Helping the Helpers

There is a beautiful line from Mr. Rogers that addresses what one should do when an overwhelming amount of bad things are happening in the world. He got it from his mother, and it goes like this:

When I was a boy and saw scary things in the news, my mother would say, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'

Look for the helpers. What a wonderful sentiment.

An overwhelming amount of things happened in Bitcoin recently. Coldcard, a popular hardware signer, had a catastrophic entropy failure. BTCPay Server had a critical bug that was actively exploited, leading to the closure of many Lightning channels and loss of users' funds. And we had a chain split on top of it all, just to name the highlights of the last few weeks.

Our mission at OpenSats has always been to support free and open-source projects and contributors, especially those who make Bitcoin flourish. We want to help those who are doing their best to make Bitcoin as useful and resilient as possible, which is why we launched our Long-Term Support Program, and most recently, the Red Team Fund.

"You will always find people who are helping."

It was beautiful to see a widely dispersed group of people come together in the wake of the Coldcard fallout. Dusty Daemon, one of our LTS grantees, wrote one of the first technical pieces digging into the lack of software development best practices that contributed to that failure. Rob Hamilton, who is a member of one of our technical evaluation committees, was one of the first people to realize the gravity of the situation, as well as the massive opportunity to do damage reduction: "This moment may be the highest asymmetric harm reduction possible in a generation," to quote one of his tweets.

Calle, another one of our LTS grantees, started red teaming immediately, as did Rob, and countless other developers. The BTCPay Server vulnerability was found and responsibly disclosed by Craig Raw, the lead developer of Sparrow Wallet, and another member of one of our technical committees.

"There are good people in bitcoin dropping everything out of a sense of duty to do something," to quote Rob Hamilton once more. "ANYTHING to help strangers keep their life savings."

Good people. Developers, builders, volunteers, fire-fighters; people who are willing to drop everything in an instant to help others. People who will do whatever is in their power to make a horrible situation a little bit better. In other words: helpers.

Allocate Sats Where They're Needed Most

We see it as our duty to allocate sats where they're needed most, as we've said before. In other words: we want to do what we can to help the helpers, to support those who are making sure that critical vulnerabilities are patched before they are exploited, whether it be by malicious humans, autonomous AI systems, or a combination of both.

If you want to help to make Bitcoin as resilient as it can be, consider making a donation to one of our funds. If you are a developer who is working on making bitcoin software more secure and robust, please consider applying for funding.

We are grateful for everyone who has donated so far, and we are grateful for those who keep working on bitcoin, tirelessly, in good times and in bad. Grateful for the helpers. Thank you.