BUIP138: (passed) Fund BU's Chief Scientist

[Peter R]

BUIP138: Fund BU's Chief Scientist
Submitted by: Peter Rizun
Date: 10 November 2019

Summary:

For many years, I have contributed to Bitcoin Unlimited in my spare time as an unpaid volunteer. In September, I decided to "go pro" so that I could take a more active and hands-on role in research & development. It would be helpful if I were to receive a salary to partly compensate for the income that I am forgoing by not working elsewhere.

Budget:

This BUIP authorizes up to $100,000 USD a year (paid monthly in crypto) to fund my work. (This number was chosen in consulation with Andrew Stone and Andrew Clifford and is inline with the other BU developers).

What I Intend to Work On:

The majority of my work will focus on research & development towards new technology to allow blocks beyond 25 GB to be validated on low-cost hardware. I intend to release the first preview of what I've been working on towards the end of this month.

Funding this position will also make it easier for me to continue doing what I normally do, which is write articles to explain BU technology and initiatives, collaborate with other developers, carry out experiments, and organize workshops.

Here Are Some Highlights of What I Have Done In the Past on Bitcoin:

Scholarly Papers:

Rizun, P. R. "A Transation Fee Market Exists Without a Block Size Limit." Presented at Scaling Bitcoin Montreal (2015)

Rizun, P. R. "Subchains: A Technique to Scale Bitcoin and Improve the User Experience." Ledger, Vol. 1, pp 38 - 52 (2016)

Research Talks (with links to recordings):

"Empirical Double-spends Probabilities for Unconfirmed Transaction", Instant Transactions Workshop, Gargnano, Italy (2018)

"Measuring Maximum Sustained Transaction Throughput on a Global Network of Bitcoin Nodes," Scaling Bitcoin Conference, Stanford, USA (2017)

"A Segwit Coin is not a Bitcoin." The Future of Bitcoin Conference, Arnhem, Netherlands (2017).

"A Transaction Fee Market Exists Without a Block Size Limit." Scaling Bitcoin Conference, Montreal, Canada (2015).

Technical Articles:

"Towards Massive On-Chain Scaling: Presenting Our Block Propagation Results With Xthin." [parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] (2016)

"Visualizing HTLCs and Lightning Network's Dirty Little Secret" (2019)

Workshop Planning:

Satoshi's Vision Conference in San Francisco (organized by Solex and me) (2016)

Instant Transaction Workshop, Gargnano, Italy (organized by Sickpig and me) (2018)

Podcasts:

"Lightning Critique: FUD or Fair?" What Bitcoin Did Podcast (2019)

"A Bitcoin Fee Market Without a Block Size Limit" Epicenter Bitcoin (2016)

Hardware:

Sigsafe: paper, demo video, promo video


Intellectual Property:

Neither Bitcoin Unlimited, its members nor its officers have any claim of ownership to intellectual property that may result from my work on bitcoin, beyond that which I explicitly assign to BU. (This applies for all BU developers, but I wanted to state this explicitly)

 

[freetrader]

Neither Bitcoin Unlimited, its members nor its officers have any claim of ownership to intellectual property that may result from my work on bitcoin, beyond that which I explicitly assign to BU. (This applies for all BU developers, but I wanted to state this explicitly)

What kind of intellectual property do you foresee resulting from your work under this proposal for funding by BU?

And what kind of license do you propose to use for work done under such BU sponsorship?

 

[Peter R]

> What kind of intellectual property do you foresee resulting from your work under this proposal for funding by BU?

I don't know. I am simply trying to limit risk should I decide to start a business in the future in the bitcoin space.

> And what kind of license do you propose to use for work done under such BU sponsorship?

MIT for production software, creative commons for research and educational content.

 

[freetrader]

income that I am forgoing by not working elsewhere

@Peter R For avoidance of doubt, this means you are going to work full-time on the Bitcoin developments you've outlined?

 

[Peter R]

@freetrader

To be perfectly transparent, I have committed 1 day per week to the (non-bitcoin) tech company I co-own (where I previously worked full time), plus I serve on the advisory board of another tech company. I disclosed these details to Andrew Stone and Andrew Clifford ahead of time; we decided that my funding from BU (should BUIP138 pass) would be prorated based on how much these commitments take away from my time on BU activities, with a target of 0.8 FTE on BU-related activities. This is why I wrote "up to $100k USD per year" (at 1.0 FTE) to give us this needed flexibility. Excluding these prior commitments, yes I intend to work full time on the developments I outlined.

The potential for "double dipping" is always there for all bitcoin devs and scientist with these unusual funding arrangements. All I can say to address this is that I intend to be transparent should my current employment details change.

 

[79b79aa8]

@Peter R i did not vote in favor of this BUIP, not because i doubt the value of your contributions or because i believe they should not be remunerated, but because the role of Chief Scientist, the method for his/her election, and the duration of his/her term are nowhere defined in the BU Articles of Federation. this is a flaw in the organization's current operations which debilitates the Chief Scientist position.

moving forward, the solution appears simple: when the effect of this passed BUIP runs out, a new one could be submitted applying for the position of Chief Scientist, specifying the duration during which the position is to be held and submitting a salary and budget attached to the tenure.

i would be interested in hearing your and @solex's opinion on this matter.