Rene Pickhardt - (Independent) Lightning Network Developer & Researcher

Hi you probably came here because you wanted to learn why to support my work via my fund raiser!
So let me first list an overview of my achievements for the Lightning Network Community since 2018 and then say a few words why I believe that funding independent open source developement matters.

Education

Added the first article about the Lightning Network to German Wikipedia
Created an openly licensed 300 slides presentation diving into the protocol
Answered more than 50% of all questions about the Lightning Network on Stack exchange
Maintained the first youtube channel explaining the Lightning Network to developers
Co-authered the openly licensed book Mastering the Lightning Network together with Olaoluwa Osuntokun and Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Tutored the Chaincodelabs Lightning Residency in 2019 together with Christian Decker, Alex Bosworth and Fabrice Drouin
Supervised 4 students at the Summer of Bitcoin 2022

Research

I am currently finalizing a paper on the fundamental limitations of the number of payments per second that the lightning network is supporting.

Together with my co-authors I...

Created an imbalance measure for Lightning nodes and proposed Just in Time Routing (JIT Routing).
Proposed to switch to Probabilistic Routing
Found the optimal split of Multi part payments that led to the currently best known payment routing algorithm
Provided an efficient way to compute optimally reliable and cheap payment flows via piecewise lenearization. This was within one year independently verified by Dr. Carsten Otto
Proposed a way to define the Price of Anarchy in selfish routing via the shape of the distribution of expected channel drain values
Explained the liquidity distribution in payment channels with drain via Markov Chains and showed how max_htlc_size can act as a control valve for flow control

My main interest is reliabilty of Bitcoin Payments via the Lightning Network and understanding the technical limitations and boundaries of the Lightning Network Protocol.

Vulnurabilities & Security issues

Noted how moving forward with BOTH upfront fees and negative routing fees will not work. (2022)
Investigated Probing attacks (2020)
Described a novel 51% attack (2018)
Responsibly disclosed a Black mail attack related to channel jamming (2019 / 2020)
Described how private channels can be found (2019)

Why open source does matter!

I believe that society can flourish and prosper best if everyone has good access to knowledge and information.
Open Source Software is an often underrated crucial part of achieving this. Have a look at this German video to learn more.

I was fortunate enough to receive the highest education which was paid for by a scholarschip from the German National Academic Foundation while my parents could not have afforded to support my plans to go to university. Also I use open source software every day or at least things that are build with the help of open software. So personally this choice is my way of paying back a debt that I feel I owe.

Why independent open source?

Even open source can be driven by interestes from companies. This is not neccessarily bad. Good examples are the development of Web standards in W3C and the linux kernel developement.
However pitching for developer grants gives tremendous power to the people who sponsor such research and thus they might decide not to fund research and development that is not in their own interest. I am not saying that this happens but I am saying that you can prevent this by helping me work independently on what I believe is best for the Lightning Network. In the spirit of being a swarm of decentralized cyberhornets (or what ever the current lingo is) I think especially for Bitcoin this is very important.

Disclaimer: Obviously it is hard to find a community of people who are willing to match competitive salaries so I will accept grants like the ones provide through NTNU and BitMEX or I might do consulting to compensate for my time.

Software and Data sets

I am currently the maintainer of the pickhardt payments python package. Feel free to download the listchannels20220412.json data set. I am also a contributor to the lnresearch project.

Media

I am occasionally available for interviews or background and fact checking conversations with media outlets. Please find the incomplete list of examples:

German Speaking (Non Bitcoin related Outlets)

Maithink X: Kryptowährung Bitcoin – jetzt erst recht? and Dr. Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, wie nützlich ist Bitcoin
Podiumdiskussion auf Phil Cologne: Bitcoin Change the Money Change the world mit Ijoma Mangold (moderiert von Wolfram Eilenberger)
Finanfluss Interview: Teil1: Was sind Bitcoin's größte Herausforderungen? Teil 2: Bitcoin skalieren mit dem Lightning Netzwerk
Gastbeitrag für Spektrum der Wissenschaft: Die Debatte um Bitcoin ist entgleist
Interview mit Zeit Online: Es geht um die revolutionäre Idee hinter Bitcoin
Spiegel Online: Darum ist Bitcoin mehr als nur digitales Geld

English Speaking (Bitcoin related outlets)

Guest on What Bitcoin Did and helped with editorial of the 2nd Lightning Network series
Guest on Kevin Rooke Show
Guest on Stephan Livera
Guest on the Speaking of Bitcoin podcast
Bitcoin Magazine: Article on Price of Anarchy on the Lightning Network and article on Pickhardt Payments

Letter of Recommendation (if you prefer trust over verification)

While I strongly encourage to read and verify my work I understand that there are circumstances where you might not have enough time to do so and prefer to rely in your decision making to a trusted third party. Fortunatelly I have been given the following letter of recommendation from Rusty Russell. You can verify it using gpg via the following commands. (The first imports Rusty's key in case you don't have it):

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 15EE8D6CAB0E7F0CF999BFCBD9200E6CD1ADB8F1
wget https://www.rene-pickhardt.de/letter_of_recommendation.txt 
gpg --verify letter_of_recommendation.txt
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

To whom it may concern,

	In the young field of studying the Lightning Network, Rene has
proven uniquely insightful on the tangled problem of payment strategies.
His research is now bearing fruit and is widely accepted as the optimal
method of making payments.

	His current work on the effect and incentives of protocol design
(including the widespread adoption of his own algorithms) is critical to
the future development of Lightning and its specifications.  His
background, tenacity, and respect within the wider Lightning community
is unparalleled by any other researcher.

I can recommend him and his research for funding without reservation!

Sincerely,
Rusty Russell,
Senior Lightning Developer,
Blockstream and Core Lightning.
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My c-lightning node
id 03efccf2c383d7bf340da9a3f02e2c23104a0e4fe8ac1a880c8e2dc92fbdacd9df
alias ln.rene-pickhardt.de
color 03efcc
num_peers 126
num_pending_channels 1
num_active_channels 125
num_inactive_channels 0
address type address port
ipv4 144.76.235.20 9735
binding type address port
ipv4 144.76.235.20 9735
blockheight 792679
network bitcoin
msatoshi_fees_collected 293808880
fees_collected_msat 293808880msat
our_features init 080269a2
node 800000080269a2
channel 
invoice 02000000024100
You can also test my video voting LAPP