A day before yesterday I sent a post to bitcoin-dev referencing the publication of the new Bitcoin scalability and privacy protocol, which had already received a broad reaction across the bitcoin community with literally no critical/negative responses after ~25k of reads [1]. I am not the first-time writer to the mail list and had developed things like RGB smart contracts [2], rust lightning implementation named LNP [3], multiple bitcoin libraries and software [4], [5], during three years was a main contributor to rust-bitcoin [6] etc, etc. The post was clearly not spam and received support from known community members like Giacomo Zucco [7]. Bryan Bishop knows me since 2019 when I was presenting Storm protocol on the stage on Scaling Bitcoin in Tel Aviv - and he was writing a transcript of it [8]. Thus, I am not a random unknown guy or a known spammer - and the post can be easily checked for not containing any scam promotion.
Nevertheless, I next day I see other e-mails getting released to bitcoin-dev, while mine - was not. It is not a problem, but since we already had an incident in the past where Bryan reported the failure of his software, me and my colleagues from LNP/BP Standards Association started asking questions about whether this post ever got to Bryan.
What happened next was very unexpected. I am giving the core of the conversation over Twitter after in Annex A - with the purpose to showcase the problem I’d like to address in this e-mail. From the discussion, it is clear that bitcoin-dev mail list lacks clear explicit moderation (or peer-review) policies, which must be applied on a non-selective basis. Also, Bryan Bishop, as the current moderator, had abused his powers in achieving his agenda based on personal likes or dislikes. The conversation went nowhere, and the post got published only after a requirement from Peter Todd [9].
In this regard, I’d like to propose the following:
Kind regards,
Maxim Orlovsky
[1]: https://twitter.com/lnp_bp/status/1664329393131364353?s=61&t=9A8uvggqKVKV3sT4HPlQyg
[2]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-April/021554.html
[3]: https://github.com/LNP-WG
[5]: https://github.com/mycitadel
[7]: https://twitter.com/giacomozucco/status/1664515543154544645?s=61&t=9A8uvggqKVKV3sT4HPlQyg and https://twitter.com/giacomozucco/status/1664731504923095041?s=61&t=9A8uvggqKVKV3sT4HPlQyg
[8]: https://scalingbitcoin.org/transcript/telaviv2019/wip-storm-layer-2-3-storage-and-messaging
[9]: https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1664742651835367424?s=61&t=9A8uvggqKVKV3sT4HPlQyg
Annex A: