Snappy
Pivian
This is a pre-proposal to garner feedback around the proposed potential alliance between PIVX and the Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation. It is being posted by SnappySnap on behalf of Dan Neal (of the Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation - more about Dan below).
At a high level - the Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation is a non-profit currently run by Penn State Professor Dan Neal. He is also a military veteran, adjunct professor at ASU, and has many inroads in the computer science/IT departments at universities.
The focus of the breakthrough blockchain foundation: Business, Blockchain, Tutelage and Kinship - the focus being on being a conduit for college students (and soon high school students) to access education, experience, and opportunities in the blockchain/cryptocurrency realms.
The intent of the proposed alliance is to bring PIVX into the forefront of partnership with the breakthrough blockchain foundation. This would position PIVX as the main champion of all endeavors of the BBF, which include: meetups, conferences, seminars, textbooks, online education courses, Tutorship, Senior Projects, and more. Additionally, the goal would be to create direct ties from the university layer into PIVX, to gain experience, as well as provide a myriad of services ranging from:
- use cases for PIVX
- development support
- Academic research
- Marketing
- Business Development
In summary, PIVX would be brought to the various universities as a real world, live use case for various students and programs to study, and work with in real time.
BACKGROUND
Connection to PIVX:
I reached out to Snappy Snap (Bryan) on twitter after reading/learning a lot about PIVX (as well as both being from Pennsylvania). We quickly began to explore the oppertunities in front of us, and have been in constant communication for about 12 months building, planning, and developing what is now the Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation.
Who I Am: Dan Neal
I am a professional technologist and lover of all things problem solving. From a very early age, I have had a profound desire to learn all there is to know about computers, programming and technology in general. Starting in junior high and all the way through my master’s degree, expression of problem solving skills in programming, databases, multi-media and web development have been prevalent.
I have worked with fortune 500 hundred companies to take advantage of the myriad of opportunities that IT presents. From ERP solutions, to custom designed e-commerce solutions, to on location green screen videos, if it was IT skills that were needed, I could provide.
I am currently a world campus faculty member at PSU. I have used that time to develop ways to improve student success, not just within the university foundations courses, but across the curriculum and in their respective professional lives. In addition, I am writing my first 2 textbookx, an introduction to information technology and a blockchain focused textbook. The newly created Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation was established earlier this year and has received endorsements of its endeavors from Penn State.
I earned my Master’s degree through Robert Morris University in the field of Information Systems, my Bachelor’s degree from Slippery Rock University in the field of Information Technology, and my Associate’s degree from the International Academy of Design and Technology in the field of computer information management.
I am a former service member, counting 8 years in the military to my credit.
What is the Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation
Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation is non-profit endeavor and a model for ensuring that the future of blockchain and encouraging the leadership of the United States in this technology, are both shining successes. It emerged from the initial thought of a conference focused on bringing students in US based educational institutions, specifically starting in the State of Pennsylvania, directly in contact with blockchain projects, to bridge the gap of what is possible now. The high-level goals for the Breakthrough Foundation, in a few words are:
Business, Blockchain, Tutelage and Kinship.
We want to not only bring awareness to blockchain through education but, our goal is to help the local communities as well.
This concept was born in 2018 with an eye towards highlighting some of the student talent and institutions that we have in the Pennsylvania area, and then expanding outwards. All too often, in my humble opinion, we lose a lot of talented students to other areas because we do not do a good enough job of really spotlighting all of the great things that we have going on. Great industry, great students, great organizations, great educational institutions and groups really accentuate this wonderful region of the United States.
The foundation will have a few main initiatives which are:
We have goals of expansion that will include not only highlighting local communities but to also give back to the local cities and communities using these emerging applications of as a beacon to draw other companies and organizations to our area. With this technology, we can be more inclusive and we can do more good. This is the driving focus of not only our event but the foundation that has been born out of the event itself. Our goal is to eventually filter this down to the high school level.
We intend on helping the community through events and also use these events as a springboard to bring business and industry here to the region of Pennsylvania at first. Not only that, but with my service background and one of my associate’s military experiences as well, we want to help current, future and former service members in their integration back into society and their success in business and education.
Another of the main focuses, considering the large veteran presence in the region, is to work with veteran supporting government and private institutions, to bring better treatment, opportunities and organizations that can support the success of these sacrificing and wonderful individuals. To that end, we will be supporting and funding a number of veteran facing organizations that help and support our service members as they transition into civilian life and to help the causes that they find near and dear. One group involved with the event, Leonidas International, a non profit dedicated to the transition of veterans suffering from emotional and physical wounds back into society, will be helping to get the word out and to showcase this event to our veteran friends.
INITIAL EVENT DETAILS
BreakThrough Blockchain Inaugural Conference
When: May 29, 30 2020
Where: Penn State (Brandywine Campus)
Large companies have been invited to our event, hosted and sponsored by Penn State University, to bring them together in one venue to not only highlight what our region has to offer, but to see what kinds of interesting conversations could come out of that mix of groups and people. The hope and the goal is to get more investment from these businesses and blockchain groups into this area. With the groups that are now showing interest in this event, we have a real opportunity to make that happen.
With Penn State’s involvement and support of the event, this will serve as a beacon to the region as to what is possible with blockchain based events.
We will and are Proud to already have PIVX confirmed (Bryan Doreian) as attending, and will be looking to build out some content for the event with PIVX.
Attendees Confirmed:
Amazon’s Blockchain Team
Amazon AWS Teams
BNYMellon
University of Pittsburgh
University of Queensland
Digibyte
Decent Bet
Quantstamp
Litecoin Foundation
Legaler ICO
Blockchain Assembly
Silver Bay Capital
Chainalysis
PIVX
Axel
We are actively discussing with:
ASP
IBM
Boeing
SALT
Solar Coin
Uphold
MICRO EVENT DETAILS
There will be an on-going series of smaller events to highlight a small set of companies, speakers and projects. The events will be used as a spring board to highlight certain platforms, textbooks, speakers and projects to help to gain interest and awareness in the foundation, it’s educational, philanthropic, professional and commercial endeavors.
With each event, we will be bringing focus to certain industries, projects and community based organizations that will help to bring awareness to not only their company but to their causes and activities.
The events will purposely be kept small and can be streamed and saved to help to build social media engagement, drive awareness to future events and also as a lead up to the larger events. These events will create a strong following with their intimate nature, highlighting the social and business uses that these technologies can have to help to benefit not only business but people, community and governance in general.
We have a number of interested schools, to include:
Penn State
Pitt
Duke
ASU
UNLV
We will be reaching out to:
CMU
University of Colorado
University of Minnesota
Projects Interested:
Litecoin Foundation
BNYMellon
Digibyte
Axel
Zenzo
Vendible
WHERE ARE WE GOING
A leader in any endeavor is usually one that acts early, they are ahead of the rest of the crowd. Formalized blockchain course materials, events and community partnerships in the higher ed space are limited and unorganized. The opportunity with this event, this foundation and the supporting materials that we are putting together will help to firmly fix Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation as a leader for blockchain in the higher ed space. From course materials, to webinars, to events, to consulting, to community partnerships, our foundation will be established as one of the industry leaders for any group that needs educational materials and support.
The following statistics from late last year help to showcase the opportunities that blockchain represents. According to statistics from Burning Glass Technologies, there were about 1,838 job posts related to blockchain in 2016. By the end of 2017, this number had climbed to 3,958. 2018 figures have dwarfed these statistics with over 6,000 vacancies. According to a recent study carried out by Glassdoor, there were 1,775 blockchain-related job-openings advertised during the month of August, and this is in the U.S. alone. This is a 300 percent increase compared to the same period last year.
Once phase one has been established, phase two will lead to disseminating our expertise and materials to secondary ed and businesses to help to create a large base of groups, organizations, and companies interacting with our foundation. At the moment, we are currently engaged in creating one textbook, with 3 more to follow. These materials will be adopted by a number of higher ed institutions, to include Penn State, Arizona State University, Southern New Hampshire University, University of Nevada Las Vegas and Princeton. Once these textbooks are complete, we will begin creating webinar, virtual lab and other supporting materials for these organizations and their student base to engage with.
We are in the beginning phase to develop a deep relationship with Penn State, their innovation center, their launchpad, the College of IST and the Smeal College of Business to establish a blockchain incubator to highlight any number of projects, platforms and technologies in the blockchain space. This should also include the revival of the bitcoin club, to have a different name and work towards different blockchain based hackathons, speakers and research initiatives to highlight quality student projects and ideas. Next, we will begin looking towards the secondary education institutions to help to disseminate these materials to underprivileged youth, with the goal to be to help them attain skills, education, scholarships and ultimately, an ability to be better positioned to succeed with a quality career in blockchain and the IT space.
My role will be to lead and spearhead the creation and oversite of the materials for the various outlets. I will also be working to build more relationships with existing supporting schools and new ones to continue to grow the network. I will be looking to add new staff to help in these endeavors, in addition to the soon to be created steering committee who will help to advise on the various agenda items and direction of the foundation.
OBJECTIVES
Based on the roadmap from the previous section, there are a number of items that will be addressed with the foundation, that we look forward to partnering with PIVX around as an integral part of these endeavors.
INITIAL PIVX DELIVERABLES
Orientation Module:
Welcome to Your Online Campus
Module 1:
Welcome to blockchain technology
Module 2:
PIVX scaling
Module 3:
Identity protection with PIVX, how is it done?
How
do other Blockchains do it?
Module 4:
Desktop, paper wallets, why?
Module 5:
Using PIVX to design new types of digital platforms
Module 6:
The future of blockchain technology, AI, and digital privacy
Some proposed potential courses with students completing:
Core Units
BLK001 Develop a blockchain business model
BLK002 Create trust and activate a blockchain with smart contracts
BLK003 Develop a framework for operating a blockchain network
BLK004 Develop a strategic network framework for interoperability
Elective Units
BLK005 Develop a blockchain governance model for stewardship
BLK006 Analyze performance of a business model deployed on a blockchain
As a sample of some of the educational initiatives, an assignment might look like:
Assignment 1
Written Portion
Questions
1 - Hash functions
Suppose Mallory is launching a new ‘secure’ messaging app. When Alice installs the app, it creates an account for her on the server using a hash of her phone number. The app then queries the server by sending a hash of each phone number in Alice’s contacts to learn which of Alice’s friends are already on the platform. The goal is that users can discover their friends without the server learning the contents of every user’s address book.
Assuming phone numbers are 10 digits, explain why this does not achieve the intended security goal. How can Mallory act maliciously to determine the phone numbers of every one of Alice’s contacts?
2 - Signatures
Signature schemes allow for public-key message authentication, meaning that both the integrity and provenance of a message can be checked. However, they are often computationally expensive to compute, especially over large messages.
Given a secure signature scheme and a collision-resistant hash function, explain how you could construct a new secure signature scheme wherein the signature scheme can operate over a smaller input, and informally justify the security of this new scheme. Include an overview of the Sign and Verify operations.
3 - Proof-of-Work
Suppose instead of the existing proof-of-work, Bitcoin required n sequential hashes of a block to prove that n iterations of sha256 had been computed.
Explain why this construction is infeasible.
4 - Bitcoin
Explain qualitatively why the verification of a transaction in the most recently broadcast block is less reliable than one in a block a few prior to the most recent block.
Coding Portion
QR Code Generator:
Imagine that you will be sending and receiving messages that need to be encrypted. You will be using a public/private key approach to securing the data. The Public and Private key pair comprise of two uniquely related cryptographic keys (basically long random numbers). Below is an example of a Public Key:
3048 0241 00C9 18FA CF8D EB2D EFD5 FD37 89B9 E069 EA97 FC20 5E35 F577 EE31 C4FB C6E4 4811 7D86 BC8F BAFA 362F 922B F01B 2F40 C744 2654 C0DD 2881 D673 CA2B 4003 C266 E2CD CB02 0301 0001
The Public Key is what its name suggests - Public. It is made available to everyone via a publicly accessible repository or directory. On the other hand, the Private Key must remain confidential to its respective owner.
Because the key pair is mathematically related, whatever is encrypted with a Public Key may only be decrypted by its corresponding Private Key and vice versa. For example, if Bob wants to send sensitive data to Alice, and wants to be sure that only Alice may be able to read it, he will encrypt the data with
Alice’s Public Key. Only Alice has access to her corresponding Private Key and as a result is the only person with the capability of decrypting the encrypted data back into its original form.
As only Alice has access to her Private Key, it is possible that only Alice can decrypt the encrypted data. Even if someone else gains access to the encrypted data, it will remain confidential as they should not have access to Alice’s Private Key.
You will be writing 2 php scripts.
1 - The first part will take a user supplied URL, encrypt it and generate a QR code. Save that URL to your computer.
2 - Write another php script that will allow the user to upload the QR code, unencrypt the data in the QR code and take the browser to that address.
REPORTING
We will, throughout the duration of this proposal, provide back to the PIVX community the following:
With all of these projects and initiatives, we will require some budget to get started. This will include the tools, personnel and travel/meeting expenses required to make these items able to be completed in a timely manner.
Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation is requesting a 9 month commitment for the following monthly bequest:
We would also hope that as we arrived towards the conclusion of the 9-month commitment, that both parties would look to renew/create another proposal, to continue the work and foundations laid during the prior 9 months.
At a high level - the Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation is a non-profit currently run by Penn State Professor Dan Neal. He is also a military veteran, adjunct professor at ASU, and has many inroads in the computer science/IT departments at universities.
The focus of the breakthrough blockchain foundation: Business, Blockchain, Tutelage and Kinship - the focus being on being a conduit for college students (and soon high school students) to access education, experience, and opportunities in the blockchain/cryptocurrency realms.
The intent of the proposed alliance is to bring PIVX into the forefront of partnership with the breakthrough blockchain foundation. This would position PIVX as the main champion of all endeavors of the BBF, which include: meetups, conferences, seminars, textbooks, online education courses, Tutorship, Senior Projects, and more. Additionally, the goal would be to create direct ties from the university layer into PIVX, to gain experience, as well as provide a myriad of services ranging from:
- use cases for PIVX
- development support
- Academic research
- Marketing
- Business Development
In summary, PIVX would be brought to the various universities as a real world, live use case for various students and programs to study, and work with in real time.
BACKGROUND
Connection to PIVX:
I reached out to Snappy Snap (Bryan) on twitter after reading/learning a lot about PIVX (as well as both being from Pennsylvania). We quickly began to explore the oppertunities in front of us, and have been in constant communication for about 12 months building, planning, and developing what is now the Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation.
Who I Am: Dan Neal
I am a professional technologist and lover of all things problem solving. From a very early age, I have had a profound desire to learn all there is to know about computers, programming and technology in general. Starting in junior high and all the way through my master’s degree, expression of problem solving skills in programming, databases, multi-media and web development have been prevalent.
I have worked with fortune 500 hundred companies to take advantage of the myriad of opportunities that IT presents. From ERP solutions, to custom designed e-commerce solutions, to on location green screen videos, if it was IT skills that were needed, I could provide.
I am currently a world campus faculty member at PSU. I have used that time to develop ways to improve student success, not just within the university foundations courses, but across the curriculum and in their respective professional lives. In addition, I am writing my first 2 textbookx, an introduction to information technology and a blockchain focused textbook. The newly created Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation was established earlier this year and has received endorsements of its endeavors from Penn State.
I earned my Master’s degree through Robert Morris University in the field of Information Systems, my Bachelor’s degree from Slippery Rock University in the field of Information Technology, and my Associate’s degree from the International Academy of Design and Technology in the field of computer information management.
I am a former service member, counting 8 years in the military to my credit.
What is the Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation
Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation is non-profit endeavor and a model for ensuring that the future of blockchain and encouraging the leadership of the United States in this technology, are both shining successes. It emerged from the initial thought of a conference focused on bringing students in US based educational institutions, specifically starting in the State of Pennsylvania, directly in contact with blockchain projects, to bridge the gap of what is possible now. The high-level goals for the Breakthrough Foundation, in a few words are:
Business, Blockchain, Tutelage and Kinship.
We want to not only bring awareness to blockchain through education but, our goal is to help the local communities as well.
This concept was born in 2018 with an eye towards highlighting some of the student talent and institutions that we have in the Pennsylvania area, and then expanding outwards. All too often, in my humble opinion, we lose a lot of talented students to other areas because we do not do a good enough job of really spotlighting all of the great things that we have going on. Great industry, great students, great organizations, great educational institutions and groups really accentuate this wonderful region of the United States.
The foundation will have a few main initiatives which are:
- Hosting blockchain conferences
- Developing new educational materials
- Exploring blockchain infrastructure and mining
- Establishment of renewable energy
- Obtaining commercial real estate in economically depressed areas
- Esports
- Veterans Support
- Providing opportunities for students to participate in a diverse range of projects in an incubator style manner
We have goals of expansion that will include not only highlighting local communities but to also give back to the local cities and communities using these emerging applications of as a beacon to draw other companies and organizations to our area. With this technology, we can be more inclusive and we can do more good. This is the driving focus of not only our event but the foundation that has been born out of the event itself. Our goal is to eventually filter this down to the high school level.
We intend on helping the community through events and also use these events as a springboard to bring business and industry here to the region of Pennsylvania at first. Not only that, but with my service background and one of my associate’s military experiences as well, we want to help current, future and former service members in their integration back into society and their success in business and education.
Another of the main focuses, considering the large veteran presence in the region, is to work with veteran supporting government and private institutions, to bring better treatment, opportunities and organizations that can support the success of these sacrificing and wonderful individuals. To that end, we will be supporting and funding a number of veteran facing organizations that help and support our service members as they transition into civilian life and to help the causes that they find near and dear. One group involved with the event, Leonidas International, a non profit dedicated to the transition of veterans suffering from emotional and physical wounds back into society, will be helping to get the word out and to showcase this event to our veteran friends.
INITIAL EVENT DETAILS
BreakThrough Blockchain Inaugural Conference
When: May 29, 30 2020
Where: Penn State (Brandywine Campus)
Large companies have been invited to our event, hosted and sponsored by Penn State University, to bring them together in one venue to not only highlight what our region has to offer, but to see what kinds of interesting conversations could come out of that mix of groups and people. The hope and the goal is to get more investment from these businesses and blockchain groups into this area. With the groups that are now showing interest in this event, we have a real opportunity to make that happen.
With Penn State’s involvement and support of the event, this will serve as a beacon to the region as to what is possible with blockchain based events.
We will and are Proud to already have PIVX confirmed (Bryan Doreian) as attending, and will be looking to build out some content for the event with PIVX.
Attendees Confirmed:
Amazon’s Blockchain Team
Amazon AWS Teams
BNYMellon
University of Pittsburgh
University of Queensland
Digibyte
Decent Bet
Quantstamp
Litecoin Foundation
Legaler ICO
Blockchain Assembly
Silver Bay Capital
Chainalysis
PIVX
Axel
We are actively discussing with:
ASP
IBM
Boeing
SALT
Solar Coin
Uphold
MICRO EVENT DETAILS
There will be an on-going series of smaller events to highlight a small set of companies, speakers and projects. The events will be used as a spring board to highlight certain platforms, textbooks, speakers and projects to help to gain interest and awareness in the foundation, it’s educational, philanthropic, professional and commercial endeavors.
With each event, we will be bringing focus to certain industries, projects and community based organizations that will help to bring awareness to not only their company but to their causes and activities.
The events will purposely be kept small and can be streamed and saved to help to build social media engagement, drive awareness to future events and also as a lead up to the larger events. These events will create a strong following with their intimate nature, highlighting the social and business uses that these technologies can have to help to benefit not only business but people, community and governance in general.
We have a number of interested schools, to include:
Penn State
Pitt
Duke
ASU
UNLV
We will be reaching out to:
CMU
University of Colorado
University of Minnesota
Projects Interested:
Litecoin Foundation
BNYMellon
Digibyte
Axel
Zenzo
Vendible
WHERE ARE WE GOING
A leader in any endeavor is usually one that acts early, they are ahead of the rest of the crowd. Formalized blockchain course materials, events and community partnerships in the higher ed space are limited and unorganized. The opportunity with this event, this foundation and the supporting materials that we are putting together will help to firmly fix Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation as a leader for blockchain in the higher ed space. From course materials, to webinars, to events, to consulting, to community partnerships, our foundation will be established as one of the industry leaders for any group that needs educational materials and support.
The following statistics from late last year help to showcase the opportunities that blockchain represents. According to statistics from Burning Glass Technologies, there were about 1,838 job posts related to blockchain in 2016. By the end of 2017, this number had climbed to 3,958. 2018 figures have dwarfed these statistics with over 6,000 vacancies. According to a recent study carried out by Glassdoor, there were 1,775 blockchain-related job-openings advertised during the month of August, and this is in the U.S. alone. This is a 300 percent increase compared to the same period last year.
Once phase one has been established, phase two will lead to disseminating our expertise and materials to secondary ed and businesses to help to create a large base of groups, organizations, and companies interacting with our foundation. At the moment, we are currently engaged in creating one textbook, with 3 more to follow. These materials will be adopted by a number of higher ed institutions, to include Penn State, Arizona State University, Southern New Hampshire University, University of Nevada Las Vegas and Princeton. Once these textbooks are complete, we will begin creating webinar, virtual lab and other supporting materials for these organizations and their student base to engage with.
We are in the beginning phase to develop a deep relationship with Penn State, their innovation center, their launchpad, the College of IST and the Smeal College of Business to establish a blockchain incubator to highlight any number of projects, platforms and technologies in the blockchain space. This should also include the revival of the bitcoin club, to have a different name and work towards different blockchain based hackathons, speakers and research initiatives to highlight quality student projects and ideas. Next, we will begin looking towards the secondary education institutions to help to disseminate these materials to underprivileged youth, with the goal to be to help them attain skills, education, scholarships and ultimately, an ability to be better positioned to succeed with a quality career in blockchain and the IT space.
My role will be to lead and spearhead the creation and oversite of the materials for the various outlets. I will also be working to build more relationships with existing supporting schools and new ones to continue to grow the network. I will be looking to add new staff to help in these endeavors, in addition to the soon to be created steering committee who will help to advise on the various agenda items and direction of the foundation.
OBJECTIVES
Based on the roadmap from the previous section, there are a number of items that will be addressed with the foundation, that we look forward to partnering with PIVX around as an integral part of these endeavors.
- Be a leader in the blockchain higher ed space
- Provide incubators, laboratories, and conduits to PIVX. Essentially, beginning to establish a funnel of students looking to get into the blockchain realm, into a arena where they could work on various projects that would support, grow, and utilize PIVX.
- This would range from devs, marketing, business development, application development, media, and more.
- Be a leader in the blockchain secondary ed space
- This would funnel from the above, where university students would begin to partner back into the high school system, creating clubs, and courses.
- Creation of blockchain clubs at colleges and universities
- Introduction to department chairs, provosts, departmental leadership and other business/educational institutions to help to further the mission of increasing visibility and adoption of agenda and materials.
- Create course materials for action items 1&2 to include:
- Textbooks
- Assignments
- Multi-media
- Virtual lab environments
- Create veteran friendly and supportive initiatives
- Create community-based outreach programs to help enrich the regions we are active in
- Engage with various technology organizations to help to form partnerships where appropriate
- Encourage the relocation and creation of projects to the areas we are active in to create more and better jobs
- Be an advocate and lobbyist with various state and local governments to create blockchain friendly initiatives, investment and laws/regulation which will support the growth of the technology
- Create various blockchain scholarship and investment opportunities for students and start-ups
- Increase visibility through the creation of educational events, conferences, hackathons and job fairs.
- Introduction to Investment Banking, Fintech, energy, real estate and other technology related projects.
- Clone our accelerator programs where appropriate
- Creation of partnerships that will lead to new products, services, projects and businesses centered around blockchain, esports, casino gaming, energy and commercial real estate.
INITIAL PIVX DELIVERABLES
- A lot of the focus for working with PIVX initially will be uncovering, exploring, and implementing ways in which university students can work with PIVX. At the onset, we will be:
- Establishing a working core of 3-5 students who can liaison with a project manager from PIVX.
- This initial core will begin to frame projects and funnel more students over the next 6-9 months. The goal is multi-faceted. To provide students with the opportunity to work directly with one of the leading and pioneering blockchain projects, PIVX. To provide PIVX with direct access to resources, talent, and a swath of opportunity into the university and academic realms.
- These projects that we plan on developing range from:
- Application development utilizing PIVX core (Ancillary applications highlighting the use case of and for PIVX).
- Electron and other wallet designs for simpler use and interface
- Social Media and PR work
- Academic research and writing about PIVX and its core technology, advancements, and blockchain firsts.
- Business Development
- Other to be explored opportunities for students.
- We will also be looking to highlight/showcase the PIVX codebase to the various blockchain/crypto clubs on campus (And one’s being established) as a world-class blockchain to know and understand.
- With this, we will be looking to create and establish training and teaching materials around and for PIVX.
Orientation Module:
Welcome to Your Online Campus
Module 1:
Welcome to blockchain technology
Module 2:
PIVX scaling
Module 3:
Identity protection with PIVX, how is it done?
How
do other Blockchains do it?
Module 4:
Desktop, paper wallets, why?
Module 5:
Using PIVX to design new types of digital platforms
Module 6:
The future of blockchain technology, AI, and digital privacy
Some proposed potential courses with students completing:
Core Units
BLK001 Develop a blockchain business model
BLK002 Create trust and activate a blockchain with smart contracts
BLK003 Develop a framework for operating a blockchain network
BLK004 Develop a strategic network framework for interoperability
Elective Units
BLK005 Develop a blockchain governance model for stewardship
BLK006 Analyze performance of a business model deployed on a blockchain
As a sample of some of the educational initiatives, an assignment might look like:
Assignment 1
Written Portion
Questions
1 - Hash functions
Suppose Mallory is launching a new ‘secure’ messaging app. When Alice installs the app, it creates an account for her on the server using a hash of her phone number. The app then queries the server by sending a hash of each phone number in Alice’s contacts to learn which of Alice’s friends are already on the platform. The goal is that users can discover their friends without the server learning the contents of every user’s address book.
Assuming phone numbers are 10 digits, explain why this does not achieve the intended security goal. How can Mallory act maliciously to determine the phone numbers of every one of Alice’s contacts?
2 - Signatures
Signature schemes allow for public-key message authentication, meaning that both the integrity and provenance of a message can be checked. However, they are often computationally expensive to compute, especially over large messages.
Given a secure signature scheme and a collision-resistant hash function, explain how you could construct a new secure signature scheme wherein the signature scheme can operate over a smaller input, and informally justify the security of this new scheme. Include an overview of the Sign and Verify operations.
3 - Proof-of-Work
Suppose instead of the existing proof-of-work, Bitcoin required n sequential hashes of a block to prove that n iterations of sha256 had been computed.
Explain why this construction is infeasible.
4 - Bitcoin
Explain qualitatively why the verification of a transaction in the most recently broadcast block is less reliable than one in a block a few prior to the most recent block.
Coding Portion
QR Code Generator:
Imagine that you will be sending and receiving messages that need to be encrypted. You will be using a public/private key approach to securing the data. The Public and Private key pair comprise of two uniquely related cryptographic keys (basically long random numbers). Below is an example of a Public Key:
3048 0241 00C9 18FA CF8D EB2D EFD5 FD37 89B9 E069 EA97 FC20 5E35 F577 EE31 C4FB C6E4 4811 7D86 BC8F BAFA 362F 922B F01B 2F40 C744 2654 C0DD 2881 D673 CA2B 4003 C266 E2CD CB02 0301 0001
The Public Key is what its name suggests - Public. It is made available to everyone via a publicly accessible repository or directory. On the other hand, the Private Key must remain confidential to its respective owner.
Because the key pair is mathematically related, whatever is encrypted with a Public Key may only be decrypted by its corresponding Private Key and vice versa. For example, if Bob wants to send sensitive data to Alice, and wants to be sure that only Alice may be able to read it, he will encrypt the data with
Alice’s Public Key. Only Alice has access to her corresponding Private Key and as a result is the only person with the capability of decrypting the encrypted data back into its original form.
As only Alice has access to her Private Key, it is possible that only Alice can decrypt the encrypted data. Even if someone else gains access to the encrypted data, it will remain confidential as they should not have access to Alice’s Private Key.
You will be writing 2 php scripts.
1 - The first part will take a user supplied URL, encrypt it and generate a QR code. Save that URL to your computer.
2 - Write another php script that will allow the user to upload the QR code, unencrypt the data in the QR code and take the browser to that address.
REPORTING
We will, throughout the duration of this proposal, provide back to the PIVX community the following:
- A monthly, written reporting of the updates, developments, successes, and ongoing work of our efforts.
- Provide weekly status updates to include things like meetings, sponsors, contacts and event updates
- Available for a monthly call with the community to provide updates as well.
With all of these projects and initiatives, we will require some budget to get started. This will include the tools, personnel and travel/meeting expenses required to make these items able to be completed in a timely manner.
Breakthrough Blockchain Foundation is requesting a 9 month commitment for the following monthly bequest:
| Budget Item | Cost |
| Personnel | 25% |
| Tools | 25% |
| Software | 10% |
| Hardware | 10% |
| Marketing Materials and Memberships | 15% |
| Travel/Meetings | 15% |
| Total | 7500 PIVX/mo |
