Bitoin SoK paper
--
Team so far:
Andrew Miller, Joshua Kroll, Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Jeremy
Clark, Ed Felten.

We welcome additional contributors.

What's an SoK paper?
====
- Basically a really good survey paper. See Oakland's SoK
criteria. 
http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2013/cfp.html 

  Following the success of the previous years' conferences, we are also
  soliciting papers focused on systematization of knowledge (SoK). The
  goal of this call is to encourage work that evaluates, systematizes,
  and contextualizes existing knowledge. These papers can provide a high
  value to our community but may not be accepted because of a lack of
  novel research contributions. Suitable papers include survey papers
  that provide useful perspectives on major research areas, papers that
  support or challenge long-held beliefs with compelling evidence, or
  papers that provide an extensive and realistic evaluation of competing
  approaches to solving specific problems. Submissions are encouraged to
  analyze the current research landscape: identify areas that have
  enjoyed much research attention, point out open areas with unsolved
  challenges, and present a prioritization that can guide researchers to
  make progress on solving important challenges. Submissions must be
  distinguished by a checkbox on the submission form. In addition, the
  paper title must have the prefix "SoK:". They will be reviewed by the
  full PC and held to the same standards as traditional research papers,
  except instead of emphasizing novel research contributions the
  emphasis will be on value to the community. Accepted papers will be
  presented at the symposium and included in the proceedings.


What's our schtick?
=====
Our paper will be the first to systematically explore the design space
of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Our paper has several contributions.
- We will provide a comprehensive explanation of the Bitcoin protocol
and ecosystem, targeting computer science researchers (as opposed to
policy, economists, or end users). There is currently no truly great
overview of Bitcoin that researchers can cite and point to, and as a
result every paper has to describe Bitcoin from scratch.

- We will provide novel abstractions/generalizations as a basis for
understanding and evaluating the complexity not just Bitcoin, but also
the significantly different related systems such as Mastercoin,
Ethereum, Ripple, etc.

- We will provide a categorization and comparison of all the
proposed Bitcoin extensions and alternatives, both from the academic
community and the developer community. There are a ton of great ideas
buried in the Bitcoin dev forums and mailing lists, where it's hard
for researchers to find them.


How to contribute?
====
- Contribute specific descriptions of a proposed extension. The best
place for this is in the subsection "description of the rows."

- Contribute a concise but detailed explanation of the "concrete
  function" of Bitcoin today, especially in the "how.tex" background
  section, such as the peer-to-peer network behavior, etc.

- Suggest different evaluation strategies? For an evaluation strategy,
  explain what kinds of extensions/modifications the evaluation
  applies to, and give examples of how to apply it? Tables with
  rows=SpecificExtensions and cols=EvaluationCriteria are particularly
  desirable.

- The best way to actually stake out and submit a contribution is as a
  github pull request. Modify some text, create a patch and a pull
  request, and we can have a discussion inline about how to improve
  and merge it.