@petertodd a comedy show in the US once and the canadian comedian on stage was making a lot of fun in the room by saying a lot of "cliches" on canadians :) Don't take it as it is, I swear it's a joke.

More seriously, if there are intel agencies out in the wild deliberately trying to influence the bitcoin protocol development process, they could set up a more or less fake non-profit organization and that organization having a special tax status to receive donations from whatever industry donors. It could be from then quite easy to have the board helicoptering money more or less randomly on bitcoin open-source contributors, and this being a vector of attack. All very in the hypothetical line of thought...

After all, all major money are fiat today, at least since the 90s and there is no more constitutional limits strictly guaranteeing the independence of the Bundesbank w.r.t to its monetary policy. So bitcoin protocol development could be disrupted tomorrow with massive chunks of fiat money thrown on developers.

I don't really think an organization like OpenSats is sincerely to question on that regard. People at the board have a real track record in the bitcoin industry, and they are quite public about from where the majority of theirs funds is coming from. Have they lived it to their original promise to be as much pass through as they can when opensat was initially announced in 2020 ? I don't know, sounds they have a lot of people getting financial compensation in operations, there is no public report on the remunerations of the operation team. Beyond, it would be great for them to start to motivate their grant refusals on sounds technical arguments.

In matters of open-source funding transparency, I think there is a good example with NLNET Labs in the Netherlands, which is a non-profit maintaining multiple pieces of open-source software related to the Internet stack. Their software support policy announce explicitly the following:

"Dutch tax regulations allow us to have reserves that guarantee two years of continued operations in case all industry funding would disappear. Thus, in the unlikely event that NLnet Labs can no longer commit to maintaining our software projects, we will announce this at least two years in advance."

Personally, I think it's a good policy example to minimize the risks of grants inflation and promises towards serious and legit open-source contributors expectations not being fulfilled, whatever are the underlying reasons. At the start of the COVID pandemie in 2020 and when I was still full-time at Chaincode, I've seen 2 serious open-source contributors suddenly being defunded by their industry backers due to the sudden changes no ones expected in the economical conjecture.

About scaling Nostr, I think there is an old technical comment of yours about some Nostr architectural choices during the mempoolfullrbf that I've never replied here. I think it's only the email or comment of yours on the Internet, I've never replied too (if my memory is correct ?), though I''ll put my thoughts on Nostr scalability on stacker news during the coming future.