When and where: 15th/16th May 23 in Madrid

Participants: Carla Rafols, Luca Nizzardo, Leo Reyzin, Matteo Campanelli

Flavor of discussion items in general:

• technical aspects of current PoS and Filecoin protocol
• exploration for:
  • new cost assumptions
  • new analysis for SDR and NSE
    • we have sketches of improved analysis for
  • other theoretical results that could be formalized (sealstacking and lower bounds for asymmetric retrievability)

Main decision of the discussion: paper on PoS

We think it would be of the highest impact to write an article in order to achieve all goals we have.

1. obtain and describe improved constructions for PoS that can be high short-term impact
   1. we know how to modify NSE to improve its efficiency (e.g. see here )
   2. we strongly believe the SDR analysis can be improved and made tighter
2. create excitement and momentum on PoS problems so that other researchers (many of which with an academic background) will work on it
3. have a SPOT (Single Point of Truth) paper for PoS problems for academics.
   1. Ben Fisch’s paper (PoRep) was a candidate to be (3). It has both a model (PoRep) and a construction for that model.  Where it falls short as a SPOT for PoS in Filecoin, though, is: that the model is not the one Filecoin currently uses (researchers cannot pick the model used there to build new PoS directly); the construction is not quite the one we use. We would like to write a paper without this shortcomings and that can be the point of reference for Filecoin.
4. Good accessible communication of technical results (current writeups are too technical and they require guidance by internal experts in cryptonet; this does not scale and keeps even academic readers at a distance)

We want to progress on all these goals at the same time through one self contained paper. We believe that framing some of our efforts for the next two-three months as a paper is going to give the highest impact. Other efforts (discussed below) could be followed in parallel and with lower attention.

More on the article, its content and why it would achieve the above.

• it would be submitted (and written at a level at which it could be accepted) at very good conferences to gain visibility
• it would have the simplest model(s) of PoS and a discussion of why that definition can be lifted to the context of Filecoin