Ledger, the first academic journal dedicated to cryptos, call for papers

The Plaza
#2

We welcome papers of up to four thousand words detailing new ideas and perspectives on any relevant topic, including but not limited to the technical, social, economic, and philosophical developments and implications of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, public and decentralized ledgers, distributed consensus, and more

I like the idea a lot, but we’re somewhat limited in that only @JordanLee would be able to construct such a paper relating to the design and philosophy behind Nu (possibly with help from @sigmike depending on the topic chosen). It’s quite amazing what we’ve accomplished in the first year of our network, including:

  • Will become the first decentralized cryptocurrency in the history of Earth to maintain a $1.00 peg for one year (eight days from now)
  • Created the first automated liquidity pools designed to support a stable value
  • Solved one of the primary arguments against proof-of-stake

Any one of those topics (and others) would be of interest to researchers but would require a considerable amount of time on Jordan’s part to write. A pool provider would be able to write on ALP’s, but would need to be familiar with scientific journal writing standards. The question would be whether the exposure we generate from such an article would be worth the cost to produce it.

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#3

I think a mature and thoroughly analyzed ALP system would be a good candidate.

#4

Voting is also very interesting.

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#5

Yes, it has to be in our self interest to write such academic papers and ensure it goes within our self interest.
Perhaps, we have to make sure that we have one Nubits guy on the review board first.

#6

I think it would help with advertising our liquidity operations, something which might seem a little scammy at first without understanding the rest of the Nu system. It could help put it in a much better light and bring in liquidity from more sources.

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#7

I agree as for the ALP and LP in general.
But, what if the paper review board depicts a bad image of Nu, which is highly expected – academia mission is not to discuss and disclose the Truth, but to decide what is false and what is true, for the special interests of one or several parties.

#8

Why is it higly expected? The journal has its reputation at stake.

What is academia mission? What you said is not expected from a peer reviewed academic journal.

The biggest obstacle is the effort it takes to write a rigorous journal paper through the reviewing process – this is not a design doc, not a readme, not a bullet-pointed powerpoint speech, not a forum post, not even a white paper (although it can be close).

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#9

Would Vitalik being on the board mean he has influence over the outcome? I’m not exactly sure how this process works. I just don’t want it to be biased in favor of Ethereum or Bitshares. I can imagine people from the crypto community all being part of the team and voting in favor of the projects they’re already involved with. Again though, I don’t know how the process works, so hopefully it doesn’t end up being like that.

#10

I’m sure with the right topic we can write up something very serious. We need new ideas, and I can volunteer to write.

Voting mechanisms and the rigorous analysis of such are already very widely explored within game theory and operations research. This means, unless we can bring to the table something truly unique to blockchains, the rigor and reflection we need to put in has to meet established standards. It’s a high bar. That’s not unattainable but I don’t see enough depth for us to probe in this area.

TLLP is probably a very new thing that’s unique to Nubits, and many things built into / to be built haven’t been rigorously analyzed. There could be rather formal analyses for the effects and robustness of the parametric order book, for example. Or some potential improvements, such as extending it to Tier 2 liquidity. Building and evaluating a system is often an important part of an academic paper, so we should do that too.

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#11

From the author guidelines there are hypothesis-driven research paper and technology-advancement papers. The former is more close to computer sciece research. The latter I think is more of a report and analysis of original application of technology.

#12

Put me down as a volunteer editor if you require one (or many).

I think one obvious choice for a paper would be Nu’s historic split of the network into two units. We were the first to do so, and nobody has been able to replicate our success so far. I still view the following as the most exciting paragraphs I’ve read in any blockchain project:

[…] Both of these networks contain a critical flaw which Nu resolves. These networks permit the purchase of scarce units used in the networks which function much like shares. If the value of the network rises, the value of these “shares” rise. This dynamic has been critical to the success of these networks as it allows anyone to purchase a stake and benefit from promoting the network. These networks have simultaneously been promoted as currencies but have not functioned well as such. Currencies must have a stable value to be effective, while Peercoin and Bitcoin have exhibited exceptional volatility. Many argue volatility will end with the high liquidity that will accompany widespread adoption. While volatility will decrease with greater adoption, it is unlikely volatility will ever be less than occurs with large cap stocks such as Google or Microsoft. This is still an unacceptable level of volatility for a currency. Let us suppose I am wrong and that volatility will be eliminated in these networks. In that case they would serve well as currencies but poorly as shares, because they would not appreciate, nor give dividends. This would likely cause a selloff of these “shares”, thereby introducing volatility once again.

The critical flaw is that Peercoin and Bitcoin use the same fungible unit for share and currency functions. Shares must have the capacity to appreciate and reflect changes in the perceived value of the network while currency must remain stable regardless to be effective. It is impossible to accommodate these diverse pricing needs in a single unit.

Source: https://nubits.com/about/white-paper#the-problems-being-solved-by-nu

I think it would be interesting to look at how the network has functioned with properly-separated units and why the design has worked so well (both in terms of scalability and stability) in comparison to other decentralized competitors like BitUSD. There are many tangential observations - such as how our voting consensus mechanism supports the interplay between NSR and NBT - that are relevant to the primary discussion too. Almost one year after our release there is no identical competitor to Nu, and only a few decentralized stable digital currency proposals floating around like Ethereum’s SchellingCoin and Maker. Nu was the first private digital currency that is fully controlled by the collective evolving judgement of its issuers, and that fits the criteria of technology advancement.

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#13

The former is more highly regarded in academic circles, the latter is attractive mainly for the industry (which is actually a larger part than academia in case of cryptos) and probably a suitable venue for advertising current features and developments.

Another ideal candidate would be the economics of our currency model, but I don’t think we have a trained economist on the forum to investigate our thesis. Perhaps we can collaborate with some economists that like our idea.

I think one obvious choice for a paper would be Nu’s historic split of the network into two units.

Good idea. In that case we should step up seeded auctions, as that’s a very important piece in the picture. As we might be having a NSR buy-back pretty soon, it’s a good time for collecting data etc.

#15

I think one obvious choice for a paper would be Nu’s historic split of the network into two units.

Good idea. In that case we should step up seeded auctions, as that’s a very important piece in the picture. As we might be having a NSR buy-back pretty soon, it’s a good time for collecting data etc.

#16

We have @Benjamin, although he doesn’t show up much, plus some of his suggestions were not in line with Jordan’s design such as negative interest rates. He wrote these two detailed papers on NuBits…

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#17

wow, I didn’t imagine that this thread would sparkle such a hot discussion overnight (literally in my case :wink: ) …

The number of possible scientific work that can be done its very large and it goes from blockchain-specific technicals to economic models and open source governance, and whatnot. But it is not limited to the former categories imho. To find the right topic we should first ask ourselves what we want to achieve with it.

This should be seen as a market opportunity only indirectly : it’s virtually impossible to get any remotely biased article published on any serious journal.

We should think broader, in scientific terms, and the publicity will come later, and its going to stay there forever, unlike a website.

In my opinion we should plan for a series of articles to release during the next three years, instead that a single macro one.
This :arrow_up: means the choice of the first topic is key to success and must accomplish the follow :

  1. Inform the uninformed reader on the challenge of the stability space.
  2. Sparkle curiosity and debate among the scientific community around the “stability” topic.
  3. Demonstrate to the editorial board that we are able to publish objectively solid scientific articles, building a solid reputation for following issues of the journal
  4. Produce something that will get a lot of citation (systematic reviews in general)
  5. Create the framework for a body of knowledge and a shared vocabulary

Here is the first idea that comes to mind and satisfies the criteria below :

Tackling volatility in cryptocurrencies : a systematic review of the state of the art and state of practice.

And one winner would emerge for the comparison :wink: , but we let that emerge from data rather than declare explicitly.

If we are able to objectively produce such a comprehensive comparative review, we would establish our paper as milestone that would need to be cited by every author that wishes to publish on the matter in the future.

I am confident I can find at least one senior engineering professor willing to participate as a coauthor and also a couple of MSc/PHD students who desperately need to publish.

If we do that, we will have open doors to publish pretty much anything else on other verticals of our network.

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Microsoft to Sponsor Ethereum’s DEVCON1
#18

Thank you for covering this! If you guys have any questions about the submission process or feedback about Ledger in general, here is the official Ledger discussion thread, maintained by the journal’s co-managing editor Peter Rizun.

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#19

I am afraid, the journal can “rigorously” depicts badly NuBits, without hurting its reputation.

To me, its mission is to officialize “what is science” and “what is not” (just like the Miss Universe board does within the Beauty concept) to create thought patterns and official trends that people will follow.
Before venturing in such effort, I would advise to set a clear objective and put a nubits guy (or affiliated ) on the board.

(I am talking from my own experience of producing academic papers.)

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#20

What are the outcomes expected - Marketing and revenue wise for Nu?

#21

Well, entering the recorded scientific body of knowledge of humanity is a decent marketing goal imho :wink:

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#22

Bitcoin Peer-Reviewed Academic Journal ‘Ledger’ Launches

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