IOTA, Litecoin and other Bridges

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is January 3rd, 2021, Sunday, in the office taking care of some paperwork and just about head on home, but I figured I'd make a quick movie, video, recording, whatever, before I went on home, talk a little bit about interoperability. So many of you are familiar with a discussion we had with the guys over at the Litecoin Foundation a few months back, where we were discussing about implementing Nipah Pals or something like Nipah Pals into Litecoin for interoperability with Cardano. Brief update on those conversations.

We had the preliminary conversation, talked to Charlie, talked to David, then they invited us to go do a presentation. We did a presentation, it was very productive, we got some great feedback on it, and I believe there's a process where a lip is being written. Litecoin is a very slow evolving cryptocurrency, it's one of the legacy coins, it's been out since I think 2011, if memory serves correctly. They move quicker than Bitcoin, but certainly slower than, I'd say, a third generation cryptocurrency, as part of the charm. Litecoin is resilient to change, and that's a feature, not a bug, so big changes like interoperability or other things, they take a little bit of time to ratify.

So hopefully we should be able to have that lip through their process and get some community support behind it, and it'll take a little while to work its way in, and some test code has to be written, and all these other things. But the advantage of Nipah Pals is that Nipah Pals are very special, they don't require a lot to get in, and they don't actually require dramatic changes to consensus or validation. See, you get a big bang for your buck, you don't have any loss of security. It's very rare in protocol design to see something where you gain something and you don't have to give something up for it. For example, when you shard, you tend to give up security, or availability, or something of that matter.

And so it's going to be really fun to see what happens with it. The great part is Litecoin, because it's one of the Bitcoin gene line, so it was a fork from Bitcoin. If it works in Litecoin, it should reasonably well work in Zcash, and in Dash, and many of the other things that follow very similar consensus mechanics and code bases. So we'll see, but I'm very optimistic about these things, and it's very exciting to see that we're getting some traction. The other thing I've noticed is that Dominic posited, hey, maybe we should do something like that for IOTA, and we're familiar with the IOTA project, I believe it's based upon Tangle with some modifications.

It's one of the coins that's been around for a long time, and they've always been trying to figure out a way to make their model work and grow, and there's been ups and downs, and it'd be a lot of fun to go and do that. So oftentimes, I always go and see what the community is saying, and so I had a chance to go to the IOTA Reddit, and looking at the thread where we mentioned this, we have something called Foot of the Beast, and he says, oh, please, let's not go back to the hype tweet era, and certainly not with Cardano. Charles unfortunately shares many traits with David. Number one, arrogance. Anyone remembers the MetaMask tweet?

Number two, see all know-it-all future of the tech argument with Ethereum core devs about sharding, which he ended up being proven incorrect, I guess. Number three, tons of time spent on ideas that went nowhere. Cardano's running, right? Too bad Cardano does not have an independent foundation to fire Charles. Okay.

So here's the thing, setting ego, personality, and other things aside, we're happy to work with IOTA if there's a productive technical conversation to be held, and there's community support for the fork. When we approached the Litecoin community, it was actually a very pleasant conversation, a little bit of snarkiness here and there, and Litecoin's been around forever, so they kind of have a way of doing things, but it's been actually a very pleasant experience, and I've really enjoyed it, and it's been a lot of fun. And if anybody has a cryptocurrency and they're looking for interoperability in a general sense, so adopting some form of a bridge protocol that can be reused to connect to multiple cryptocurrencies, it's actually a conversation that we're going to start scaling up in Q1 of this year and really scale up in Q2 of this year, and it'd be real fun to see if we can get some of our technology to work with IOTA. But it has to make sense both on a technological viewpoint, meaning that a bridge protocol is actually there, and also on a community viewpoint. So if the community doesn't support it, it's not worth anybody's time to actually pursue an implementation because it would be a vacuous implementation.

So I think we'll have a call with Dominic here. I really hope this foot guide doesn't speak for the IOTA community. I don't spend much time there, and I know very little of that community. I just know a little bit about the tech, and actually I rather enjoyed Sergey Popov's paper, Tangle. It was a lot of fun to read, and I think there are some cool things there, and it's really sad that IOTA didn't quite get to where it wanted to go throughout all the years.

Because when you do really difficult things that are off the beaten path, and you chose very different architecture, unfortunately it means that you sometimes have to spend a little bit extra time refining those ideas and getting those ideas where they need to go. And so that's fine as long as you approach it with humility and openness and a desire to work with others and being big enough to admit when there are problems. So it'll be interesting to see if we can get a bridge there, and it'll be interesting to see if the community's up for it. So I'll talk Dom. I've known him for years.

He actually stayed at the Ethereum house back in 2014, and we've had several conversations since, and he's always been affable and very fun to talk to, at least from my side. And we'll see if there's something that makes sense there. And also it'd be really exciting to see what the IOTA 2 plans are, because I've kind of not paid too much attention to the post-Tangle work. And that project, of course, has had an incentive to kind of grow things, and IOT is a really interesting field. And so there's lots of cool, interesting things that can be done.

But this is just an example of where you can't quite innovate without permission. you have to work within the confines of your community. For example, for a long time, our companies thought about being Bitcoin core developers. It'd only take us about eight months to 12 months to build a completely new Bitcoin client. But then we thought, God, then those politics we would be spending years trying to convince people to do things like adopt FEC 32 or, a new signature scheme or something.

Really not a lot of opportunity to evolve things or grow things. And so even though it's interesting work, and it's certainly a big and meaningful project, and it'd be a lot of fun to participate, community's not really ready for that, and the ecosystem's not ready for that. And so it's interesting to see the different cultural drifts between each and every community as we kind of go from one to the other. Some are friendlier than others, and some are more insular than others. And interoperability is basically the silver bullet of how do we find a way when we disagree or people have very negative views of other people and think other people are horrible actors or bad actors and can't separate ego and personality from what's best for their projects.

How do we still manage to find a way to get the community to accept and bring these things in? So actually, I want to close this video real quickly on my governance book, which I am writing this year with a co-author, and that's what we're going to be discussing. It's going to take a long time for me to write the book, probably the majority of the year, but basically it'll go into both a historical analysis of where did governance come from, both in the open source world and the internet, and how does it evolve to a point where we have productive systems, and what have we learned from the last 12 years of cryptocurrencies? It's quite apt that on the birthday of Bitcoin, we have to ask ourselves, how do we manage a system with millions, if not billions of people, especially in an age of fake news and in an age when people don't really care too much about facts and reason, and people dig their heels into the ground and just believe things that are not true? So it's going to be interesting, the age of deep fakes and fake news and the age of cults of personality and the age of Dunning-Kruger and bots and fake arguments spread to create disinformation.

How do you govern a system that's totally decentralized with no official institutions and somehow make that evolve and become more valuable? Interoperability is just a subset of that, of how do you make those systems talk to other systems, and apparently maximalism gets in the way. So I figured I'd make a quick video, talk about it, and say that we're certainly looking at it, we're working on it, we're pushing forward on it, and we'll see how many people we can work with and what we can build, and we're certainly going to be talking about the topic of governance in general, even if people call me a poopy head and a bad guy, that's okay. That means the system is working if we can still evolve despite the fact that some people don't like me. So until next time, I'll see you guys this upcoming week, lots to do, lots to talk about, and governance is on the menu for 2021, it's going to be a very exciting year, and hopefully interoperability is as well in every aspect, from network stacks to asset interoperability to asset transfer protocols to oracles, yeah, it's a big menu, a lot of stuff to do, a lot of standards bodies to work with, a lot of protocols to write and refine, and every system is a snowflake.

IOTA is probably one of the most difficult I'd imagine to integrate with because it doesn't follow traditional conventions, and proof of stake has its own challenges, proof of work has challenges, so it's going to be fun to try to tackle all of those somehow, someway. Until next time, cheers.