Surae funding Q2 2019

WHO My name is Brandon Goodell. I am Monero Research Lab’s first postdoctoral researcher into cryptocurrency. I have a Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences from Clemson University, a M.Sc. in Mathematics from North Dakota State University, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Colorado State University. I taught as a graduate student for 9 years at the university level, and I have participated in the Monero community under the pseudonym Surae Noether on-and-off 2014-2016, and I have worked at MRL full-time since June 2017.

WHAT I am requesting a continuation of funding for April, May, and June 2019. An incomplete list of overall lab-wide goals for MRL in the 2018/2019 year are described here. An ongoing list of research topics is difficult to maintain, since research is fluid and so often leads to rejected material, but for additional action items, see the proposal by Sarang. Moreover, expect soon the following:

Submission of thring signature publication for peer-review (journal still under selection).
Submission of a DLSAG publication for peer-review (still in preparation with our co-authors).
A technical note on the possibility of replacing MLSAG RingCT with shorter LSAG RingCT using Musig-style key aggregation.
Our matching/linkability work will be presented at the Monero Konferenco.

WHY Monero Research Lab has communicated with researchers all over the cryptocurrency industry, cryptographers, computer scientists, and computer engineers. In the past year, we have traveled internationally to conferences to learn and participate in the dissemination of results, contributed to several published technical notes/white papers on the technology underlying Monero, helped read and review papers for other researchers, participated in the cryptocurrency community more broadly, and learned quite a bit about decentralized payment infrastructures. Our work into multisig revealed a lot of dangerous territory in the multi-signature world, and some of this work is paying off in terms of compression of signature sizes. Our work into bipartite weighted matching has a chance of being rather foundational in assessing anonymity in cryptocurrencies like Monero.

RATES AND AMOUNTS My rate is based on the 14-day moving average exponential on Kraken from 18 March 2018, which is approximately 50.50 USD per XMR, and my monthly rate of 10,400 USD per month.

AN IMPORTANT CHANGE Please read this paragraph carefully for an important change. Research funding over many months suffers from price volatility. Neither donors nor researchers at MRL know the value of donations when they are eventually paid out. To mitigate this and provide the most stability, this request will be paid out in full when it is funded. Please see the request by Sarang here for a similar statement.

Conflicts of Interest I have two conflicts to report, neither of which lead to any substantial monetary conflict of interest. First, I am the President of MAGIC, Multidisciplinary Academic Grants in Cryptocurrencies, for which I receive no compensation. I am also the sole proprietor of Colorado Crypto Conferences LLC, the company hosting the first Monero Konferenco in Denver on 22-23 June 2019. However, I have pledged the gross profit of the Monero Konferenco in 2019 toward the 2020 event and will receive no profit in 2019 from this event.

Thank you, Monero Community! We at MRL strongly value community input into the funding process, and welcome discussions regarding my funding proposal. Thank you again to the entire community, whether you've donated to me or not... you guys are absolutely running the show, and you all kick some major butt. I hope by making Monero better, we're all a little better off.

I guess this time, the first post if this user is not suspect ;)
Let's merge this before the next community meeting!

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i support this!

I support development, research adn also the great work Surae has done. Thank you for your hard work.

mentioned in commit 0cf9dac6

merged

The following was also posted to Dr. Feikert's funding thread verbatim.

Greetings Dr. Goodell, I hope you are having a great 2019.

I have some questions regarding your work in regard to the Monero Project. I hope I am not too forward in asking the following questions as I (and many Monero supporters) may not have a very good grasp of what work a typical PhD in mathematics does.

Anyway, here are my questions:

Have you proposed any impactful and original idea(s) that have made it into the core Monero daemon code? If so, can you list or explain some of them?
Do you have any goals, ideas or work that would actually correspond to milestones other than just being paid as a milestone in and of itself? Maybe this isn't a proper question, and the use of the word milestone is misplaced in the CCS. Maybe milestone should be changed to merely remuneration.
I am not sure if this has been asked formally before, but what does a typical day look like for you, being employed (or in business for yourself as the case may be) working on the Monero project? How much of your time is spent on other projects outside of the Monero project?
Since one of the goals or properties of the Monero project is decentralization--ASIC resistance, is this an area of expertise you would contribute to or is it outside your field of expertise?
What is your vision of the Monero project, say, two years from now? (other than Monero value "going to the moon".) :-)

In closing, I would like to thank you for your time and contributions to MRL. I hope these questions aren't taken too negatively and I wish you the best in your future endeavors.

Surae's Quarterly Update

This document is intended to explain what I did with my time in the past quarter. This is usually a monthly update, but the past quarter has been mad.

1. DOCUMENTS FOR FUTURE USE

I wrote the following documents for future use at The Monero Project and are intended to be living documents that are updated during and after the planning of each years’ events.

The 2019 finalized Monero Konferenco Budget. This document can be copied for future years. We recommend using the actuals from the previous year as projected numbers for the present year… saving money over the 2019 actuals should be an easy PR win for the 2020 organizers. Check it out here. ODS file.
The 2019 Monero Konferenco Post Morto. Post morto is in Esperanto, not latin. I speak about what went wrong, what went right, changes we can make next year, and so on in this document. Find it here.
The Guide to Hosting a Konferenco. This document describes a general structure for delegating tasks that we think may work well for future years of organizing the Konferenco. We recommend that an organizer act as the bridge connecting a steering committee to make organizational decisions, a content committee making scheduling and speaker decisions, vendors, sponsors, and conference attendees. Find it here.
The Guide for a Konferenco Organizer. This document describes the tasks of the Konferenco Organizer. Check it out here.
The Guide for a Konferenco Steering Committee. This document describes how the steering committee works. Check it out here.
The Guide for a Konferenco Content Committee. This document describes how the steering committee works. Check it out here

2. TALKS AND OUTREACH

In May:
- I attended the Magical Crypto Conference.
  - I gave a talk on making Monero harder, better, faster, and stronger.
  - I sat on a panel with Andrew Poelstra about privacy, how Monero works, and more.
  - I gave an interview with the folks from MoneroTalk. Check this out here
- In June:
  - I took part in a Monerotalk podcast, check it out here
  - I spoke at the Monero Konferenco on linkability analyses and their applications in output-based cryptocurrencies. Check out my talk here
  - I also was interviewed during MoneroKon by Monerotalk here

3. COMMUNITY SERVICE

In April, May, and June, I organized the Monero Konferenco for the community. You can see the content we produced here or by swinging by the Monerotalk Live page here to see some of the (quite frankly very interesting) interviews.

In addition to that, I’ve spent most of July working for free. My work in July has included work on my matching/simulation code partly, but mostly has been spent writing Konferenco organizational documents, the post-mortem, getting the budget in order... and even helping trapped speakers get passports renewed through their consulates so they can actually go home. I got horribly ill with pancreatitis and spent a night in a hospital in July, and I have merely not had time to get my funding request or my quarterly report finished (nor would I feel comfortable requesting more funding before finishing the Konferenco post-mortem documents).

The event was a wild success in terms of service to the community, but it lost a lot of money due to a confluence of factors. About 80% of the lost money can be explained by the market crash of December and January. Please see the post morto and budget for more details.

4. RESEARCH

In April, May, and June, Sarang and RandomRun and I worked on two research papers together with some co-authors, both of which are currently on IACR:

DLSAG: Non-Interactive Refund Transactions For Interoperable Payment Channels in Monero. Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Randomrun, Duc V. Le, Sarang Noether, Brandon Goodell and Aniket Kate.
Compact linkable ring signatures and applications. Brandon Goodell and Sarang Noether and Randomrun.

The former is a fundamental property required for off-chain scaling solutions like lightning network (many more obstacles to tackle before we get there). The latter is a signature scheme that will reduce the overall size of the Monero blockchain, as well as the verification time (this is currently under review and will be pushed to production in the spring hardfork).

In addition to working on the above two papers, I’ve also been trying to correct some simulations for investigating traceability in Monero and Zcash. It’s a rather large-ish project but, especially in the 2 weeks immediately following the Konferenco, I have been able to clean it up quite a bit. I expect reliable results soon, but I’ve been expecting reliable results for months now.

5. ANSWER TO QUESTIONS BY: @palexande

Have you proposed any impactful and original idea(s) that have made it into the core Monero daemon code? If so, can you list or explain some of them? Threshold ring multi-signatures did not exist with discrete logarithm and random oracle assumptions before my paper generalizing musig to MLSAG signatures. Other proposals of mine that are currently consensus includes fixed ring sizes, and the community is currently paying for an audit of a compressed signature scheme first proposed by randomrun and for which I've written a proof of unforgeability. That will save 15-20% of blockchain download time and 15-20% of verification time after download. We would not have implemented it without the proof of unforgeability.
Do you have any goals, ideas or work that would actually correspond to milestones other than just being paid as a milestone in and of itself? Maybe this isn't a proper question, and the use of the word milestone is misplaced in the CCS. Maybe milestone should be changed to merely remuneration. I'm fine with calling it remuneration. Many projects merely cannot proceed on a milestone basis, especially in research; you never know exactly where it is going to lead. I have many goals, ideas, and work that could end up in a "deliverable..." but incentivizing research by looking at deliverables, I think, is slightly wrong-headed. For example, we have a few sublinear ring signature schemes available at our disposal. A sublinear RingCT replacement with ring sizes on the order of 100 compatible with our present key image system, batched verification, no new cryptographic assumptions, compatible with efficient multiparty computation of multisignatures... that would be nice. But at what point do we define the milestone? When the paper is published? When the paper is converted into code? When the code passes review? When the code passes audit? When the code is pushed to production? shrug
I am not sure if this has been asked formally before, but what does a typical day look like for you, being employed (or in business for yourself as the case may be) working on the Monero project? How much of your time is spent on other projects outside of the Monero project? I have no projects outside the Monero project. I roll out of bed and work on Monero. I have a very difficult time with work-life balance, and I am rarely not doing work. For example, today is Saturday, I'm not being paid, and I'm skipping out on a camping weekend with my wife to do work because I feel guilty about not having communicated well enough with the community on the run-up to the Konferenco.
Since one of the goals or properties of the Monero project is decentralization--ASIC resistance, is this an area of expertise you would contribute to or is it outside your field of expertise? Nothing is (yet) ASIC resistant. Someone claiming to be an expert in ASIC resistance is like someone claiming to be an expert in practical table-top fusion technology or... I don't know, unicorns. We have some ideas of some computational problems that could be ASIC resistant, such as RandomX, but it remains to be seen how rapidly ASICs truly come about. A group of talented experts in information theory, computer science, mathematics, electrical engineering, FPGA/ASIC design, and physics could probably all work together to make something work. I'm not sure what you're going for with this question. Needless to say, ASIC resistance is an active area of research at MRL, and I contribute to this work wherever I can (which is necessarily approaching the problem from only one of several facets).
What is your vision of the Monero project, say, two years from now? (other than Monero value "going to the moon".) :-) Vision of the project overall? Not so sure. Projects I'd like to see live in a few years include lightning on the Monero network and the RingCT replacement I mentioned above.

mentioned in merge request !89 (merged)