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Long-Term Support For René Pickhardt
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- @cfunk
We are very excited to award a Long-term Support Grant to René Pickhardt, helping him continue his fundamental research on improving Bitcoin’s overall usefulness as a payment system through the Lightning Network.
Fueled by gratitude for his scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation, his four consecutive Bitcoin Developer Grants from BitMEX, and the everyday benefits of the open-source software he uses, René has centered his career on giving back to the communities that supported him on his path.
He has consistently shared commercially significant knowledge for a long time without seeking prior funding. All major LN implementations have integrated some of his research results and algorithms, now widely recognized as the most optimal for bitcoin payments.
Over the years, he has achieved an almost endless list of invaluable contributions, including creating Pickhardt Payments, actively answering most questions about the LN on Stack Exchange, co-authoring the openly licensed book "Mastering the Lightning Network," proposing Just in Time Routing, mentoring at Chaincode Labs Lightning Residency, and Summer of Bitcoin, as well as responsibly disclosing a blackmail attack related to channel jamming (don’t worry, he didn’t have to blackmail us for this glowing review!)
This LTS grant is now instrumental in René's ongoing efforts to enhance reliable payment planning, efficient payment routing, and explore innovative liquidity management strategies on the Lightning Network. He is currently focused on researching non-minimum cost flow-based methods to optimize the expected delivery of sats and is inviting feedback on this question about how to compute the expected number of sats to arrive in a probabilistic payment flow.
What’s more, he’s planning to host free online webinars. These sessions aim to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical application by making the complex technical details of his papers easily understandable.
Big thanks to our generous donors for making this possible. If you are interested in contributing to the funding of Bitcoin infrastructure, please consider donating to our General Fund.
If you too are an internet-load-bearing person with an extensive track record of high-quality contribution, capable of working in public, and dedicated to bitcoin-only projects, please apply for an LTS grant here: