HRF is excited to announce the CISA Research Fellowship 🎉

Cross-Input Signature Aggregation (CISA) is a proposed upgrade to Bitcoin that could potentially enhance privacy and provide cost-savings for transactions

HRF is sponsoring a four-month research fellowship to help analyze the state and future of CISA

The product of the fellowship will be an industry paper that seeks to answer the following questions:

1) How could CISA improve Bitcoin privacy?

2) Exactly how much cost-savings could CISA provide across different types of transactions? This will include a comparison of full versus half aggregate implementations.

3) How meaningful might these cost savings be to different industry participants? Given historical precedent, could these cost savings make Taproot the default script type, as Native Segwit is today?

4) Could CISA, if adopted widely, reduce the effectiveness of chain analysis?

5) Could CISA pave the way for cheaper transactions in a high-fee environment?

6) Could CISA lower the minimum economically spendable account at a given fee rate?

7) Could CISA help exchanges by, for example, saving them money while they consolidate small UTXOs?

8) How does CISA compare to other aggregation strategies?

9) Are there any ways in which CISA could help upgrade or complement the Lightning Network, eCash, or existing CoinJoin mechanisms?

10) How might CISA protect the social and legal choice of Bitcoin users and businesses to CoinJoin, and the likelihood of more CoinJoin behavior, if users could state (if asked) that their decision was based on saving money, not simply seeking more privacy?

11) How would Bitcoin Core need to change to integrate CISA? Are there any known current improvement proposals?

12) How would SegWit need to change to integrate CISA?

13) Could CISA be packaged with (and might it be mutually beneficial with) any existing softfork convent proposals?

14) Would CISA have any impact on output destruction versus creation? How would implementation relate to the witness discount?

15) How problematic would the interactive nature of full aggregate CISA be? What strategies might be adopted to ameliorate this?

16) What would be the main downsides and risks of bringing CISA to Bitcoin?

17) How would a CISA-powered for-profit service that could help people save money on fees, if they are willing to enter an interactive pool, work?

18) What other kinds of CISA-powered apps can be envisioned?

The fellowship is being created with the acknowledgement that CISA may not be a helpful or appropriate addition to Bitcoin, but with the open mind that it might be

The fellow will receive 50 million sats to support their efforts during the research and writing period

The research is expected to be on par with the standards established by bitcoinrollups.org, a previous HRF research fellowship paper reviewing rollup technology

To apply, please email cisafellowship@hrf.org before May 15, 2024

Please include relevant information about your industry or academic background, a research plan in terms of who you will speak to, and your current sense of the impact CISA could have for Bitcoin 🙏

Fire away

You can go along with mainstream narratives or you can critically think. But you cannot do both. Choose wisely, as your future depends on it. #Bitcoin.

For those that are new to Nostr, hello!

What’s cool about it is that Nostr it is an open source protocol. It is not a centralized company, but rather is a protocol that individuals and companies can build upon.

This means that you can use many different applications to access it, or even build your own. And it means that there is no central authority that can take down posts or delete accounts; there are different servers operated by different entities that are storing the data. And there is no central algorithm for determining what posts people see or don’t see.

You can hook up a bitcoin lightning wallet to send and receive tips (“zaps”) on posts. Nostr itself is not a blockchain or crypto and has no token, but the Bitcoin blockchain does complement it well via zaps.

Nostr is still relatively small, and a bit rough around the edges. But the community here is great, and familiarizing yourself with the technology and concept is useful in a world of centralized social media. It is a new method of decentralization that balances various trade-offs in a novel way, and the protocol can be used for a lot more than just social media.

Welcome!

Two groups that typically don’t talk to each other: bitcoiners and UBI’ers 😂

BUT there are many ways. I would propose allocating funding to UBI initiatives and removing funding from ineffective and poverty-cycle promoting government programs.

Also state and local UBI initiatives work well depending on region. Some states and locals have budget surpluses to accommodate. Others could balance.

Giving agency and choice to people is far better than dictating and ineffective bureaucratic programs. And I know, coming from a largely federally funded nonprofit.

Y’all sleepin’ on what UBI and a Bitcoin Standard could do 👀