Code of Ethics

Research

In the Bitcoin system, there is too much at stake: not just billions of dollars, but lives and safety for many humans. We do not put mainnet at risk neither by “testing” our attacks against it nor by disclosing vulnerabilities irresponsibly.

At the same time, the bandwidth of Bitcoin experts is very limited. We aim for the best judgment and highest standards in our work so that our peers don’t waste time due to relying on our misinterpretations.

Since we want more people to engage and validate our ideas/results, we aim to make our work as accessible as possible, both in terms of licensing and readability.

Making Bitcoin stronger is always our top priority.

Consulting

The following code of ethics will drive us in consulting and we will refine it along the way, drawing lessons from our experiences on the ground.

First and foremost, we care about courteous and honest work relationships weaved across the years. Each of us strives for a humble, open-minded, and self-questioning attitude and hopes for the same from your side.

We may make mistakes. Working in a fast-paced, high-bandwidth environment means acting with limited rationality. If the negligence is qualified on our side, we will take care to cure the damage. In any case, we will produce a private post-mortem for us all to grow from it.

We favor written words enclosed in good frameworks over floating promises. Defining the problems we are going to work on well is already half of the success. If the job turns out too complex for us, we will notify you and relinquish our fees. We may know emergencies we have to deal with. If this happens, we will inform you about the delay as soon as we can.

As we are quite engaged in the Bitcoin open-source development, we are keeping our areas of activities as isolated as we can. We won’t sell our image, do promotion of your product or project, and we won’t trade access to our friends. If we hit a conflict of interest, we will notify you and relinquish our fees. By default, we require keeping our collaboration private, and do the same on our side.

We deeply care about the confidentiality of your business data and we will process it with the same diligence we do for our data. As a matter of principle, don’t tell us more than you have to. Feel free to use a pseudonym to reach out.