks, more ? Maybe the real bottleneck in the real-world growth of bitcoin is that so far we had only one serious full-node, and everything upstream is frustratingly slow down on that. Better to grow the pie for everyone and compete from the top, by innovation.

Back down to earth, I don’t wish to over-promise with Backbone neither to engage myself to strongly and for now it’s just boring-but-necessary quality assurance, documentation and basic testing works. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

There is nothing really new with quantum, reorg risks already exists if N -1 block reward > N block reward + 2 * block_energy_cost.

The race is converging towards marginal gain be 0 and the most solvable miners setting the chain forward and the others miners finding themselves at deficit.

The probabilistic impossibility on catching up in the block race can be reduced within the formalization of the Gambler’s Ruin as applied to bitcoin, which is already today at the ground of network’s security.

The full math and game-theory analysis can be flesh out of course, but the point is the risk already exist today with Coinbase and MicroStrategy’s centralized bags being pwned and the liquidity being leveraged to gain a persistent edge in the mining race.

Let’s be clear, I’m not making the argument to freeze Coinbase or MicroStrategy’s coins.

Being able to coordinate with other contributors and expose design ideas to as many people to collect arguments before to implementing it (new mempool design, protocol tweak, etc).

If replacement cycling was the only issue:
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALZpt+EptER=p+P7VN3QAb9n=dODA9_LnR9xZwWpRsdAwedv=w@mail.gmail.com/T/#u#m4fcd81d3fbf25a2571b51eba2221cea7238279cd

There is a bunch of ongoing prosecuting cases.

It might just take 18 months / 2 years between a kidnapping event and the judgement in front of courts of justice. Generally, gathering all the elements during an investigation takes some time.

Note this wave of kidnapping is only recent in itself, start of 2025.

"If they defend themselves, they will be the ones to go to jail”.

Nah, it’s okay if you shoot the legs (Cass. Chambre criminelle, 28 nov. 1972, 72-91.406).

a new bitcoin full-node built with the libbitcoinkernel consensus engine extracted from bitcoin core, native multi-process.

it's still very experimental, but it's making progress step by step.

yes sir, it's directly building on the libbitcoinkernel as a validation backend.

libbitcoinkernel has been matured enough since ~1.5 years to be be used now.

Few comments on the article.

First, if you're an open-source developer or organization and you're asked an interview by mainstream medias, this is fine to be a little careful. You're free to have few rounds of exchange with the journalists to scope the interview and ask under which the angle the article is expected to be. This is fine to exercise your right of correction and explicitly ask the media to insert your version of the facts.

Secondly, on cryptography at large, last year the European Court of Human Rights implicitly recognized the legitimacy of end-to-end encryption in a landmark decision (ECHR, Podchasov v. Russia, 13 February 2024) and underscoring the worthiness of end-to-end encryption in a democratic society in the era of Internet. As far as I know, no other similar decision has been yielded by a supreme court in any other worldwide jurisdictions. France is a state party to the European Convention on Human Rights, so ECHR decisions have to be followed by French courts in principle, minus the caveats.

Thirdly, on the question on the criminalization of intent for the simple usage of encryption tooling or data deletion tools like the alleged usage of GrapheneOS in the Parisien article under French law, this is a controversial legal question. There are series of cases pending in front of the highest French court for criminal matters on this topic of usage of those kind of tools and it's a controversial topic.

Most of the time, you have the law enforcement authorities doing the wider interpretation of the legal texts (I'm respecting their wish for efficiency but fundamental rights matters too...) and then after the facts, courts intervening to put a "calm down". This is a reason why France has effective separation of powers, and why separation of powers matters in any democratic society.

Fourthly, from the latest news, EU Chat Control has been drop on the floor by the European legislator as least for now (https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2025/10/31/chat-control-le-projet-europeen-de-surveillance-des-messageries-largement-abandonne_6650578_4408996.html). To be frank, I don't see how such text would have survived judicial checks and challenges, given the myriad of legal texts and grounds on which to strike it or render the legal effects ineffective.

With all those caveats, let's be frank if you're working on privacy-first or human-rights first open-source softwares, and you have the choice to pick up the worldwide jurisdictions under which to operate, in my humble opinion you're better off to be based in Germany or Czech Republic rather than France, US or Canada. The former have known the URSS and its wide surveillance state, so culturally there are far more respectfully of privacy and human rights.

Rien de tres nouveau sous le soleil.

Read a lot on the subject, not only Strauss's book.

Bruno Leoni's Freedom and the Law is a great one too.

I believe I have read Leo Strauss's Natural Law & History.

This doesn't answer how you would solve conflict if let's say you and @Darthcoin have a conflict because you have both different interpretation of the "natural law".

Here I bet you're going to fall back in the millenary old intractable conflict between natural and positive law...

Thanks, I'm not unfamiliar with constitutional law and I do remember the triade a population, a government, a territory.

There is no answer on my second question of how your community of cypherpunks would administer and resolve disputes among themselves on a territory (?).

First question, at which degree of interactions a community of cypherpunk, which accumulate resources and "master arms" on a territory (?), start to be a self-"government" of its own.

Second question according to which principles those cypherpunks would solve disputes among themselves. If you answer the principles of the ones who has the most AK-47s in the hands, this sounds very familiar to me to the Italian cities in the Middle Age.

I'll leave you to meditate on those subjects.

In the meanwhile, I'll go to finish Max Weber's Politik als Beruf and meditate on the zen philosophy of Bouddha.

Take my viewpoint as mostly applying to major European countries and the US. In those countries, there is something called rule of law, albeit imperfect of course and not always respected, but in principle rule is law is strictly framing any prosecution.

Any traffic “crime”, be it human trafficking, child pornography, drugs dealing, war weapons dealing, pirated movies or whatever needs material actions committing the reprehensible actions and knowledge of said actions.

There is no such thing as “potential abusers”. Either someone by its actions has fulfilled the legal framework incriminating a said “crime” and as such that person is liable from prosecution. Or that person has not committed said “crime”. Especially in criminal matters, where legal incriminations are of strict interpretation.

To go back to your example of something illegal happening in New York City. In a bunch of NYC streets, you can go to find all kind of drug dealers. Does it make anyone walking in those streets or even accidentally seeing a drug deal happening a complice of said drug dealer ? The answer, drawing from (centuries) of court cases, is obviously no -- one has to commit deliberate materials actions in that sense.

May I invite you to have a reading of the major legislations in US or Europe on “crime” committed through the transit of an online service providers, and how the responsibility of said service providers are strictly scoped. Theirs responsibilities are only engaged in case of no-cooperation with a judicial authority, when a specifically designated “crime” instance is happening or might have happened.

In that sense, I can only invite you to have a survey of decisions on online decisions matters yielded by the US Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights or the Court of Justice of the European Union (e.g Ahmet Yildirim v Turkey App no 3111/10 18 December 2012). In all those decisions, the judge don’t say freedom of expression is absolute, rather they use standard heuristics to make a balance among competing interests (freedom of expression, right of intellectual property, public order, etc).

So far there has never been decisions saying that absolute and timely unbounded technical filters that would deprive some of their usage of Internet and therefore of its freedom of expression. This is even the contrary, if an absolute filter would not be able to dissociate legal contents from illegal content, it should not be introduced as it’s encroaching too much on freedom of expression (CJUE, 26-04-2022, aff C‑401/19).

Again, in the present situation, I’m understanding and maybe I’m misunderstanding your arguments so feel free to correct. But I’m understanding it’s like if you were the New York Times editorial board, which is a private company, you would take the initiative by all technical means to try to censor what the Washington Post, USA Today or the Los Angeles Times have decided to publish in their own private publications.

No, in case of obviously illegal content you would seen published in the Los Angeles Times, the right move would to notify some law enforcement authority, and let those people do their jobs. This is not for nothing that anyone working at the average law enforcement authority or judicial authority in a role of responsibility would have followed years of training and studies, most of the time something like 5 years of studies

Sadly, Internet is giving too often the (false) impression that one can be an expert in any topic, including legal matters, and this without real training or practical experience.

Now, if you think that a local or international law governing what one can say or publish in a Bitcoin block is far too lax, as it’s not fitting your specific viewpoint, you’re free to engage in political lobbying in Washington D.C or Bruxelles or whatever any other hub of other worldwide regulatory area. But, I’m humbly believe we start to be very far from Bitcoin protocol design and a cypherpunk write code ethos...

And I’m saying all of this with a mark of intellectual respect for anyone working or hacking on Bitcoin Knots, everyone knows that I can be highly critical of Bitcoin Core too at times. Be sure I’m always trying to favor a meritocracy of ideas and open discussion of said objective ideas and facts over tribalism.

Sure, while my criticism is coming more as an insider, than as an external "onlookers", I believe that whatever the category you belong to, insider or onlooker one can find surprising that Brink has not already independence provisions in its contracts employment with the Bitcoin Core contributors on its payroll. At least for the most senior contributors on its staff.

In my view, independence is not something you remind when a controversy has already arised. By then, it's a little delicate to reach out and say "Independent review and open discussion are critical for Bitcoin Core". If you had to say and remind it explicitly, it's probably because it was not fully clear in your eyes and in the mind of the professional Bitcoin Core contributors on Brink's payroll.

In my humble opinion, independence is a point that should be fully clear in the minds of everyone involved. Having that kind of provisions in contracts employment obviously tight the hands of everyone, but I believe I can say that the outcome you wish when controversial topic happens like OP_RETURN. In all this matter, I think it got inflated a lot, partially because in the view of a lot of plebs and full-node operators, right or wrong, some professional Bitcoin Core contributors might have taken technical positions to satisfy some corporate interests.

If any it's of interest to you, I can share in private "independence" provisions I have
spent time and effort to legally craft for myself in my professional endeavors, and as such keep my speech and actions free in matters of bitcoin development.

Apologies again if my tone is a bit rigid. Still I do remember when Brink in its rough
lines was shared to me as a more consistent idea during a picnic on the grass of Long Island city, kinda end of May 2020. cc @schmidty