Add conflict of interest rules

[ariard]

Following on my comments in #1:

I think it should have a moderation@bitcoincore.org. If you're in a situation of conflict of interests with someone with
moderation privileges, and you believe it's altering its moderation decision-making process, at least you can mention the issue on a non-public communication channel and if justified asks that this moderator does not intervene in moderation decisions related to your persona. Conflict of interests hasn't started in the open-source world with bitcoin, they were doing that very well in the 90s with all the BSD forks, if my memory is correct.

Here what can be a proposal for future conflicts:

## Conflict of Interests

Contributors to Bitcoin Core software projects can reach out to moderation@bitcoincore.org if there is an estimation of a situation of conflict of interests.

Conflict of interests can be characterized directly in 2 situations:
- among the contributor and the moderator
- among the contributor and the contributor advocating moderation decisions to be taken on the contributor

A conflict of interest is a set of conditions of in which professional judgement concerning a primary interest tends to be unduly influenced by a second interest.

To be clear on my intent, proposing this rules is only intending to encompass future situation of conflict of interests in a scoped matter for what is related to online interactions on Bitcoin Core software projects. Scope of moderation rules applications has been raised independently by another contributor in this comment on #29507.

[pinheadmz]

@ariard I removed your comment on the pull request about mempool policy for being off topic. I will paste it here, and then reply on my own time. Normally posting off topic comments like this one would also result in a 24 hour ban from bitcoin/bitcoin too "cool down". I have adjusted my github notifications and I will not miss any more events from the meta repo.

---

@1440000bytes hello from your friendly neighborhood moderator. This is just a reminder to keep all discussions technical. > Pull request comments should be focused on the code in question. Discussions about personal opinions, moderator or
maintainer actions (including responses to this comment) can be opened [here](https://github.com/bitcoin
core/meta/issues)

@pinheadmz you or another moderator still has not reply on the meta-comment I made on the moderation rules available #3. I understand you can be in a situation of conflict of interest as the example I’m giving to you is related to your current employer to comment so and take a position.

As such from someone who is a code contributor and regular reviewer to this github repository, this is hard to think that moderation can be followed of good faith, when "discussions about personal opinions, moderator or maintainer actions” are not addressed after 2 months of having being mentioned.

[pinheadmz]

@ariard I can promise you that my employment will not have any effect on how I interpret the written moderation policy in this repo. My suggestion at the dawn of the moderator proposal was to add the names of the moderators to the policy itself, so that contributors could open pull requests to add or remove moderators similar to how we decide on code maintainers (and, really, everything).

[ariard]

Hey Matthew, calm down ! I think you're should talk with both of your employer here such @morcos and
@sdaftuar to have a constructed and argued answer before to say non-sense like saying you're going to
ban someone from the github repository (...which is not technically achievable given github technical
architecture ?).

If this is an issue that needs to be settled in front of a US or European court of justice because bitcoin
devs like you do not have the level of patience and civility to have a constructtive conservation on how
moderation rules should work in a decentralized open-source project - I can always proceed in such
direction.

---

More constructevely, promises are cheap when there are not objective rules to enforce them, either at
the project-level or in your contract employement. On the former, if you remember the period of 10 years
ago there was a lot of questions on the bitcoin foundation which was employing a lot of major bitcoin
developers and at same time there were arguing on long-term technical proposals like the block size.
Here a video
of Gavin Andresen of 2015, at the time a bitcoin core maintainer, who was after the fact disapproved by
numerous senior bitcoin core dev. On the latter, it is common notoriety that some blockstream people has
in their contracts of employment, conflict of interests provisions in case of their company was asking
them to commit unethical actions. The people behind blockstream were active in bitcoin far before chaincode
and somehow they understood potential conflict between public open-source matters and private interest.

More concretely, that we shall have precise moderation rules prohibiting a moderator to take actions
towards another contributor when there is an apparent situation of conflict of interests, this is just
the type of rules very present in many corporate companies, public institutions, communities, etc.

I'll put again the formulation I'm proposing, which is just one among many plausible, for your consideration.

## Conflict of Interests

Contributors to Bitcoin Core software projects can reach out to moderation@bitcoincore.org if there is an estimation of a situation of conflict of interests.

Conflict of interests can be characterized directly in 2 situations:
- among the contributor and the moderator
- among the contributor and the contributor advocating moderation decisions to be taken on the contributor

A conflict of interest is a set of conditions of in which professional judgement concerning a primary interest tends to be unduly influenced by a second interest.

Thanks for your polite and courteous handling of this issue (though I reasonably believe here it's better
to have other bitcoin core contributors non-affiliated directly with your employer to provide their opinions
on the matter).

This conversation is cryptographically timestamped in the bitcoin blockchain for authenticity purpose.

[pinheadmz]

Pasting this off topic content here for discussion:

For my comments that was marked as off-topic by @pinheadmz, I invite a more wider group of regular bitcoin core contributors to express opinion on the issue, as pineheadmz as a matter t stake in marking as off-topic my comment so his moderation cannot be considered as objectively neutral. The issue is here: #3 (edit: mistyped the github login of Matthew Zipkin at first).

[pinheadmz]

@ariard please (re)read the moderation policy in this repo. My interpretation of it is that comments on pull requests that do not contribute to the relevant technical discussion in the pull request itself is off topic. Moderators have been asked to delete such comments and temporarily ban the user that posted it. In practice the moderators have been using 24 hour bans.

[pinheadmz]

For complete transparency I will add this screenshot. I can not do my job as moderator as it is described in the policy reviewed and approved by project maintainers and contributors.

I'm apologize to the maintainers. I need to escalate this particular case. @achow101

[ariard]

@pinheadmz

@ariard please (re)read the moderation policy in this repo. My interpretation of it is that comments on pull requests that do not contribute to the relevant technical discussion in the pull request itself is off topic. Moderators have been asked to delete such comments and temporarily ban the user that posted it. In practice the moderators have been using 24 hour bans.

Can someone else than yourself moderate my comments until there is resolution on the bitcoin-meta issue ? We have more like 40 people in the organization.

[pinheadmz]

@ariard sure. @willcl-ark is the other moderator and he and share the work depending mostly on time zone.

Just to be clear, you think that if I did not work for chaincode then I would not have removed your comment on the mempool policy pull request that did not in any way contribute to the technical discussion about mempool policy?

[ariard]

@pinheadmz

Just to be clear, you think that if I did not work for chaincode then I would not have removed your comment on the mempool policy pull request that did not in any way contribute to the technical discussion about mempool policy?

I’ll answer on 2 grounds (a) in matters of conflict of interest, it’s not only the substantial presence of a conflict of interest, but also the apparence that matters. While the substantiality might not be present, the apparence is gathered here (you have an example to nourish your reasoning on this canadian website, not saying it’s authoritative just an example that I’m not inventing cumbersome guidelines out of nowhere) . (b) I’ve been a chaincode employee myself in the past and in time there was no legal provision in my employment contract in the situation of conflict between open-source matters (e.g a janitorial role like moderation) and an organization private interest (e.g a technical stand on bitcoin consensus rules like some blockstream folks used to have in their work contract).

I prefer not that will intervene on the present matter (as I’ll say I’m also in a situation of conflict of interests with his present grant provider organization as I said so on a public bitcoin forum months ago even if I respect for will as an open-source contributor from his days on Lot49).

I think it’s reasonable to have the maintainers give more opinions on how conflict of interests shall be handled , or anyone else in the 40 group of people in the github organization as after all we all wish that to be a an open-source decentralized project.

[achow101]

@ariard has been removed from the organizations to allow moderators to take any actions they deem necessary. He will be reinstated once the moderators inform me that any further moderation actions are unnecessary.

[pinheadmz]

@ariard 24 hour ban from bitcoin/bitcoin for repeated off topic comments. Please try to contribute to technical discussion in the bitcoin core repo. It is a work place where dedicated engineers are focused on improving the software. Last comment pasted below.

About the ongoing issue on moderation, I did a cryptographic timestamp of this github HTML page in the bitcoin blockchain, if this needs to be discussed on another public communication channel.

Maintainers or moderators can for sure mark as off-topic comments on the github repository, though they do no have the proof-of-work to reorganize the mainchain (edited).

[emc99]

There is no such word as 'apparence'.

[ariard]

@achow101

Can you explain your thinking in matters of conflict of interests handling rather to engage in action that could be interpreted by the wider bitcoin community as retaliations on a recognized security researcher reporting security issues ?

24 hour ban from bitcoin/bitcoin for repeated off topic comments. Please try to contribute to technical discussion in the > bitcoin core repo. It is a work place where dedicated engineers are focused on improving the software. Last comment > pasted below.

@pinheadmz, I’ll take the 24 hour ban. In the meanwhile, I’ll let you meditate on the legitimacy of this action on the Github platform, a company with an address here.

GitHub, Inc.
c/o Corporation Service Company
2710 Gateway Oaks Drive, Suite 150N
Sacramento, CA 95833-3505

I’m still expecting substantial answer from maintainers and the other project contributors on my previous comment posted here.

[ariard]

@emc99

s/apparence/appearance/g.

English is the native language of not even 2B people in the world. The 6B others talk another language and I’m generous in how this linguistic estimation is made. Code and mathematics, which are underpinning the bitcoin blockchain, are the same whatever your language.