Looking for another `bitcoin-problems` maintainer in replacement of myself

[ariard]

As I'm in the process of doing an inventory of my open source balance sheet to refocus on long-term and low-level bitcoin and second-layers security works (especially in light of the current growth of LDK), I won't have time to proactively maintain bitcoin-problems in the coming future. I think that's okay as Lloyd as always done most of the work so far, I've never been that much active here.

I think this project and community are still highly valuable to build a bridge between the academic world, the research engineers and bitcoin hobbyists. I would say we have a lot of Big Problems in Bitcoin lacking dedicated solvers with a long-term perspective in mind, where both abstract conceptualization abilities and know-how of the technical ground are required. There is also the goal of transmitting awareness of the Bitcoin hard problems across the generation of developers, that this project could fulfill (e.g few devs of the recent generation are exposed to the fields-leveling goals of the block mining process that has motivated earlier work like BIP152). Beyond, with the increasing complexity of the Bitcoin ecosystem due to the emergence of upper layers and internal sophistication of the existent layers themselves, I believe there would be a need in the future of better formalization of the layers mechanisms to keep a sound protocol design decision-making process.

Overall, I hope to still contribute sometimes on this project in the future. I'll self-revoke my GH admin 2 weeks from now.

[ariard]

@s-tikhomirov I think you made valuable contributions in the past to the repository, you could be interested to be a new maintainer :) (or anyone else doing research engineering at Chaincode would be a good fit I would say)

[LLFourn]

Thanks for your help @ariard and for your parting thoughts.

On the topic I'd be up for sponsoring someone to focus on this project. The website needs a facelift and needs some concerted effort to get large problems written up. We've got plenty of issues for them (and more in our heads). If you find someone who'd be a good candidate for that let me know.

[ariard]

For info, I left the organization as announced (after battling with GH settings as usual...) to refocus on other projects. If anyone is still interested to join the maintenance of bitcoin-problems, I'm staying available to support during the onboarding period.

Still probing people around if they're aware about a good candidate, to institutionalize this project in the long-term landscape of Bitcoin R&D.