Research and Development Phase

Work : Researchers

Buy-In : Researchers, Protocol Developers

The first step in building support for your idea should be to get researchers and developers on board.

At a very high level, this will generally involve:

• Describing your idea at a level suitable for optech
• Comparing your idea to similar ideas from the past
• Documenting the tradeoffs of your idea versus other approaches
• Taking feedback about the drawbacks and trying to fix them
• Building simulations and getting researchers to poke holes in them
• Work on theoretical security proofs

The main goals at this phase should be:

• To save time if your idea has previously been explored
• To ensure the problem space is well understood
• To brainstorm alternative solutions before investing too much time and effort
• To have widely acceptable metrics for how changes in this space make things better or worse