Update and Few Thoughts

hi everybody this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado i'm trying a new streaming service and it allows me to annotate a few things and bro simulcast to both periscope and to youtube so let's see how this works i also get to put a a little caption so i think for the future i'm just for a while going to put i will never give away ada so when people repost my videos for giveaway scams they at least they at least have that so first off a thank you a community member named daryl had decided to carve a log and give a his artistic impression of my twitter profile picture of me and the falcon so that always means a lot when i get these gifts from fans and also i just wanted to on the back of the catalyst presentation express my profound gratitude and excitement to the community it's really really cool to see how much progress has been made in such a short period of time it was only yesterday when we were saying when shelley now shelley's out and it's evolving rapidly voltaire is now starting to evolve rapidly and we're real close to to gogan at the end of this month we'll be able to talk around some of the realities of gogan and some of the ideas we have and give some dates for certain things and give you a sense of where that project is at and the good news is that we have gained an enormous amount of progress and knowledge about what we need to do and how to get that done and basically people are just executing and it's a much smaller task than getting us to shelly with byron to shelly we literally had to build a completely new cryptocurrency from the ground up we had to have new ledger rules new update system we had to invent a way of transitioning from one system to another system and there's hundreds of other little innovations along the way new network stack and so forth so byron cosmetically looks like shelley but under the hood it's completely different and the shelley design was built with a lot of the things that we needed for gogan in mind so for example we built shelley with the idea of extended utxo and we built shelly understanding what the realities that were for the smart contract model and that's one of the advantage you get when you do this type of bespoke engineering so there's two consequences to that one the integration is significantly easier and two the integration is significantly faster so we won't look at that same complexity there and the product update at the end of the end of the month we'll really start discussing around some of these things as well as talk about partners and talk about how the development ecosystem is going to evolve there are a lot of threads throughout all three organizations that are happening simultaneously with emergo they're really thinking deeply about defy and they've invited us to collaborate with them on things like stable coins for example but we're also looking at oracle's dexes and these other things and because there are already people in market who have made mistakes learned lessons it gives us the benefit of hindsight so it means we can be much faster to market and we can build much more competitive things in market and the cardano community gets first accessed to these next generation d5 applications with a lot of without a lot of the problems of the prior generations and that's super beneficial to us the other side of it is that voltaire is going to have a systemic influence not just on community funding but also the overall evolution and direction of the platform the longer it exists the more pervasive it will become probably first applied towards the cardano foundation roadmap but later on it will definitely have a lot of influence and say over every element aspect of the system including the launch dapps and these other things and basically long term the types of problems that cardano solves so that's incredibly appealing to me and very exciting to me because it's i have this giant community brain with the best and brightest of all of you working with us to get us where we need to go another thing that was super encouraging it's a small thing but it's a it shows us that we're definitely in the right direction was that we recently got a demo from promote and his team out of university of illinois on a protocol they create called prism which is a super fast proof-of-work protocol and they wrote this beautiful paper and they wrote code along with it that showed that prism is a ten thousand times faster than nakamoto consensus so if you take the bitcoin proof of work protocol you strip it out you put prism in you can run the entire bitcoin system 10 000 times faster they have these beautiful benchmarks to show that even in bad network conditions because promoting this team they're they're real researchers and they're real engineers they use a lot of cool hpc concepts like springboarding and other things like that to accommodate that then i asked him in the presentation i said well how much faster if you replay the ethereum chain he says well that it takes a big performance hit could be only maybe a hundred times because that model is not as easy to optimize and charred with standard computer science concepts in fact in some cases there are limitations there that really can't be overcome it turns out that we're more on that utxo side than we are on the account side as a coincidence or intent of the design of extended utxo we're gonna have a lot easier time getting much higher performance where and when it's necessary i also approved this week a scaling up of the basho project in particular to build a hydra prototype team the science has gotten to a point where we can make a really competitive push in that particular direction now what does that mean it means that in just a few short months we can de-risk technological approaches that long-term will give us a lot of fruit where and when the community decides that they need infrastructure like hydra now here's the beautiful thing about hydra if you watch my whiteboard back in september of 2017 when cardano first hit market with byron i talked about this concept of looking at scalability with a very simple test which is as you get more people in the system it stays at the same performance or it gets faster we all experience systems that do this for example bittorrent more people downloading something you tend to be able to get it faster and we all experience the converse which is this the system gets slower when you get more people okay so what does this mean it means that hydra is an actual approach towards true scalability in the system and it's a lot easier to do than sharding even though we have a beautiful approach to get the sharding on the ledger side if we truly desire to go down that way and there's beautiful ideas like frida shard and so forth that we are definitely in deep discussions about that's a very complex thing there was recently a paper out of stanford that showed that the casper protocol as proposed for f2 does have some security concerns and it's going to be the burden is on the shoulders of the ethereum to developers and vitalik to address those concerns from those stanford professors so whenever you have these very complex protocols they have so many different ways they can break and things can go wrong so it's much more appealing when you don't have to embrace complexity to achieve the same end the elegance of hydra is that stake pool operators are very natural parties to put hydro channels on and every time we add one we get much more performance out of that and the system as it gets more valuable the k factor increases which means you get more stake pull operators which means you get more hydro channels so with growth we get appreciation with appreciation we get more decentralization with more decentralization we get more performance so in essence this spiritually speaking is really what we meant when we said scalability that the system will always grow to meet its particular needs and we have a very elegant way of moving in that direction that doesn't require us to embrace very sophisticated techniques it's not to say that these techniques don't have a place and purpose but it says that the urgency of implementing these is gone and we then have the luxury to pick the best science when it's ready instead of rushing it to market to resolve a crisis of high fees we'll never have that crisis so there's a beauty to cardano that is missing i in my view from many cryptocurrencies and blockchains in the marketplace and we're now seeing that beauty shine through not only through our community who are so passionate and amazing but in the science and the engineering itself and how easy it is for us to navigate the concepts how easy it is for us to add more things to take some things away to clean some things up here and there and our ability to move through i never imagined when in 2015 i signed up to go in on this crazy ride and try to build a world financial operating system we would have made as much progress as we made today we've written more than 75 research papers as an organization many of which are directly applicable to cardano we've got great partners who work with nasa and boeing and pfizer massive companies that have 10 years of history and millions of users to come in and help us grow better we've worked with incredible organizations major universities like university of wyoming university of edinburgh tokyo tech professors all across the world and we've worked with incredible engineering firms like vacuum labs and atix and twig and well typed runtime verification cubic and dozens of others along the years and despite the fact that at times there's been delays and friction throughout this entire journey we've mostly been aligned and we keep learning and growing and it gives me so much hope that our best days are ahead of us and an almost fanatical belief that success is inevitable in a certain respect you see because we always find a way to be here tomorrow and we always find a way to make tomorrow a better day than today and as long as that's the trend you're monotonically increasing towards a better tomorrow you're always going to have that outcome you're always going to be in a position where cardano shines bright so towards the end of the month we'll have a lot more to say about the development side and that'll be a beginning just like voltaire is the beginning and then suddenly you now notice the beautiful parallelism of the road map shelly continues to evolve partial delegation is coming in fact i signed the contract with vacuum labs to bring that to ledger and the daedalus team is hard at work to make that feature apparent for everyone as is the roy team and you see that with now voltaire and soon was gogan and these are not endpoints rather they're just beginnings and they're never over we can always make staking better more diverse more merit-based and entertain different control models have better delegation mechanics have better user experience the same for smart contracts that's an endless river and along the way what we've discovered is it's easy for us to work with great minds and great people for example with testing of smart contracts i would love to diversify that conversation above and beyond what we can come up with and bring in some firms who have done this for a long time to basically take that part with us shoulder to shoulder and build beautiful frameworks to assist us for example runtime verification is doing this with the evm with a beautiful project called firefly to replace truffle and i believe that we can achieve similar ends with blue to smart contracts when you ask yourself what makes a system competitive in the cryptocurrency space in my view there are four dimensions and you have to have a good story for all four of those dimensions you need security and correctness a lot of people don't prioritize that but when they get that wrong it hurts retail people it hurts everyday people billions of dollars have been lost due to the incompetence and ineptitude of junior developers making very bad mistakes and oftentimes those developers faced no consequences and the people who lost money were innocent people who believed in cryptocurrencies and wanted to be part of the movement but didn't protect themselves adequately that's a really sad thing and it's unethical to continue pushing a model that that is the standard or the likely outcome rather than a rare rare edge case so you have to as a platform a third generation platform invest heavily in giving the developers proper tools to ensure security and correctness and we've seen a whole industry there's been great innovations out of quan stamp and consensus and dozens of other firms in the space including runtime verification who have really made major leaps in the last few years of trying to improve that story what's unique to cardano is that we based our foundations on languages that were designed right the first time and there's over 35 years of history for the approach that we're following in the haskell side that allows us to build high assurance systems and our developers in the ecosystem to build high assurance systems we didn't reinvent the wheel we found the best wheel and we're giving it to you so i think we're going to be dominant in that respect as we enter 2021. second you look at things like ease of maintenance ease of deployment the life cycle of the software upgrades to the software and as we've demonstrated with things the hard four combinator and the fact that voltaire is not just a governance layer for ada and cardano but will eventually be reusable for any dap deployed on our system you have very natural tooling that's going to allow people to upgrade their smart contracts their dapps and enable governance for their users at an incredibly low cost and not have to reinvent the governance wheel each and every application this is another unique property to our system and it can be reused for the dapps that you deploy on your system as i've mentioned before performance is a significant concern and this was often corrupted by marketers especially ico marketers who really wanted to differentiate say our protocol tested on a single server in someone's basement is 500 000 transactions per second and somehow that translates to real life performance and that's antithetical to anyone who's ever to study distributed systems and understands the reality of these systems and where they go and what they do and in terms of performance i think we have the most logical approach we have 10 years of history with bitcoin it's a massive system we've learned a huge amount and there's a lot of papers written about a lot of practical projects and bitcoin is about to step into the world of smart contracts we congratulate them on getting schnorr cigs in and the success of taproot and that means entering 2021 2022 we are going to start seeing legitimate dapps d5 projects real applications instead of choosing ethereum or al grand eos cardano choosing bitcoin and they're adding a lot to that conversation and i think that ultimately that model has a lot of promise which is why we built a better one there are still significant limitations with what bitcoin can accomplish from settlement time to the verbosity of contracts that can be written the extended utxo model was designed to be the fastest accounting and most charitable accounting model ever on and off chain and hydra was designed hand in glob to allow you to flex between those two systems seamlessly so when you look at the foundations of where we're at and how we can extend this from domain specific languages for domain experts such as marlowe to financial experts and the dsls that will come later for others like lawyers and supply chain experts in medical databases and so forth and how easy it is to write and deploy these to pluto's being beautiful glue code for both on and off chain communications i think we have an incredibly competitive offering for performance and when hydra comes simply put there'll be no one faster and if we need to shard we're going to do that well and definitely better than anybody else because we know where our security model sits and there won't be surprise stanford papers to blindside us that require immediate addressing in terms of operating costs this is the last component in my view and that's basically how much does it cost you the developer to run your application and there are really two dimensions there one is predictability and the other is amount so it's not just good enough to say it's a penny per transaction today you need to know that after you spend millions of dollars and months or years of effort building something and deploying something that you're not going to wake up tomorrow and now it's five dollars to do what used to cost a penny so you need that cost to be as low as possible and as predictable as possible and again the way that we architected our system and as we turn things on towards the end of this year and as we enter into the next year we believe we have a great approach to achieve low operating cost so one person asks why cardano well because we have great security and correctness in the development experience and tools with 35 years of legacy that were built right the first time and don't put the burdens of mistakes on your customers they ask why cardano and we say well the chain itself is going to give you great solutions with identity value transformation and governance itself and as a consequence when you talk about upgrading your applications having a relationship with your customers of your applications and you talk about the ease of maintenance of those applications there's going to be a good story there and we have beautiful frameworks like voltaire that allow that story to evolve and we keep adding partners and who have decades of experience to get us along and we won't stop until it's much better they asked why cardano we said because at the moment we're 10 times faster today than ethereum today and that's all we really need for this year and next year to be honest and in the future we can be as fast as we need to be because we're truly scalable as the system gets more decentralized the system improves performance and where and when we need to shard we can do that and we'll have the luxury of time to do it right the cardano way and when people ask why cardano because the reality is it's very cheap to do things on our platform and the way we're building things that's going to continue being the case and we have the governance mechanisms to allow the community to readjust fees and parameters so that it can continue being affordable for users everything in the system will eventually be customizable and parameterizable from block size to transaction fees and the community will be in a good position to dynamically allocate these things where and when needed so that we can enjoy as an ecosystem predictability in our cost now in the coming weeks and months especially in my company we're going to invest a lot of time and effort into comparison marketing and product marketing when i see people say oh well you've launched proof of stake a lot of other people have done that i don't think those people fully appreciate the magnitude of what we actually accomplished as an ecosystem and the quality of the protocols that are in distribution and that's not their fault it's our fault because we didn't take the time in simplistic terms not scientific papers and deep code and formal specifications but rather everyday language to really show why we're different and i admit that that's a product failing and that needs to be corrected so we hired a great marketing director named liza and she is going to work full time with me and others in the ecosystem and a great team of people every single day to get out there and explain why what we have done is novel unique competitive and special to our industry everything from ouroboros to our boris compared and contrast to major other protocols from the eoses and algorands and the tasos of the world why we're different trade-offs we chose over them to our network stack to the extended utxo model to pollute us tomorrow and we're going to keep hammering away at that until we get it right and everybody acknowledges and sees what has been accomplished i've spent five years of my life good years of my life and missed a lot to get this project where it needs to go all of our employees have invested huge sums of their personal lives their time their brand their careers in trying to make this the really most magical and special cryptocurrency and blockchain infrastructure around no one ever signed up in this company or the other companies working on cardone to work on a mediocre protocol that's just another blockchain they signed up to change the world they signed up to build a system that legitimately can look at you in the face and say one day we have the potential to have a billion users that's what they signed up for and they showed up to play they built technology that evolves in that direction with some certainty and great foundations and we have an obligation to market in a way that can show the world why succinctly with clarity and understandably and this has been a failing in the past but what you can always be better tomorrow that monotonically increasing make it better and that's what we're going to do we recognized it and we're going to invest in it and with voltaire if we can't do it you the community can do it and we'll work with you if you can do a better job and the funding will be there to get that done in addition to this we think about 2021 and we ask where does the future take us and i've thought a lot about this i've thought a lot about how do we get the next five years as we close out 2020 and here's the reality we're not going to leave as a company until we have smart contracts and multi-asset and voltaire has evolved to a point where the community can comfortably make decisions about the future of the protocol and that the staking experience has solidified and it's stable okay i don't care if this costs me millions or tens of millions of dollars out of my own pocket to make happen i'm going to do that because that's my commitment to you the community and every product update will keep pushing our way there and we'll continue to get more transparent we'll continue to get more aggressive and hire more and parallelize more aware when we can to deliver that experience so that cardano gets where it needs to go then when we ask about where do we go next the reality is that the science as an industry the engineering as an industry has given a menu of incredibly unique attractive and sexy things that we can pursue and so what we're going to do is work with the community and the very same tools that are turning on today the voltaire tools the idea scale tools and we're going to propose a consortium and we're going to bring the best and brightest together and give a vision of where we can take the system in another five years with the benefit of hindsight massively improved processes better estimation capabilities and the fact that we're not starting with two people at i o global we're starting with 250 people and the best scientific division in our industry and the legacy of almost nearly by the end of this year 100 scientific papers that's us what there's dozens of companies throughout the history who have worked on cardano it's about time to scale them up too and get client diversity so come next year when the protocol has evolved to the point where it's ready for it we'll have that conversation with you the community and that's going to be a beautiful conversation at the conclusion of it there's going to be certainty of how we're going to evolve over the next five years to get ourselves beyond the cryptocurrency space i'm very tired of these conversations we have about are you going to go to consensus or not or who's going to be the big winner or what about libra or what about this particular regulation and this crypto unicorn and this thing i've been in the space a long time and i've noticed that people keep saying the same things year after year in the same venues and yes the crowd sizes get larger and the amount of value at risk gets larger but i haven't seen a lot of progress in the places where i feel it is absolutely necessary for this technology to be permanent in the developing world we need to see economic identity so people often ask what is the mission for cardano for us io global so you look at economic identity and you take a look at a roadmap for it you scale up and down and each and every step along the way from open data to self-sovereign identity to financial inclusion you can keep going down to centralize lending decentralized insurance decentralized banking each and every step along the way to economic identity when you admit a blockchain tells you that there's a collection of applications and infrastructure that you need to build my life's work is to get to a point where we have the technology to do that the infrastructure to do that with principles and so we'll keep evolving cardano and we'll keep evolving the space as a whole and the science as a whole until i can wake up and say each box and that road to economic identity for all people not just one group we have a solution for that and i'm going to put those applications on cardano and success for me is not about us being king of the crypto hill and having a higher market cap than bitcoin or being entrepreneur of the year coin death's most influential person it's meaningless noise success for me is reflecting back at the things that we have accomplished together and recognizing that millions if not billions now live in a system where they all matter they all have a voice they all have an equal footing the jeff bezos of the world have the very same experience as the person born born of rwanda and we're not done until that's the case it's a long road it's a hard road but what we're making progress we have great people in africa we have great people in eastern europe we have great people in southeast asia and great partners all along the way great people latin america great people in south america great people here in the united states when we talk about economic identity there are millions if not tens of millions of americans who don't have it same for canadians hundreds of thousands who don't have it developed western cultures it's the greatest blind spot of policy and as we enter into a depression as a result of coronavirus add millions if not tens of millions more onto that list generations are being disenfranchised by this legacy system and we as an ecosystem we as an entire community are offering a different way forward not hyper centralization not social credit but a way forward where you own your own money your own identity your own data you're not a victim of surveillance capitalism you're not a victim of civil asset forfeiture or when you say the wrong things you get de platformed and shut out of society each and every human being matters and i'm optimistic to believe that when you remind people that they matter they're gonna rise to the occasion that is the point of my company in the things that we do each and every day that's our mission to give the platforms to the world so that those who don't have economic identity can get it and they can keep it and no one can take it from them and they can enjoy an ever increasing growth of standard of living wealth and prosperity however you want to measure that this is my goal post so i couldn't care less about the cryptocurrency space it was a great place to start but the space needs to be reminded why it exists bitcoin was given a mandate on the back of the 2008 financial crisis to do something different it was not given a mandate to go be a new settlement layer for central banks or a new way for the old guard to make more money and banks get bigger and for those who are in control to preserve their power the whole point of doing something so crazy as to buy a coin that doesn't even exist in real life that's just a bunch of numbers in the cloud the whole point of that was so that we as a society could do something different than the way that we'd been doing things before so each and every member of the cryptocurrency space needs to remind everyone else from time to time why we're here and where did we come from and where are we going to go the beauty of cardano is we have already achieved for the most part a decentralized brain and that momentum is pushing harder than ever more and more scientists are waking up more and more institutions are waking up getting us there and the code we have the right approach and i think we have a great competitive offering for 2021 as we go and battle the titans and that's going to be a lot of fun but we know who we are and where we're going and we're in the right places and it's so incredibly encouraging to see the state pool operators not just be from california or texas or new york or canada to see a lot of stake pool operators from the place that need the most help everybody does matter and it means a lot to me for the people who are there but it means a lot to everybody to say that we have created an equal platform and it makes the participation of all of us so much more meaningful we're not just talking to each other we're talking to the world and by working together on this platform we're lifting the world up and giving people hope that's the point there's a lot more to do we didn't get everything done you never do you aspire you work hard you set a moon shot and sometimes you can just get to orbit with the first go but what when you build the next rocket you can go to mars so thank you all for being with me thank you all for being part of this today was a damn good day with the announcement of voltaire go to cardano.ideascale.