Dubai Surprise AMA: 03/26/2022

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from dry deserty dubai today is march 26 2022 and i figured i'd do an ama i always love you guys and spending time with you and even though i'm out here in the desert having fun enjoying life for the binance event meetings with various people and who knows hopefully we'll be able to tweet some pictures here and there but it'd be a lot of fun just kind of keep in touch and give you some updates on some things and of course let you get to your questions so first let's talk about cardano it's the thing you all love so things are going well this month was a heavy heavy heavy development month utxohd was a big one it's well more than underway we made some major progress with hydra this month we've made some major progress with pipelining it looks like sip 31 32 and 33 are working their way to the test net and are on schedule sip 40 collateralized inputs are also making their way to to test net they're under construction as well as pluto's versioning and a litany of other enhancements so the vossel hard fork is going to be a pretty significant one on one hand you're gonna have big throughput increase on the other hand you are going to have new ways of developing cardinal contracts that don't require high throughput so it's always nice to see that and it's long overdue we were planning on breaking it to different different updates february and june instead we did a non-hard fork in february and we rolled everything into the june hard fork that's just the way a lot of these components came together so it's an overloaded release i like doing releases a little smaller but the good news is that code looks good testing is on schedule and we're making pretty good progress with it now we released a blog post last week that outlined in detailed pipelining and more detail in fact i'll go ahead and post it here for you guys but basically long and short is that pipelining was covered in see your blog and it's called increasing the transaction throughput of cardano and it discussed different approaches for example like there we go look that up on the screen and it showed a spectrum of options based upon the transaction payload as many of and some of you don't know there's a difference in the accounting models of cardano in ethereum ethereum chose to take what bitcoin had done extend it and then add more capabilities to it to enable smart contracts ethereum chose a completely different accounting model which i think was based on lessons learned from nst which came out around 2013. the advantage of the accounts models it replicates a more traditional virtual machine model the jvm or other things and it's a little simpler to understand from a developer's viewpoint the advantage of the extended utxo model and utxo model is it doesn't have a notion of global state from the smart contract perspective it's deterministic and local alongside a litany of other things and so ultimately if your goal is to put on things like improved versions of lightning if your goal is to do side chains and lots of off chain activity but you want to guarantee isomorphism then it's much better to parallelize with the utxo than it is to parallelize with accounts the challenge is you have to decide what is the minimum viable amount of expressiveness so you'll see in this article it says hang on a second not all transactions are created equally so you'll see numbers like 150 tps assuming a canonical normal cardano transaction then it gets lower if you're talking about pluto scripts and the devil's in the details there so i'd highly encourage you to read the blog post and i think that it will add a lot of clarity but this is coming in june with the vossel hard fork in addition to a lot of enhancements to plutus reference inputs reference scripts reference data collateralized inputs pluto's versioning and potentially some cryptographic primitives like sec 256 k1 sec p256 k1 is the bitcoin elliptic curve which would help with interoperability now reference scripts mean that you don't have to spend something to see something or interact with it so that means in some cases you don't even have a transaction occur the other thing is that having inputs and outputs means that depending on how you use the outputs you may be able to have a single transaction that emulates dozens or hundreds of transactions that would occur in ethereum account model so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison and we're very happy and proud of the work that's done and we think ultimately extended utxo is the model that will dominate the future satoshi got it right with utxo but it's dangerous to increase the expressiveness beyond a certain point which is why it wasn't pursued long term every attempt to do so with bitcoin led to some serious issues for example you can reference the bitcoin inflation bug of 2010 as the as a reference point a few other things dap ecosystem min swap was a great example of the community coming together long and short is when they open source their code wing writers found something and then wing writers reported it to min swap they worked together the auditor that reviewed the code tweak also wrote a blog post explaining how they missed something and it just discussed how difficult it is in practice to build smart contracts for any system and why auditing certification automated tooling and best practices are so important so that seems to be resolved as far as i can tell i the teams are slowly but surely chipping away the thing that was not reported was how the cardano community work together other communities are very adversarial our community seems to be friendly welcoming and collaborative which is a hallmark of success there's over 500 daps under construction at the moment millions of assets that have been issued on cardona our tvl is growing at an extraordinary rate while creation is growing at an extraordinary rate participation catalyst is growing at an extraordinary rate these are just facts whether they're reported or not whether they're reflected in the crypto media or not or they want to focus on other things is completely beside the point cardano continues to thrive and continues to be relevant in every dimension from our engineering to our science to community growth and engagement a lot of great progress with the foundation as well they came here to dubai for the first wave of conferences i came for the second wave as well as some private meetings and in both cases we were able to i think fairly adequately represent the mission vision of philosophy what we're trying to do a lot more to say on that relationship and the governance of open source development but that's for a later time and hopefully the 360 episode this month and next month will be quite elucidating final announcement i'm going to consensus june 9th to 12th it's going to be in austin texas and not only will i be there the cardinal foundation will be there and likely dozens of cardinal ventures building on cardinal will be there everything from the vc ecosystem the c fund and others to efforts in africa to our defy actors and so forth i know some people on twitter and in the crypto space like to pretend that there's no ventures on cardano there's a ghost chain nothing exists it's all made up so i think they'll be quite surprised when they actually show up and see there's real people there who don't work for me and are completely independent of io and the rest of the gang turns out there's hundreds of these companies and it turns out there's a lot of very passionate people so in addition to consensus our hope is also host community events similar to the one that we hosted miami in 2021 and you're all welcome to come to that event it will be free of charge the community event that we host consensus won't compost tickets so unfortunately i can't extend that to the main conference but if you happen to be in texas between june 9th to 12th we'll make an announcement of an event love to see you there it'd be a lot of fun okay so let's get to your questions why is this video so grainy it is usually clear i am on hotel wi-fi in the middle of dubai unfortunately this is as good as it gets where i'm at is it possible that a teleprism could replace bureaucracies a dmv model for example the answer is yes prism is really good for credential management so do you have a certification like are you a doctor or a lawyer or accountant do you have a license do you have a credential a driver's license or fishing license or hunting license and if so who issued it what are the terms and conditions for its validity so being able to issue all of that and do that in a very organized coherent way is one of the specialties of blockchain technology in general and it's one of the reasons we built prism in fact we're looking into creating an african credential alliance and it's going to focus on trying to bring these services to some of the poorest people throughout africa and give them a better experience than the one that we have in america wing riders deserves an atta boy shout out it's a wonderful team we have a great relationship with them and i think they're one of the more professional of the dexes and we certainly had quite a bit of fun talking to them they have some great technology that they're going to be deploying so i like wing riders it's pretty cool and it's just an example of the rapid iteration and growth from sunday to min to wing everybody's learning very quickly and they're moving very quickly and that's that's a good thing for cardano much faster than anything we ever saw with ethereum you meet cz i'll likely see him today because i think i'm going to the binance event here in a bit but he's floating around and many other people are as well like gabe abed and so forth so we'll have some fun together have you looked into toda will it do away with the need for proof stake or work no toda is an example of a new class of protocols we haven't done a protocol analysis on it yet so we don't know exactly where the trade-off profile sits but the point of the way we constructed cardano and we're going to make some dedicated videos and materials on this is that we wanted to have a stable strong root of trust that you then could use to spin out dedicated computation layers that have different consensus transaction and accounting models so we call that cardano settlement layer in cardinal controller computation layer as in the original y cardinal white paper that i wrote back in 2016. so when you look at things like tota or metastable consensus like what avalanches brought al grant litany of these other projects it's entirely possible to spin them up as side chains of cardano and we encourage people to do so and there's a lot of benefits to the network as a whole in addition to potentially high throughput that these systems can offer these systems could also offer new ways of writing smart contracts and different development experiences but it doesn't make sense to replace or boris that's a long arc research stream and we continue the march to omega and there's a lot of amazing things we've come up with over the last six years hello charles will mithril allow for dapps to work on mobile devices without using anything web 2 related just like front end communication the blockchain yes and no it improves the state of affairs and opens up a broader line of research of inclusive accountability despite missing key features a copy of the blockchain for example so right now it's really focused towards balances so you receive a token and you need to check if it's not been double spent and you also need to check if the token exists so that's a very powerful starting point but it's very possible to expend this to broader predicates for example the output of a smart contract or these types of things so we're looking into that but that's a long arc research agenda and there's a lot of people exploring these things like nina protocol and all the recursive snark people and so forth starkware is another company this is another example of a misconception that people keep coming in charles when hydra is released in june it's not being released in june we have a public road map it's on github every communication you can read yes versions are coming out yes there's a hydra head on the test net hydra is a product that will be every three to six weeks experiments done iterations done integration is done dapps will be integrating it they say then oh well when this mcguffin comes out will it that immediately solve the scaling problems increase tps will more work be done well chris i've repeatedly said this year our big focus is pipelining and input endorsers the hydro program continues and resources are scaling up for the hydro program and long term that's a phenomenal solution for off chain stuff it's a phenomenal solution for micro payments it's a phenomenal solution for interoperability between chains there's a lot of things there and actually hydra as a technology group can also be integrated into off-chain infrastructure for dabs but it's not the end-all be-all of scalability and throughput especially this year the base ledger itself can be dramatically enhanced by orders of magnitude just by implementing things like pipelining and input endorsers you don't need hydra for that furthermore you have side chains like melchometa and mamba and these other things that are coming that will offload a lot of volume into different systems so it's important to manage expectations hydra because of the way we build extended utxl and because the way we're designing it long term is going to carry enormous amounts of volume and be an essential component for all dapps that have high throughput requirements for cardamom but it's not this mcguffin that come june we're going to flip a switch and then magically it's a million tps and everybody's there you're being dishonest if you tell people that and we've never once said that in every single communication you have to focus on iterative tangible growth pipelining and input endorsers for example and in the very beginning of this video i posted a blog post that showed you the actual numbers there that we believe we're going to get would you recommend dubai as a vacation destination no it's very hot very expensive and very fake but a lot of money's here trillions of dollars hey charles what happened to your javascript course oh this is a fun one for those of you who don't know i really do want to do a free online course that's kind of an introduction to programming and computer science and teach it through the lens of javascript and cover a lot of concepts like functional programming and data structures and algorithms and then do some really fun applied work data science work some ai work like making a deep fake some things like creating a web scraper and so forth and i think it'd be a lot of fun to do that and you can go through gradual iterations you start with stock javascript and then you teach them typescript to teach type theory and then you go on to actually functional versions of typescript so like ramda and these other things and then you can learn about functional programming techniques beyond just maps and filters you can even go into monad like concepts and so forth and might even be able to cover functional reactive programming now in all things in life my ambitions are usually larger than my available time and so i just haven't had the time to even think about it but it is something i want to do and i just have to make some hard decisions about what can i do every quarter i've been focused a lot more on my biotech startup right now with my dad and brother and we're making phenomenal progress there might even be able to have that organization have a clinic and practicing medicine with the physicians there before the end of the year so we'll see on that but it's very time intensive ranch is also taking a lot more time than i thought it's very large and it was quite worn down when i bought it so i've been slowly but surely upgrading it and having to learn how bridges work and roads and pavement and all these things but it will come why are you working on etc what does etc have that cardano does not i am no longer contributing in any way shape or form to etc left the community last year i believe or late 2020. i spent years of my life trying very hard to make meaningful contributions there but there's nothing to innovate there's nothing to do there's no desire for a real road map there's no funding available or commitment to funding no treasury system and you can spend millions of dollars in years of hard work and build a full node and it still means nothing so it was just it was a necessary thing to prove a point about the nature of social contracts and fiduciary commitments but not really interesting otherwise we took the code base we built for etc though and we turned it into the mamba project and with a lot of improvements and some changes we're now going to launch that on cardano for evm interoperability so it actually produced a lot of value for cardinal because it gives us evm support so if you're a solidity developer or web 3 developer you can use what we wrote for ethereum classic on cardona just better faster and cheaper but there's nothing i'm doing there anymore in that ecosystem what consensus which consensus mechanisms besides proof of stake do you see as promising i think that the multi-resource consensus paper that we wrote called minotaur let me bring that up for you guys is a really cool paper and i highly highly highly recommend reading it minotaur basically shows you how to create a waiting mechanism for more than one consensus algorithm at the same time and the power of that is that you can then combine proof of work and proof of stake and other proofs of things together and so you get a more egalitarian system instead of just one model of control you have multiple models of control and multiple security bases so i think this is the future but it's going to require a lot more research and we'll make some statements about what we're planning on doing at a later date charles is cardano iso 222 compliant i've seen this come up a lot sharia compliance and 222 compliance i have a small group of people looking into the certification standards for 222 and i think this is something that we can integrate with a work package from the cardano found foundation so we're we're certainly going to have that discussion but it would be nice to get that done i think al grant is and a few others are as well when legends of valor for those of you don't know i own a video game called legends of valor i played it as a kid and i bought the ip for it we are setting up a game company called io games we'll make an announcement a later date for that but the first product will be crypto bison and then after crypto bison we'll get into more involved things but i think that's good great charles a bit off topic but will the epic time frame ever change from five days yeah as orborus evolves as a protocol it may be possible to actually remove the entire notion of an epic in fact there's a great paper written by promotive swanos and his author is called nakamoto proof of stake which has a discussion on how to do that so the amount of blocks per epic the entire notion of an epic is something that's going to change over time as protocols get more involved advanced especially when you move multi-resource consensus charles i want to learn haskell got any recommendations i'd recommend the haskell book it's long but it's definitely a good book when proper recording studio is it almost built now we haven't started working on it yet the lot that we want to put it in there's still a tenant in there we're negotiating to see if we can get rid of the tenant so i put my studio in and it'll take about six to nine months to build the studio hey charles when jed i suspect that jeb will drop somewhere in the second half of 2022 i was kind of hoping to see in the first half but it looks like there's a lot of things with fossil hard fork which will make jed significantly easier to to deploy so it's probably prudent to deploy that post fossil is it possible cardano will collaborate with algorand we've had a lot of discussions with the al grand team about everything from vrfs to how they got sharia compliance they're very friendly team there's good people over there like sean and of course silvio and we're on great terms with them so where and when it makes sense we do have a discussion with them and we're certainly we're certainly looking for low-hanging fruit and collaboration i suspect it'll be around a lot of shared common infrastructure that we need like verified crypto and primitive implementation and so forth but you never know there might be commercial ventures that make sense to to do together we do like that team they're good people just you have to find something that there's mutual interest in and sometimes there is and sometimes there's not seriously why is everyone on working on smart contract chains ignoring bitcoin countries use bitcoins as legal tender but smart contracts are needed for e-commerce well dylan this is exactly why we created extended utxo bitcoin is hostile to smart contracts by design the expressiveness of bitcoin script and the current bitcoin utxo model makes it exceedingly difficult to do anything other than what bitcoin was designed to do every single innovation of bitcoin has come hard fought as a result of years of careful thinking and extremely conservative changes like covenants and taproot and segwit and all of these things it's very very very very very difficult to do any innovation it's no coincidence that the ethereum founders worked on things like aster coin that was jeff wilche that was his first project there vitalik i believe worked on color coins i was doing bitshares people were trying to either do things on bitcoin or do alternative systems because bitcoin itself was actively hostile to smart contract development maxis will tell you otherwise and i say okay well then show me how to build a dex show me how to build an oracle show me how to build a stable coin and actually deploy it and run it on the level one layer one bitcoin they can't from the finality time to the transaction fees to the amount of data that you can use an op return to the expressiveness of the scripting language to the inflexibility of the restricted accounting model which is why we created pollutus and it's why we created extended utxo and it's why we embraced proof of stake you need to do these things in order to actually have a system that has any chance of being able to support smart contracts now to be fair people have tried papers like bitml was written simplicity was language by russell o'connor at blockstream and they have these things called jets or whatever they are so there's there's stuff there and it's real but it's hard fought and seldom done on the main chain which why it's taking so long for lightning it's why it's taken so long for side chains it's why things like nepa pals are not natively integrated into into bitcoin they should be you get tons of stuff for free including great like clients so no people aren't going to do it unless they do it with wrapped bitcoin on ethereum or wrap bitcoin on a different system because you just can't do it and if the bitcoin system wants to change they certainly can but it's been over 13 years now and no meaningful update in that particular direction they're just not going to do it which is why cardano exists and ethereum exists and polka dot exists and all these other platforms different boats for different different floats hi charles love your work what's your favorite pink floyd album wish you were here hmm what about peer review of open source code of dapps shouldn't there be such a mechanism well that's the responsibility of the dapp developer what the ecosystem can do is develop automated tooling both static and dynamic analysis so everything from linters to model checking tools to testing kits that do things like property-based testing to standards and certification techniques so we're having a summit i believe it's may 17th the 18th in barcelona specifically for dap certification for cardano adapts and we're inviting a lot of the big people to come and we're trying to create a nice comprehensive strategy long term for how to test and verify that dapps are written correctly now your particular code as adapt developer is your responsibility and that's why bug bounties exist and that's why people pay for audits and that's why people open source their projects to attempt to find issues just like minswap did the system works hi charles any updates from the wyoming cardinal research lab we have a small lab at university of wyoming and we're in discussions to create a standards body there and we've been going back and forth on a variety of things but our we'll make an announcement later date on that but it's it's moving along it's just moving at the speed of bureaucracy hi charles any updates on the book mastering cardano i have meeting next week when i get back from dubai specifically on mastering cardano the particular person who was working on it got ill and we've had to find a different team and so we're kind of we have a table of contents topic areas and a real good idea of what we want to do it's actually a little fortuitous and a dark way because we've decided to change some of the things and if we had published 1.