Cardano for the Masses: Age of Voltaire Edition

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado—always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is February 20th, 2023, and I wanted to make a quick video about a book I got. This is the second time I've gotten a copy, and it's updated. It's from John Green, titled "Age of Ulta Edition: Cardano for the Masses." Not too long ago, John approached us and said, "Hey, I'm writing a book about Cardano," and we had a chance to collaborate a little bit with him.

Mostly, he had some questions, and I think Lars did some work with him. This is basically the second edition, looking at what's being proposed for Voltaire. This book is near and dear and important to the community because it's an onboarding manual for what's been done and what's been said. It covers a boatload of things. Looking at the table of contents, Chapter 1 covers the beginning; Chapter 2 is "What is Cardano?

"; Chapter 3 is "Proof of Stake"; Chapter 4 is "Shelley"; Chapter 5 is "Gogan"; Chapter 6 is "Plutus"; Chapter 7 is "Marlow"; Chapter 8 is "Basho"; Chapter 9 is "Voltaire"; and Chapter 10 is "RealFi." It actually includes an entire chapter on RealFi. John has been chipping away at this for quite some time. In fact, I'll read off the preface. Quoting John's work: "I discovered Cardano while researching a college project in 2018.

Ever since, I asked a question of Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson in one of his AMAs. I had intended to write a book of some sort. I tried different ideas, gave up, and returned several times. On hearing the much-anticipated 'Mastering Cardano' book would be delayed, I felt there might be a space for a can opener in the meantime. Writing about cryptocurrencies is challenging.

Most best-selling crypto books have Flesch-Kincaid ease reading scores in the 50s. I wanted a book to be more inclusive. With so much jargon in the blockchain space, I decided to arm the reader with explainers throughout. However, I didn’t want to obstruct the flow either. As Kindle automatically converts footnotes into a pop-up format, explainers are accessible by clicking on superscripts in the text.

The explainers form a glossary at the end of the book. I added excerpts from Charles Hoskinson's various updates to interweave his perspective throughout the book. I felt they add context to many technology decisions while planting a vision for the overall project and industry. I made every effort to be accurate; however, Cardano is evolving rapidly. There has probably been a change or update of some sort as you read this.

I intend to update the book regularly in cadence with Cardano updates, improving readability with each edition. For e-readers, graphics are best viewed in landscape mode." I really do appreciate how hard John has worked on this. By the way, this is his own project. He just woke up one day and said, "what?

Cardano needs a manual, so I’m going to go do that." We were supposed to get around to it with "Mastering Cardano," but we found a good professor to work on that, and then he got cancer and unfortunately wasn’t able to finish it. We were always going to get around to it, but I said, "Let’s wait for the protocol to stabilize to 1.0, and then we can come back to it and write a manual." In the meantime, John did the Lord’s work and actually wrote something like this.

It’s pretty impressive, so I highly recommend you all pick up a copy. As you read through it, keep reading notes. It would be super helpful for you to email John those notes and let him know if you find anything that’s a mistake or something you don’t understand—something you’re having trouble working your way through. I do believe this is kind of a community collaborative project. It’s incumbent upon all of us to make sure that we get this where we need to go, everything from maybe improving the cover art to going chapter by chapter and trying to find ways to get it to a point where this can be considered the Bible of Cardano.

It’s always amazing to see how well, when people are sufficiently motivated, they do write and do things. It’s been seven years being at the helm here, building stuff and getting things done. It hasn’t been easy. We’ve been through a lot of boom and bust cycles, a lot of market collapses, and a lot of turnover. We’ve been through pretty much everything you could imagine, and every step of the way, what’s reinvigorated and gotten us to the next level has been a persistent, tireless effort from the community to keep things moving along.

Every time we’ve opened a new capability—whether it be metadata, opening up things like Mary, which gave us NFTs, or opening up Gogan with extended UTXO—it’s really been astounding to see how quickly the community has been able to create a new feature or functionality or build something interesting. Like Bitcoin before it, it hasn’t always been easy. In fact, in many cases, it takes quite a bit of time to figure out how to do something because a lot of things are new. The staking model was new, the extended UTXO model is new, the way we issue assets is new, Plutus is a new language, and Marlow is a new language. Every single time you bring a new feature out, it does take quite a bit of effort for you guys to figure out how to use it.

But when you do, almost always, you come up with something novel, creative, and exciting. So thank you for that. This book, like all the things we do, is really important. We just keep working at it, chipping away at it. There are a lot of things to come, a lot of debates to come, and they’re going to be challenging and difficult.

I wish I could promise you smooth sailing ahead, but unfortunately, the time has come to leave the warm embrace and cradle of the next item on the roadmap. When that time comes, understanding that almost everything is going to now be a community debate, I was just recently asked about input endorsers. I have no say over that. It’s one of many candidate designs we released last year—a good protocol sketch and some ideas of how it’s going to work. We’re currently writing a really deep and detailed theoretical paper that will explain the security harness behind it.

But at the end of the day, it’ll be broken down into some SIPs, and the community is going to decide that. There are dozens more things that are quite like that along those lines. Genesis, peer-to-peer, extended UTXO, and SIP 1694 are the last four roadmap items under the original setup of things, and those are coming this year. Anything beyond that really is up to you guys about where to go. I hope that we can build the right governance tools and the right places to have dialogue in order to facilitate conversations that converge to clarity.

It’s hard, and not everybody’s going to see eye to eye. Not everybody’s going to be fair in communication, and not everybody’s going to treat each other with respect and dignity. Not everybody’s going to respect the contributions people have made, and that’s just what the internet’s all about. If we have any hope of achieving great things on par with what we’ve achieved before, we’re just going to have to find ways to communicate productively and effectively. The age of Voltaire really is the hardest part of the roadmap, and it’s the one with the least certainty.

We certainly have a lot of great ideas, as do many of you, about the things that need to be done and said. I really hope that those ideas can see the light. Next week, there’s a workshop here in Colorado. Some of you are actually coming to the office to meet with me and other engineers to have a deep and detailed conversation about the nuances of 1694. It’s kind of a conversation opener above and beyond the SIP, and the hope is that a lot of people in the community can give some great feedback on things they’ve thought about now that there’s been ample time for review.

Based upon that conversation, if it looks positive, it’s just one gate condition for many conditions to come before that ends up in the protocol in some form or another. Once that’s there, it’ll probably be rolled out the same way that the ITN was rolled out and Plutus was rolled out, where there were pioneer programs. Many of you in the stake pool community remember being incentivized testnet staking pioneers and having pioneer pools. I think we can do the same thing as a community with the D-reps. One of the advantages of the D-reps is that they help filter and manage the maelstrom of chaotic opinions, and they have a direct relationship with their constituents.

So it’s a much more manageable set of people to have discussions with that is a good representative sample of the opinion set of the ecosystem. At this juncture, there’s a very diverse set of people. I often say, and I think it might even be quoted in John’s book, that the community’s grown up when there are plenty of people floating around that despise me or don’t like me but like Cardano. With the contingent staking debate, we’ve certainly seen a few of them, and certainly tomorrow with the Twitter space, we’ll probably see more. That’s a good thing; diversity of opinion is a good thing.

To make that opinion actionable, that’s the point of the D-rep system because it gives people the ability to delegate their voice to either themselves or to those that they feel reflect their opinion. That large maelstrom of D-reps will allow the conversation to get to the next level and hopefully allow the ecosystem to stabilize around a coherent roadmap. The MBO is another essential pillar of governance in that it allows us to have fact-based conversations and achieve objective reality. One of the biggest problems with modern democracies is that people don’t actually talk to each other; they talk at each other and talk past each other. Oftentimes, debates devolve into name-calling, personal attacks, and frankly, misrepresentations of what people are trying to accomplish.

The point of institutions is that they allow you to objectively assess reality and filter the complexity down to an executive summary of what people are actually talking about. They also allow you to, through a principles-based approach, come up with some proposed agendas about where to go and what to do. Cardano, as I built it and wrote in "Why Cardano," was intended to be a financial operating system for those who didn’t have one. This basically meant entire economies could run on it. That’s why we went to Africa and spent years of our lives in the trenches and war zones in some of the poorest countries in the world and some of the most difficult jurisdictions to operate in.

We tried as hard as we could to drive business adoption and learn what the needs are there so we could give economic identity to those who didn’t have it. It was our belief that Cardano, as a protocol, would be well-suited if it evolved in the right direction to meet the needs of those people. At the end of the day, it’s the decision of the community as a whole whether they want the protocol to evolve in that direction or evolve in a different direction. It’s not my decision; I just wrote down my aspirations and hopes. Now that there are three million people floating around, it’s ultimately your choice and decision where you want to go and what you want to do.

I hope the protocol is useful for the things that I’ve done, or else the last four or five years of my life would be very frustrating. We’ll see, but again, it’s not my call. My hope is that you’re at least informed enough to know what the option space is, and that’s why books like these are so important. They’re written by the community for the community and get everybody up to the same speed and same page. One of the D-rep systems and things the MBOs at least allows people to start converging to objective facts—fact-based reality.

Another thing is we never wrote a constitution, and that’s my fault. I should have done it at the very beginning; I just didn’t have the time, bandwidth, or expertise necessary to opine on fundamental human rights. To be fair, the United States of America didn’t do it that way either. We had the original Confederacy that we were founded under, the Articles of Confederacy, and that failed. So we decided that we needed a do-over and wrote the Constitution in response to the ineffectiveness of the first American government ratified by the 13 colonies.

It became the bedrock of the United States, but it took over 200 years. Some would argue there’s still a lot more work to be done because we have an imperfect union, and perhaps some updates need to be done because the founding document didn’t accommodate some of the bugs and hacks that people have taken advantage of to co-opt our government. Similarly, we do have to have a fundamental discussion about what the Cardano protocol means and what the right simplicity and explicitness are. That is my hope in the age of Voltaire—that we can converge to that. I do not believe it can be finished until such a time that we have SIP 1694 and we have the MBO done.

I think we can have lots of draft copies and candidate copies, and there are going to be a lot of fights to come. Ultimately, you’re all going to decide what holding ADA means to you, and that’ll be codified in some way that hopefully is protocol understandable. There are a lot of moving pieces to all of this, and this is a lifelong endeavor. No one has created a perfect government, and it would be heuristic of us to assume that we would be able to do so so quickly. Rather, I just aspire to create a process where every day we leave what we find in a better state than when we found it.

If we can achieve that, then one day I do believe we can build a shining city on a hill. I believe we can actually build something that is the envy of all, but it’s going to take time and effort, and many have signed up for that. I worry at times about what the last century has done to our ability to have constructive discourse with each other. We are not immune to the broader tides that have been enabled, for lack of a better term, that have been imbued to divide us for power. How we talk to each other, how we debate each other, how we approach problem-solving and argumentation—unfortunately, these skill sets, these dignities, the integrity of the process has badly devolved.

We see conspiracies everywhere; the benefit of the doubt is an absent thing. Oftentimes, we are unable to even represent the people who oppose us in a fair light, trying our best to understand why they say and do the things they do. We believe that if we don’t win, or our side doesn’t win, then evil has prevailed, as opposed to just simply a difference of opinion. It’s unrealistic to assume that somehow, some way, we natively would be different. You have to try to be different.

You have to have systems, processes, procedures, checks and balances, and a methodology to be different. In the absence of these things, we will be no better than those we seek to replace. It’s just that simple. You can look at it the way you want to. Some people ascribe greed; some people say it’s rational ignorance; some people say that it’s just human nature.

I like to believe, and I think cryptocurrencies require this, that we can be better and we can aspire to higher pursuits. In the absence of that, we can at least align incentives in a way where people tend to converge to better outcomes than where they started. That’s really the great experiment of Voltaire. It was ironic that I named it after Voltaire because he was a harsh critic of democracy and felt that democratic processes tend to devolve to mob rule, delusions of masses, and demagoguery. He was actually a big fan of the enlightened monarchy.

My hope was that we could prove him wrong or, at the very least, replicate his understanding of the matter at hand. Perhaps find a way to get out of it was a tongue-in-cheek reference, and I’m glad that we’re doing it together. It’s been a long seven years, and there have been a lot of ups and downs. Last year was probably the most frustrating of my career, including 2014 when my time at Ethereum was abruptly ended. The reason being is that I felt at the beginning of 2022 that we, as an industry, had a real chance to achieve a level of legitimacy and a permanent seat at the political table.

We almost got there, and it was unceremoniously undone by the failings of centralized entities and dishonest actors. Do Kwon and Sam Bankman-Fried, in a blink of an eye, did more damage to our industry, the perception of it, and our ability to navigate the political process than every other bad actor combined. They have yet to truly apologize or show remorse, and even if they did, the damage is done. The trust is broken, and it will take years, if not decades, to fully realize the damage they’ve done—first to the primary wave of victims who have lost their life savings as a result of their actions, but then the secondary implications were politicians who already didn’t like crypto are now using this as a crisis of opportunity, like Rahm Emanuel said, "Let no crisis go to waste," to co-opt the industry and subjugate it to the whims and wills of other industries to all of our detriment. I felt a big chunk of my life’s work and the life’s work of others like Vitalik, Adam Back, and all the other people who work really hard at trying to make this industry great slip away a little bit, and I felt a little bit of hopelessness myself.

But what? We picked up the pieces, and 2023 is a reset. It’s a new year and another opportunity for us to dust ourselves off and get back to the labor of trying really hard to represent the industry well. There will likely be more Congressional hearings; there will likely be more said in hearings; there will likely be more opportunities for us to try as hard as we can to say that we deserve a seat at the table and that we have good plans for the future despite the fact that bad actors have caused a lot of damage. Look at the misrepresentations that are being said about the industry.

People are saying that because of the FTX failure, crypto has failed. Yet FTX was a centralized entity led by a dishonest actor who relied on a lack of transparency, oversight, and predictable rules in order to defraud millions of people.