[Code of Conduct in BOSS] Is Rusty Russell the puppet of Jack Dorsey ? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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[Code of Conduct in BOSS] Is Rusty Russell the puppet of Jack Dorsey ?

198 sats \ 21 comments \ @theariard 5 Sep bitcoin

As every contributor to the Lightning BOLTs, we do open Lightning BOLTs dev meetings every 2 weeks.

Ahead of next meeting Monday, I did open an issue to ask clarification today: https://github.com/lightning/bolts/issues/1287

The message was wholly fact-based, a bit rude, as I'm asking clarification why Block Inc is blocking my main account to contribute on the Lightning BOLTs, but still polite and gentle.

Few hours afters, I saw my issue closed without explanation and my comment abusely flagged as abuse: https://github.com/lightning/bolts/issues/1286#issuecomment-3255500427

Here you go the notification email received:

From: Rusty Russell <notifications@github.com>
Reply-To: lightning/bolts
 <reply+BRXBFCJBSUB3RK4ZTRDOIGGGYXXTVEVBNHHMTSBS2E@reply.github.com>
To: lightning/bolts <bolts@noreply.github.com>
Cc: ariard3 <
  Author <author@noreply.github.com>
Message-Id: <lightning/bolts/issue/1287/issue_event/19516912746@github.com>
In-Reply-To: <lightning/bolts/issues/1287@github.com>
References: <lightning/bolts/issues/1287@github.com>
Subject: Re: [lightning/bolts] Unban @ariard main account and deprecate the code of
 conduct (Issue #1287)

So I'm wondering if Rusty Russell is that independent of Block Inc....or not.

After all his employer (Blockstream) made a deal with Square Up in 2021: https://blockstream.com/press-releases/2021-06-05-blockstream-and-square-inc-join-forces-to-build-solar-powered-bitcoin-mine-in-the-us/`

Few months ago, Rusty Russell did confirm he didn't have an "open-source independence" protection in his employment contract with Blockstream. Historically, folks like Gregory Maxwell or Pieter Wuille did have such legal protections in their employment contracts with Blockstream, to protect their works as contributors on Bitcoin Core.

Rusty might give in to the arbitrary desiderata of Block Inc, as for him it can be always a solid employment option if Blockstream has more financial difficulties in the future. This already happened as in 2023, instagibbs did transition from Blockstream to Spiral, as every insider knows Blockstream was trying to compress its payroll at the time.

Is Rusty Russell true to his words of 2018 about the corrosion of ethics in cryptocurrencies: https://rusty.ozlabs.org/2018/02/14/the-corrosion-of-ethics-in-cryptocurrencies.html

I don't know ? Up to everyone in the community to be judge :(

I'm the one who is patiently trying to build the dialogue, clarify the misunderstanding and gently trying to bridge among the contributors cultural backgrounds and diversity of professional experiences. And I all got its a middle finger and a complete refusal to talk. I do think Rusty has bad consciousness here...

Anyway, that the kind of issue to handle with calm and patience -- and a zest of philosophy.

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542 sats \ 9 replies \ @nout 5 Sep

I have not read your past back-and-forths and interaction with the folks, but it sounds like this is already escalated situation and there is a lot to unpack from the past. Is that correct?

In that case it's hard to point at this very last situation/case (this specific request on github) and you can't really expect us to try assessing the situation just based on the last post.

So just couple of high level observations: The title of your post (both here and github) are unnecessarily triggering. When people read it, they will immediately create a picture about you and that reduces your chances to actually make them listen carefully. Your posts are very long, bringing many points, many different pokes and punches. In escalated situation - the less text is often much better. With long text the reader immediately tries fighting individual points and nuance and that's the last thing you need. Just focus on the point where you need alignment, find the common ground with the other side and focus on that. The rest can be discussed later, separately, when the heads cooled down. That way you would have much more success.

I'm not saying you are wrong or correct, I'm saying that this communication style and behavior usually has this type of reaction and we see it again and again. If you communicate with this style I think unfortunately the outcome is quite predictable. Last time I observed Jeremy Rubin was missing couple of communication skills like this and he ended up very frustrated.

I can offer one more perspective. Communication is a skill like any other skill. When someone asks you to learn Rust, then you know exactly what to do, right? Like read some docs and quick tutorials, you try a demo project, you watch Youtube video about it, maybe you read a book about it. With communication it's exactly the same and the approach is also the same, but somehow people don't think that way. Watch youtube videos, read a book, find some articles and tutorials, try getting better on some "demo" situations...

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @theariard OP 5 Sep

Thanks for your thoughtful and cool heads message.

This is true that this post a bit of a Reddit flamewar and it doesn't substantially trying to level up the conversation on the principles and point of real divergence.

Goiing further, I'll answer and try to adress all your points in 3 separate sections:

1. remind the context of the dispute
1. point out what is the source of the misalignement
1. express my general view about open-source communication

The Context of the Dispute

Back in 2018, I started to contribute on Lightning and rust-lightning (now LDK). At the time, rust-lightning was a small projet, and it was only mostly TheBlueMatt and myself doing the work. My interest to contribute to the projet at the time was to have a community-driven open-source Lightning implementation, at the image of Bitcoin Core rather than an implementation leaded and supported by a single entreprise like it was the case at the time (lnd -> Lightning Labs, c-lightning -> Blockstream, eclair -> ACINQ).

I do think it was a noble goal, at the very least an interesting opportunity to learn about Lightning and develop my skills about off-chain stuff. Somehow this works very well, as I went to the point of being able to contribute significantly to the protocol design and fulfill some technical blind spots.

In mid-2019, TheBlueMatt joined Square Crypto and for a while I was the only one who kept working on rust-lightning and go to represent the project at conferences and other events. Beginning of 2020, Square Crypto announced they would focus on rust-lightning as their main project, as the part of the wider Square Up (now Block Inc) bitcoin ecosystem.

At the time, I took positively the announcement, especially due to the personality of Steve Lee, that I've already met before he joined Square Crypto, and who appears honest in his intent to make rust-lightning a community-driven multi-stakeholder like Bitcoin Core used to be at the time.

Fast-forward to mid-2021, and few thousands more of rust-lightning hacking and hours of reviews, the Square Crypto team started to be under commercial pressure to finally deliver something valuable back to Square Up, most notably make rust-lightning sufficiently production-ready for integration in Cash App, and by the same, in my view justify their engineering salary since mid-2019.

I let that float during end of 2021, especially as mid-2021 I was busy organizing the first CoreDev on the bitcoin core side in the middle of a once-in-a-hundred pandemic, with the clear intent to do the best to ensure the wider bitcoin open source culture to stay convivial. Interactions online are one thing, seeing people face to face is another thing and somehow if it avoids useless civil war in bitcoin, that's a good thing.

Moving to mid-2022, Square Crypto, now Spiral was all flame in in rushing forward the project to deliver more value back to its solo financial backer Block Inc. In October 2022, there was a small altercade between Steve Lee, Matt Corallo and myself for a ethical question related to my open-source work.

Steve Lee confronted me in person, one can be sure I patiently and calmly listened to his viewpoint, but at the end I did see things differently. At the time I had already a more prolific track records in Lightning security than Matt Corallo and I had the luxury to be independent and not hand-tight in binding to the economic interest of Block Inc.

Soon after, in December 2022, Matt Corallo made did a "coup" in rust-lightning, or at least I'm still seing that as a "coup" in rust-lightning by, without any a priori public announcement, establishing a code of conduct and auto-appointing people in this CoC committee who where on the Block Inc payroll.

I vehemently point out that this code of conduct was all about trying to control contributors, rather than building peaceful conflict resolution in the project, and denounced it didn’t respect fairness and due process norms, that one can find in any other social group.

Following this "coup" with a CoC, Matt unilaterally and non-transparently revoked my merge bit on rust-lightning, my invitation to the Lightning Summit in 2023 was rescinded after I raised by email to Steve Lee and Jack Dorsey that the situation was ethically abnormal for open-source, and then I've seen my online handle being banned one by one of the communication channels of rust-lightning by abusive usage of the administrative permissions.

Back in 2024, when the subject started to land on the Lightning BOLTs, after I raised the question why I was cancelled once more from the Lightning Summit of this year, Matt Corallo did engage in the same tactic of establishing a code of conduct and then banning my github account from the Lightning BOLT by seeding Rusty Russell in his version of the fact. Rusty is an open-source veteran, but he used to be colleague with Matt Corallo at Blockstream, a company where Matt was a co-founder and Rusty not. Blockstream, the employer of Rusty Russel, has also done public business partnership with Block Inc in the past.

In summary, that explains the situation of today. From my viewpoint.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nout 5 Sep

Steve Lee confronted me in person, one can be sure I patiently and calmly listened to his viewpoint, but at the end I did see things differently.

Can you expand on this difference of viewpoints and especially summarize Steve's viewpoint in a way that he would agree with? This point seems to be interesting.

Further one piece that would be useful for summary - could you give some summary stats on your contribution to rust-lightning? E.g. number of PRs from you in those years compared to total number of PRs in those years? Just to get some sense on the size of contribution.

I get that this is very far from perfect metric
I get that this is not really meaningful piece of information in this dispute, but I think it would help remove half of the questions/concerns.

77 sats \ 0 replies \ @theariard OP 8 Sep

Can you expand on this difference of viewpoints and especially summarize Steve's viewpoint in a way that he would agree with? This point seems to be interesting.

Answer more substantially in my other new comment.

Further one piece that would be useful for summary - could you give some summary stats on your contribution to rust-lightning?

From 2018 to 2023, when I voluntarily started to put myself out of the LDK as protestation of the LDK (commit 84ee92cb71) , here the top excerpt of git shortlog -s -n

  3331  Matt Corallo
   398  Jeffrey Czyz
   343  Valentine Wallace
   277  Antoine Riard
   133  Wilmer Paulino
    96  Elias Rohrer
    86  valentinewallace

This doesn’t represent all the testing and review time spent on others folks PRs, neither that my commits were also in the delicate parts of the codebase (i.e the on-chain backend).

Professionally, I’m always putting more the emphasis on “is the code correct and is the shit going to fly in production ?” than meeting the tick for the corporate trimestrial deadlines. Been in bitcoin since a while, and I’ve also seen few security nightmares also happening in the smart contract shitcoin world...

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @theariard OP 5 Sep

The Source of Misalignment

This is a far simpler topic to explain. In my view the source or question of misalignment can be explained in the following fashion: "how do we solve dispute among human beings in the middle of bitcoin open-source ?". Open source is as much about code and technical problems than it is about humans.

Of course, at that stage, one could point out, that I'm free to go and fork on Lightning, but this doesn't solve the problem as when we work on a technical standard the idea is to have a group of human taking technical decisions to have inter-compatibility among different softwares versions. Inter-compatibility sounds a simple technical story, in practice it can be back to a social problem when there is a bug in software bit versioning or basic negotiating mechanism (-- and yes I've always found that style of bugs in Lightning and more than once).

Further, it doesn't solve the wider problem when one has to handle severe security vulnerabilities affecting not only Lightning, but also the wider bitcoin ecosystem of off-chain protocols (there are intersections in the security models). When I'm finding a serious vulnerability on Lighthning, including c-lightning, I'm the one who has to trust Rusty Russell to not abuse with this sensitive information during the period of embargo. After all, it has not always been all peaceful between Blockstream and Lightning Labs in the past (the flamewar on AMP in 2022).

So how do we solve dispute in the middle of open-source ? I don't pretend to have all the answers, but doing "coup" with code of conduct, ignoring basic fairness and due process, not acknowledging one's own bias in matter of one should act impartialy, abusing administrative permission on communication channel, self-appointing friends or subordinate in a coc committee, using dilatory tactic like refusing to engage in good faith on the subject on common channel, I'm really doubtful this is the way.

Be certain, I've never questioned that the developers are somehow the most legitimate to administer their own conflicts. What I've always questioned is the lack of tangible due process and formal impartiality of the ones administering the conflict resolution. Rushing by “surprise" to the administrative permission one is vetted on a communication channel to ban first one’s "opponent" is not a viable solution.

Those tactics work, when the ones in charge of the administrative permission are also the most technically skilled and talented, but I don't think that Matt Corallo or Rusty Russell can make the straight claim there are more technically talented than I am or have more know-how about Lightning than I have.

So I'll re-ask the question again, "how do we solve dispute among human beings in the middle of bitcoin open-source ?".

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @theariard OP 5 Sep

My General View on Open-Source Communications

This is true that this post questioning Rusty Russsell open-source ethics and real independence is more akin to a Reddit flamewar, than a real post engaging the dialogue on sound abstract principles and factual arguments. This is also true that the communication style could be more diplomatic, one's communication style can be always more diplomatic and slow-paced.

On the general communication as a discipline to study I'm 100% agree with you, and for information, that's a field I have of course study in the past. Though one learning is to have real communication happening there is a pre-requisite to have a neutral public forum, where each side in the disputatio can express ideas, arguments, viewpoints and experiences.

That's the problem with open-source, there is no such neutral public forum, and when you're attempting to use the forum or communication channel, which is the most similar to that, i.e Github, very often, the ones who have the administrative permission on it will leverage said permission to cut short the discussion and enforce their viewpoint.

On the wider point, and comparing my style of communication with Jeremy's one. Very deliberately I have always kept my communication style dried and sober. I'm not like Matt Corallo and Rusty Russell, who are constantly spending their time on podcast or Twitter doing a dance of trust to remind their "100% certified open-source devs” and as such that there are necessarily "pure".

On my side, I'm not on Twitter, I'm doing very rarely podcasts and I've never tried to sell a "purity" narrative, but I hope, not always, treaded any other human beings with high standard of ethics and dignity and never used communication technology or the separation due to the screen as a prextet to act differently that I would do in the meatspace. Never say something to someone online, if you're not ready to hold the same discourse eyes in the eyes in person. Simple mantra.

So as an open-source developer, I do think a sobriety in expression driven by a constant search for objective truth should be one's personal ethic of communication.

(— apologies for the formatting of the text messages).

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nout 5 Sep

Thank you for detailed response and thank you for keeping it civil! Very much appreciated and this well summarized perspective.

I know that this tricky, but would you be able to summarize the situation from Matt's and Steve's perspective? Putting yourself into their shoes - what were the main events that they would highlight? What are their top complaints (correct or incorrect)?

(again thank you for taking the time)

77 sats \ 0 replies \ @theariard OP 8 Sep

Thanks for the courteous answer too.

I'll start by bringing more information on the table, as it might highlight and explain why there has been a swarm of codes of conduct suddenly popping up between 2022 to 2024 across Bitcoin Core and Lightning.

This is information which is clearly known to the insiders and veterans of the bitcoin open source stage, though for an outsider and the wider public I don't think it's really known. End of 2021, John Newbery, a prominent and prolific contributor to Bitcoin Core at the time and the co-founder of Brink, was "put in vacation" (i.e fired from its organization Brink) for let's say inter-personal issues.

This is clearly the kind of issues in life which is not black and white, I'll pretend that I don't know what exactly did happen, as after all I'm not directly concerned, though I had the versions from the antagonist parties. John Newbery has a big personality for sure, but if I'm asked my humble viewpoint, I would say some people, who were not formally trained to handle that kind of situation, did panic to take a quick decision rather than slow down and ask concretely and factually what did happen.

Anyway, with that element in mind, early 2022, Spiral, leaded by Steve Lee and who has been previously a financial backer of Brink at the autumn of 2020, started to insert "morality provision" in all their open-source grants.

Moving forward, we're in October 2022, during the TabConf in Atlanta, where I'm present in person for the edition of CoreDev happening ahead of the conference. In the aftermath of CoreDev, during the conference, Steve Lee asked me to have a conversation in private, and we go to have it in the Olympic Park, hidden in the back of a flower bed, as he was fearing to be seen or heard by other people from the conference.

Steve Lee told me he has heard "gossips" on my account related to open-source matters, and he confront me on that. I've known Steve since late 2018, before he joined Spiral (formerly Square Crypto) so coming from him I'm okay to listen to his viewpoint. However, Steve has only a partial and distorded view of the facts at the source of the "gossips", and as I know perfectly what I'm doing and I'm behaving, even in delicate situations, I do ask him concretely what is ethically wrong. Of course, ethics is not like "moral" an absolute, and it's more a matter of degree. Though anyone who knows me a bit in the industry, knows I have rather a very strong sense of ethics - primum non nocere.

Contrary to Steve, I've not done my whole career in the technology field, and even if he's like older than me by few decaces, I do have a wider diversity of professional experience and a more multi-dimensional training. Steve keeps going forward talking about his professional experience at Google. He says litterally to me phrases like "you know when I was at Google, I was dating a lot of women", "you should be careful in the middle of open-source, some people are in a lot of boards" and "when I was at Google, there was a code of professional conduct".

I'm still patienly and calmly listening. I do understand he's expecting me to bow to his viewpoint, but my only answer to him is "concretely what's the problem ?". He stays silent. The conversation is ending on a "thumb your nose" and he mumbles about a "token of good faith". We end up the conversation there.

No discussion on clear principles. No discussion on concrete ethics, all "wiggling your ass" style of conversation from Steve as he gives me the impression that himself he wasn't clear in his own consciousness about the principles that he should abide by.

I'm keeping some business elements for some stuff that was ongoing at Block Inc at the time out of the scope, though in the great lines, I think it's factually correct of what did happen. Apart this disagreement, I must say we had generally very correct professional interactions from 2018 to 2022.

So to resume the Steve Lee's perspective, I think we disagreed on "how do we solve divergence of viewpoints on social or cultural matters ?". But from my perspective, he wasn't free to speak his mind as he was under constraint from Block Inc's corporate rules at all time.

For the Matt's perspective, I do think it's more stupidly stupid. Matt was perfectly aware about what did happen with the John Newbery's thing end of 2021. I do think he has been asked by Block Inc's HR department to put in place a code of conduct in place in rust-lightning / LDK end of 2022. He did so in the most non-transparent and non consensus-based fashion, at the "CoC committee" was opaquely pre-appointed, all staffed by people in direct or indirect financial subordination towards Block Inc.

Where we disagree with Matt, it's clearly that I have no wish to "comply" to a stupid code of conduct only dictated by Block Inc corporate interests, and not more respectful of the other rust-lightning / LDK contributors.

The question is never about guaranting an "inclusive and diverse" community of contributors, whatever this can mean but it's always compliance. I do estimate myself also insulted by the attitude of Matt, as when you know the personal and professional life of Matt, it's a complete joke Matt pretending to make lessons on ethics…

This sounds a bunch of inter-personal issues, though at the same time, I’m very mindful, at the end of the day, it’s the same group of people which is dealing with sensitive issues that might impact in cascade the financial safety and privacy of thousands of users all over the world. I do put the interest of the average end user and bitcoin holder, before the interest of any corporation.

Anyway, that's my viewpoint I could add far more, though I have to go !

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 5 Sep

Just focus on the point where you need alignment

100%

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @theariard OP 5 Sep

"how do we solve dispute among human beings in the middle of bitcoin open-source ?” that the point that need alignment.

502 sats \ 10 replies \ @optimism 5 Sep

What is it that you want to achieve?

If you want to be reinstated/unbanned, like the title of your issue suggests, you will have to work with the same people that you in both the issue and this post explicitly voice hypotheses about that are... less than generous.

How will you work with these people? What would that look like?

100 sats \ 5 replies \ @Car 5 Sep

I think he is just voicing that he is getting black balled and in Bitcoin this happens quite often but no one speaks about it. Not saying this is the situation here, but I do get the sense that he feels he has no other outlet but sn to voice this. Not the approach I would take in a collaborative working environment but everyone is different. I think you’re right he should try a different approach, Crucial Conversations is a great book on how to have tuff conversations with people. Maybe first off don’t accuse them of bad intent. 🤷‍♂️

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @theariard OP 5 Sep

Not the approach I would take in a collaborative working environment but everyone is different.

Curious, how you would approach more the issue if you were in my shoes.

30 sats \ 3 replies \ @Car 5 Sep

I would start first with an apology clearly if what you say is true and I think you believe what you are saying is true. You likely owe them an apology for an incident in 22 or 23 when all this started. I would start there first. At the end of the day when working in a collaborative environment a single person can disrupt everyone else’s work and throw them off sync, I’ve seen this personally at PlebLab. It’s always best try and get along as best you can or be the first to apologize especially when you know you misspoke or made a mistake. Always try to lead with humility.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @theariard OP 5 Sep

I’m 100% that one should lead with humility.

For the apology, I’m yet have to convince the other side is playing fair.

No problem to withdraw some useless ad hominem, the day there is willingness for dialogue.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 5 Sep

This is good wisdom.

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @Car 5 Sep

Been working with founders and devs in Bitcoin since 21 have a ton of experience in this area. Seen it all, been through it all. You should see Tuesdays and Bitdev weeks it’s like rolling counseling sessions at my desk those days. I do enjoy it though I love people and helping them.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @theariard OP 5 Sep

What is it that you want to achieve?

Near-term, proving to the community I’m not the one who is refusing the dialogue.

There has been a refusal Day 1 from Rusty Russell to engage and discuss my arguments on the lack of fairness and due process about the Lightning BOLTs CoC establishment.

How will you work with these people? What would that look like?

Get to the point where they understand and have internalized that fairness and due process matters if you wish to have peaceful conflict resolution among a social group, which is true too for open-source community.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 5 Sep

Near-term, proving to the community I’m not the one who is refusing the dialogue.

Why do you think you have to prove that? It's obvious that when someone gets silenced, they're not the one refusing dialogue. You started off with a lot of sympathy, starting, I think, with the delving incident.

Get to the point where they understand and have internalized [..]

What will you do if the people you target will take 20 years to agree with you? What if it will never happen?

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @theariard OP 5 Sep

Why do you think you have to prove that?

Always good to advocate the virtues of dialogue.

What will you do if the people you target will take 20 years to agree with you? What if it will never happen?

I don’t know man, that’s so much questions and I don’t have answer to everything.

But I know it’s Friday late of day in my timezone, so I’ll will certainly go to boxe and go for beers after that.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 5 Sep

Enjoy your weekend!