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2021-10-28

Djed paper

1. Features
   1. Algorithmically stabilized by a dynamic basket of goods.
   2. Requires a market crash of 60% or more in order to lose its peg.
   3. Minimal Djed
      1. There is a set target price.
      2. Djed evaluates the actual price: the quotient of the reserve and the number of stablecoins in circulation.
      3. Djed maintains a minimum reserve ratio to reduce the risk of adversarial buying and selling. Thus, there is a threshold that will prevent people from purchasing or selling Djed back to the issuer.
      4. Provided that the exchange rate remains constant, the equity per reservecoin always increases. Thus, the token will never be subject to draining.
      5. Limitations
         1. If malicious user can predict exchange rate, the user can drain the reserves.
         2. Every action changes the value, so many could be purchased at one time at a discount.
         3. If the reserve ratio falls to one, the equity falls to zero making the target price of the reserve also zero.
         4. Fees must be rigid.
         5. When the peg is lost, the coin holders suffer losses.
         6. If the reserve ratio is close to the minimum, users may race to sell reserve coins, and future users can be barred from sale until the reserve ratio increases again.
   4. Extended Djed
      1. A nominal price is defined with a constant.
      2. The reserve ratio is dynamically adjusted.
      3. Liabilities are normalized.
      4. When it approaches what would have been the minimum reserve ratio, some of the liabiliities are converted to equity.
   5. Then they did model checking and dynamic analysis.
2. Role in the ecosystem
   1. Babel fees
3. Concerns and discussion

Notes:

Lack of liquidity of these investments may cause the operator to be unable to react quickly enough to changes in demand, compromising the stability in the short-term. Another source of revenue are the fees or spread practiced when buying and selling the stablecoin. For example, if the operator sells USDT for 1.005 USD and buys USDT for 0.995 USD, it has a revenue of 1 cent for every USDT that it buys and then sells, while keeping the price stable within the range from 0.995 and 1.005.


Minimal Djed enjoys several stability properties. The first one is that, in the normal reserve ratio range where purchases and sales are not restricted, users have no incentive to trade stablecoins outside the peg range in a secondary market. (In practice, there are other factors beyond the reserve ratio that may restrict inter- action of the user with the bank, such as blockchain congestion and high blockchain transaction fees. Such factors would have an effect on the ability of the bank to maintain the peg range in secondary markets.)

The second stability property is that stablecoins remain pegged despite market crashes up to a magnitude that depends on the reserve ratio.

Another crucial property is that the bank never becomes insolvent, which is a condition defined by having negative equity.

Another important property is that, provided that the exchange remains constant, the bank is never in a state susceptible to bank runs where stablecoin holders would feel incentivized to race against each other to sell their stablecoins.

The following theorem shows that, provided that the exchange rate remains constant, the equity per reservecoin always increases.

Revolution in Scientific Transparency

1. Pasteur put in his will not to let anyone see his lab notebook.
2. Fraud and abuse in science as shown by Elisabeth Bik in her twitter along with @mortenoxe, @TigerBB8 and @SmutClyde
3. The field is pushing for more transparency, rigor, and reproducibility.
   1. NIH policies and guidelines
   2. FlowRepository and the role of Flow Cytometry
   3. Journals
   4. Ngram
   5. How-to guide
4. Potential strategies to get started
   1. Hash data automatically and store hashes in NFTs on the blockchain.
   2. Publishing
   3. Publishing anonymously and verifying data authenticity
   4. VABrandon's note that QC and reagents could be stored on-chain. I should say that probably hashes will be sufficient, but we can do side-chains.
5. Action items
   1. Task force to identify current projects and implement proof-of-concept for data hashing
   2. Task force to imagine how an academic system of anonymous or pseudonymous publishing would work (apropos of Charles Hoskinson)
   3. We should speak with FlowJo at BD.

Decentralised Autonomous Organization (DAO) Models

1. Compare against business models.
2. Found excellent articles on dows in general.
3. Inefficiencies in trad. companies DAOs can slove.

The Utu-ubuntu Business Model

As an economic geographer and scholar of small enterprises, I have searched for a business model that resonates with the values I experienced in Ngethu – values of resilience, self-reliance, solidarity entrepreneurship, economic justice, communal responsibility and inclusiveness. So far, the only model I have found that begins to fit these criteria is that practised by traders and artisans who run marketplaces in Kenya. As explained earlier, I have named it the utu-ubuntu business model. ‘Utu’ is a Swahili word for the state of being human and acting humanely. Ubuntu is a philosophical concept from southern Africa that refers to the inextricable interconnections between all human beings (Tutu 1999). The value system embedded in the philosophies of utu and ubuntu holds that all human beings occupy a single moral universe and share a moral sensibility that makes them recognise their duty to each other. As Kenyan philosopher John S Mbiti explains in his influential work African Religions and Philosophy, this is the understanding that ‘I am because you are, and because you are therefore I am’ (1969: 108).60

Few would suggest that economics can be divorced from our humanity even if solidarity and collaboration are not exactly championed in the world’s currently dominant economic systems. However, as Polanyi (1944) describes it, in the 19th century, ‘the great transformation’ driven by industrialisation led to the global economy becoming disengaged from social control. The supposedly self-regulating ‘free’ market forms the basis of capitalism’s entrenched inequalities. In response to the failures of the capitalist economy, many have advocated for an economy that serves everyone as opposed to rewarding only a small elite (see Hart et al. 2010). In previously published work, I have that the ethics and practices of traders and artisans in African markets offer a tangible example of a more humane economic system (Kinyanjui 2012, 2014). This is a system in which values and norms, combined with an awareness of how our actions impact on others, determine the economic strategies we deploy (De Dora 2011).