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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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
"how do we solve dispute among human beings in the middle of bitcoin open-source ?” that the point that need alignment.
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).
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 ?".
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:
-
- remind the context of the dispute
-
- point out what is the source of the misalignement
-
- 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.
this is a situation to hold with a bit of zen and calm.
on the 5 sept. 2018 square up stock price was $85.00.
on the 5 sept. 2025 block inc stock price is $75.00.
so I understand why Jack is nervous and find himself bullying open-source devs.
dear anon.
“shoot the messenger, not the message”
classic rhetorical trick since the times of Demosthene I guess.
I would suggest talking to a professional.
i’m not sure if you’re familiar with the works of Thomas Szasz and the history of abuse of psychiatry in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
in the meanwhile, if you wish a psychoanalysis, I read Sigmund Freund when I was young. I can offer one to you for free, you just reach out to antoine-psychoanalysis@block.xyz.
(— it’s a troll, if you’re decided to discuss more substantially about the issues at stake, i’ll do the same…).
Fundamentally, if I’m asked about the conflict here I’ll describe in the following way.
You have 2 types of open-source developers in bitcoin open-source.
The first group, sincerely believe in bitcoin mission of censorship-resistant money, but if they have a hard choice to make, i.e between independence and a comfortable salary at the end of the month, they will always take the second alternative. Let’s not make angry the corporate hand that feed you, after all. And being your own boss or in charge, that’s very scary with all the responsibilities, you know…Typically Matt Corallo.
I would say that’s 80% of the contributors.
The second group, sincerely believe in bitcoin mission of censorship-resistant money too, but they don’t see themselves contributing on bitcoin, without sacrificing their personal independence. It’s free and open-source code but it’s also yourself staying free in the process. The folks who prefer to stay self-sovereign on the software run, on their finance and their responsibilities.
I would say that’s 20% of the contributors.
The problem is when the first group, more numerous in people, are starting to instrumentalize code of conduct and moderation rules, at the demand of their corporate backers, to push out the first group out of the bitcoin development forums.
At the end of the day, independent people, they might have their interests more aligned with the end-users, but that makes things slower as you know "we’re busy we have quarterly newsletter to write to our shareholders” so shut up !
(…I’ve enough friends who have been at Goldman Sachs to make an IPO if need…it’s not magic it’s just a lot lot of downsides…)
In my view, you should be free to work on bitcoin open-source, without having to bind the knee or ask permission to a random CEO with a flat listed company stock price or a bullshit messiah who never has contribute one line of code to bitcoin.
We reject: kings, presidents and voting. That’s the bitcoin way.
It’s a hill I have no problem to fight on as long as I’ll have to.
I refuse to bind to LDK and Lightning completely arbitrary codes of conduct.
I started to work on rust-lightning and bitcoin core in 2018.
So before Square Crypto was a thing in 2019.
If Jake and his employes don’t change their behaviors, they will pay the price.
Met Jake Dorsey and Ray Youssef in the past, know which impressed me the most.
Like I said, I’m arming myself with calm and patience on this issue.
I’m putting apart Steve Lee, worked professionally with him a long time, he’s different.
I’m just sad for him that he failed Bitcoin Works, his previous initiative before Spiral.
Now, he found himself stuck in a nexus of perverse incentives...
I already got an answer from Microsoft actually on this subject….
Satya won’t play his reputation for Jack.
Let me improve the build process for now and do some rebase. It works, but roughly.
I’ll try to share a monthly release of code advances.
git shortlog -s -n