In the words of one of our top firemen (or arsonists?), yeastplume, "keeping up with all of the tech coming out that’s relevant to Grin/MW is like drinking from a firehose… "
This was in response to the Dandelion BIP, and another good example of highly relevant research would be Bulletproofs. Staying on top of developments in the space is a job in and of itself, so having a repository where research can be shared and archived might be useful.
Sounds like their needs to be a blockchain mailing list, are there any of these at present?
lots and lots and lots.
New BLS signature aggregation paper coming from Boneh et al:
https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/BLSmultisig.html
As we’re knee deep in proof-of-work discussions, I thought I’d throw in some proof-of-stake reading, to see other perspectives:
The FAQ addresses Paul Sztorc’s marginal cost/revenue arguments as well as Andrew Poelstra’s security model critique (albeit less convincingly IMO).
Also the Casper paper:
BLS signatures in MW paper by Gandalf the Pink.
https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/files/2905763/MWpp.pdf
Two interesting things that relate I think:
This article about the first HAM radio lightning transaction:
Which relates to Nick Szabo’s https://github.com/GFARadio, which I became interested in a couple of years ago after talking to him at Stanford.
And the coindesk article mentions why Szabo is into the idea of radio network relays, to prevent attacks that partition the network, and they link to this white paper about SABRE: https://nsg.ee.ethz.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/ndss19-final252.pdf
I think incentivizing these type of alternative network relays is centralizing and akin to masternodes, but that doesn’t mean universities and other high rollers or research institutions couldn’t host radio hardware and “super” relays that run parallel to a network to help secure it against (as of yet untried) large-scale attacks out of altruism/etc.
There’s a lot of attacks that haven’t been tested, but that have to be considered for a secure currency, right now blockchain only partially solves the problem. Having what amounts to a mesh network that stores and relays important network information is crucial in the long term I think.
I also think it is even more suitable for grin to consider radio relays since the overally network state should not take up as much space as bitcoin. Actually sending complete layer-one slate files, and syncing the entire chain over radio is much more feasible with grin on paper than bitcoin.
Update to the accumulators paper by Benedikt & Boneh
https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1188