Starting to be interested in Bitcoin in 2018 while I was digging into my bachelorβs thesis. After one year I decided that working on the Bitcoin ecosystem was what I want to do full-time.
So, interestingly I came across one of the Segregated Witness BIP and it was at this point that I read the word Lightning Network, and then 4 years later here I am. I contribute for the first time in core-lightning on Jul 25, 2020, and this was the moment when I stump into a very great ecosystem full of people whom I can steal knowledge from.
With time I start to implement tooling around the ecosystem to try to solve some of the problems that I had with core lightning, such as the possibility to write plugins in different languages like Java/Kotlin/Scala, rust, golang and dart, In addition, one of the difficulties as a master student with no much money was to run a real a core lightning node on testnet and mainet with a very minimal amount of disk space, so I created btcli4j to support the bitcoin pruning mode, as well as the Rest API with esplora. Currently, btcli4j is one of the most stable bitcoin backend alternatives for core lightning that can provide 99.9% uptime and able to run core lightning in a 5 dollar server.
Therefore while I was implementing all my fancy toys for core lightning I start to propose some improvements on the command line interface, and in the plugin interface as well as fixing some issues around core lightning reported by people, so in September 2021, I became the more active first-time contributor on core lightning as well as the official maintainer of the opinionated but unique Lightning BOLT Protocol Test Framework lnprototest developed by Rusty Russell.
In November 2022, I became a full-time grantee at Brink (which supports already my development from January 2021 as a part-time grantee) to work full-time on core lightning (and lnprototest) and open ln metrics research that is my attempt to build tooling and start a standardization process in order to collect metrics on a real lightning network environment in order to provide realistic number estimated on the real node and provide data to researchers and universities in order to join us to improve the lightning network protocol.
In addition, the brink grant give me the time to implement my vision of of a new core lightning plugin manager that is coffee that will try to solve a couple of issue that we had around the core lightning plugins ecosystem.
As all this can sound a lot of stuff, Iβm hoping that all this hard work is just the beginning and at the end of my lnmetrics research I would like to work more closely to the development of the lightning network protocol by implementing some of the already proposed feature such as trampoline and/or implementing the solution of the jamming attack in core lightning, as well as reimplementing lnprototest with the needs that the ecosystem to support all the implementation that wants to be spec compliant.
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