Greetings community! Two months ago, I (Dr. Philip N. Brown, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs) made the announcement here that I was embarking on a unique research project to study bitAssets. You can read my original introduction post and its discussion here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=28340.0

Today, I give you a worker proposal to raise funds for the project and ensure its success; many thanks to @xeroc and the BitShares Blockchain Foundation for their invaluable assistance in putting forward this proposal. You can find the complete proposal below and at https://www.bitshares.foundation/workers/2019-07-uccs-research-project; but here is the TL;DR version:

• This worker fully funds a PhD student at the University of Colorado for 2 years; under my supervision, this student will study the fundamental design tradeoffs surrounding price-stabilized crypto-tokens with a particular focus on bitAssets in BitShares.
• The student and I will present reports and recommendations to the BitShares community as well as author publications which we will submit to high-profile academic conferences and journals for peer-review.
  
  • Whenever we give a talk for this project at a conference, we'll acknowledge the BitShares Blockchain as the research's funding source.
  • Whenever we publish a paper resulting from the funds in this worker, we'll include the text "This work was supported by BitShares worker proposal 1.14.204."
• The BitShares Blockchain Foundation will act as escrow, and the University of Colorado will be the custodian of the funds for the duration of the project (read: I can't just cut and run with the cash).

Please pepper me with your questions, and I will make myself available to chat via Skype (philskypetalk) or any other chat service if that would be helpful. I'll also update this post with something like a FAQ as I start to see which questions are the most frequent. What follows is the complete proposal as published at https://www.bitshares.foundation/workers/2019-07-uccs-research-project:

Name/bfid: 201907-uccs-research-project
Category: Research
Team: Dr. Philip N. Brown, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Total: $160,000
Duration: 4 months
Worker ID: 1.14.204
Discussions: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=28340.0
Accounting & Reporting: https://workers.bitshares.foundation/201907-uccs-research-project

University Research Project for BitAssets
This worker proposal, if approved and funded, will support a gift to the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) to fund a 2-year bitasset-specific research project by a PhD student under the direction of Dr. Philip Brown. Please scroll down for more details.

Yearly Budget
By far the most critical budget items are the stipend and tuition payments for the PhD student, who will be committing the bulk of the time to the project. In addition to the student’s budget items, the project’s impact is significantly enhanced by including some time for Dr. Brown, to ensure that he can adequately direct the research. Time for faculty can be included as salary in the summer months or as a “course buy-out” during the academic year which reduces his teaching load to allow more time for research. The following budget includes a summer month as well as a teaching reduction. Finally, an annual $10,000 travel budget is included; both Dr. Brown and the PhD student will travel to universities, conferences, and workshops to promote the work, disseminate research findings and develop future collaborative relationships with other researchers. UCCS applies indirect costs of 10% to each budget line item below to cover facilities maintenance, support staff salaries and related grant management expenses; each of the following budget items includes these 10% indirect costs.

A sample annual budget is as follows:

• PhD Student annual stipend: $26,736
• PhD student annual tuition (6 credits per semester): $10,211.11
• Dr. Brown month of summer salary: $14,354.44
• Dr. Brown 1-course teaching load reduction: $12,919.00
• Travel budget: $11,111.11
• Total annual budget: $75,331.66

If the project is funded at higher levels, the additional money will be used to extend the student’s funding for up to a third year. It is important to stress that this is likely to significantly increase the ultimate impact of the project, as the productivity of PhD students tends to increase over time.

Accountability and Transparency
Once the funds from this worker proposal are disbursed to UCCS, the University of Colorado will be the custodian of the funds as required for all funded university research projects. Dr. Brown will have signature authority over the funds, but all expenditures will be vetted through the usual accounting procedures of the University of Colorado, providing a strong layer of protection against embezzlement and other malfeasance by Dr. Brown.

Budget Restrictions
Worker funds are released relatively slowly, so an extremely aggressive timeline may not be possible. However, the PhD student cannot be attached to the project unless a minimum of two years’ funding is allocated to him up front.

To reduce costs, this worker proposal may pay out BTS to the BBF (the escrow) directly to reduce trading fees and spreads that would otherwise increase total costs to cover the commitment. Payments to the University of Colorado will remain transparent to the Community and the voters.

Executive summary
Dr. Philip Brown wrote an executive summary that contains the full details of the PhD student to work on.

Read full executive summary: http://cs.uccs.edu/~pbrown2/files/BTS_executive_summary.pdf

Key Research Thrusts:

• Recommend concrete improvements to the BitShares MPA system.
• Develop a “science of collateralized tokens,” investigating the key design tradeoffs in the space.
• Can the balance between short-term and long-term stability be tuned?
• Is there a fundamental tradeoff in collateralized tokens between manipulability and short-term stability?
• How can we assess risk in collateralized token systems, taking into account the incentives seen by all parties?

Additional project activities:

• Travel to universities and academic/blockchain conferences to present our research.
• Participation and outreach in blockchain community events in the greater Colorado Springs area.
• Sharing ongoing research findings with the BitShares Core Team and contributing insights to relevant design discussions.

Principal Investigator Bio
Dr. Philip N. Brown, an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, will direct the research project. Dr. Brown brings uniquely multidisciplinary expertise to the project, as his research combines concepts from automation and controls, game theory and incentive design, and integrated engineered and engineered systems. Dr. Brown has been a BitShares community member since early 2014, and participated in bitsharestalk.org discussions (under the pseudonym “biophil”) regarding the design of the first BitAsset pegging mechanisms. Since then, he has launched an interdisciplinary research program in the department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado: http://cs.uccs.edu/~pbrown2/.

Summary
The proposed research gift funds an exciting and ambitious undertaking to result in both technical results relevant to the functioning of the BitShares Blockchain as well as basic science which will advance knowledge and lead to visibility and lasting impact in the broader academic community.

It is our hope that in its success, this project will accomplish the following three unique things:

• Bring new tools and theory to bear on the practical challenges faced by the BitShares Blockchain,
• Spread awareness of the BitShares ecosystem to a previously unreached audience, and
• Showcase the BitShares community’s ability and commitment to fund higher learning projects which confer benefits beyond the insular setting of the BitShares Blockchain itself.

Greetings, Bitshares community!

A very few of you may remember me from the early days of Bitshares; back then, I was a lowly graduate student interested in game theory and cryptocurrencies.

Now, I've worked my way up to professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado: http://cs.uccs.edu/~pbrown2/. I've been doing a bit of research on stablecoins recently, and I want to gather some perspectives on what went wrong with BitUSD. I think there are some very interesting underlying problems with stablecoins in general (see NuBits for some early examples), and collaboratively-managed stablecoins in particular (see BitUSD), and I'd like to understand these problems very clearly.

So I'd love to get some community input on the reasons that BitUSD's peg mechanism broke and it went into GS. Here are some starter questions, but of course give me your own perspectives even if they don't fit my questions at all:

1. Was BitUSD mismanaged? If so, by whom and why?
2. Was it the fault of BSIP42?
3. How will BitCNY be saved from the same fate?
4. Was the GS inevitable?

And just to be clear about my intentions here, depending on my findings, I plan to write a (possibly series of) academic research papers on the topic of how to properly incentivize stablecoins. I think the incentive issues are very deep and likely very difficult to surmount. Here's an older summary of my concerns: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9348.msg315532#msg315532

It's all in the title. It would be a nice customer-relations move to have a banner of some sort on markets whose deposits are disabled. Sure, buyer beware and all that, and I'm not threatening to libel you or anything - but it's extremely frustrating to find what looks like a good price only to discover too late that it's because the IOU in question isn't actually redeemable at the moment.

The big smartcoins all seem to have a parameter called "force settlement offset" set to 1%. What is this? Does it mean that you get only 99% of the face-value BTS when you request a settlement?

If so, what is the purpose of this?

Howdy all - I just posted the following on Steemit: https://goo.gl/H0LdfX

I'm cross-posting here because I'm sure people here will know the answers:

What I'd like to do, but am not sure how:
I want to save my old BTS owner key somewhere and then update the BTS owner key to a new one. Once it's updated, the old key won't give access to the account, so I can go and drop the old key into the peerplays wallet without fear of unforseen security leaks.

How is the BTS owner key changed? I've looked at the permissions tab in the bitshares.org wallet and it's not obvious enough to me to be worth going and modifying all my permissions.

I have a couple orders on the DEX to sell some NOTEs - will the snapshot capture those, or do I need to cancel the orders before hand? Thinking more about it, I'll probably cancel them anyway just to avoid any weird disappointments, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

Has anybody done any ROI calculations for NOTEs from the pre-sale? I can't recall my ballpark figures exactly, but it seems like the pre-sale was implying a market cap around $2MM, which isn't far from where NOTEs are trading now. Anybody care to give actual numbers?