Welcome to the Mess of Voting

hi everybody this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm state colorado i right now rotating out the artwork people keep asking about the paintings and I'm trying to decide whether I keep them here or put them somewhere else and then have some more paintings on the way but everybody misses them for some reason it seems you guys like ghost stuff climp in water house so maybe we'll bring him back who knows so anyway what do you got we got anything going on today well it's Sunday beautiful Sunday Funday and I guess there's a vote going on there's stuff happening the ITN originally some history I wanted to call the ITN replicant yeah and primarily because I wanted to create a Blade Runner protocol for it if you guys are fans of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner back in the day the 1980s remember that replicants have a finite lifespan and if they kind of go crazy and go rogue they had a group of people called blade runners to go and find them and kill him so anyway I said hey it would be really cool if we call the test at replicant and we build a protocol to basically destroy it and my marketing people all that'll confuse people don't call it that just call it the ITN I said ok I was actually pretty upset about it because I bought a trench coat I actually had Deckard's trench coat from from Blade Runner I had a movie prop made and I was like yeah alright I finally get to live my flavor of their fantasies so anyway fast-forward six months and basically I was under the intention the belief that the ITN was going to run out of rewards yeah June 29th that's what calculated early in the month and we suddenly realized that it actually was June 19th and we only realized that upon another reflection read about the middle part of the month June 15th so we were thinking well looks the replicant has grown up and there's no Blade Runner floating around maybe this thing could actually have a life beyond its original intent and be valuable to the entire ecosystem and we had some plan to say well why don't we build a nice voting experience for that and a good communication plan for that and that tail got cut by ten days because of that miscalculation so we started thinking about it and we said all right well we'll talk to the community well we'll let them know and if we're gonna do something we have to kind of treat the itn like its own thing we have to actually kind of treat it it is its own currency it's its own Network because at the end of the day the model here would be that Cardno is subsidizing another system to provide value to it okay it's been doing that for six months implicitly but we're now explicitly explaining that to people so what we did is we said if you're a stake pool operator on the 19th go ahead and just leave your stake pool running and it at least let card ATO the network know that that group of people are available for hire now that threshold was crossed the vast majority of operators left their pools on and they said well you guys want us for something else we're here for business but we have to treat the itn it's it's own thing so we said anybody who has test net a de ta de there's this thing called jour vu and it was released on the 26 and I included a link in my in my tweet for this and all included in the show notes here where is he you hold tests that ADA you can vote and basically the vote is do you want to extend the rewards of test data to go into the month of July now that's step one functionally and the reason being is that that tests metadata is in no way connected to card no it's in no way connected to ADA holders it's just an extension of a parallel chain saying hey we're gonna start paying it out keep compensating the state pool operators but they don't really get anything for that unless step two happens which would be a vote that occurs next month and that vote that occurs next month would be basically do you want to rent for another month the ITN or not okay now we have some great things coming at the at the summit the virtual summit specifically in the realm of democracy and I'm not gonna front run the announcement here but I think people are gonna be super happy and excited about it and they're just beautiful things coming and it's really unfortunate that the rewards ran out in June 19th instead of the 29th because we would have gotten past the summit and people would have seen those great things and started getting an aha moment of what we could do with the ITN but despite that still have about twenty seven point five percent participation within the ITN itself and we may or may not cross a threshold to enable that heart for should we not cross that threshold then the ITN is as good as dead and it's just gonna go about the way and follow the original intent and it says if we named it replicant and as if we actually built that Blade Runner protocol to kill it if it does cross the threshold then on the other side next month probably around July 9th we'll have a much better voting experience and a lot more clarity on what we can do with the ITN and where it can provide value to the cardano's ecosystem that said this is just an example of how hard it is to run a cryptocurrency and to have a cryptocurrency community react to things and do things cryptocurrencies are very strong when you want to stay consistent despite what's going on in the world okay there can be plagues outside Wars going on all kinds of things and there's this old saying that honey badger don't care Bitcoin don't care the little currencies are super strong for that where they're weak is rapid decision making when you have to make a decision a week or two a or B X or Y because the social coordination of that is enormous and frankly to get good votes you have to have a lot of really really good tools you have to have a beautiful voting experience you have to be able to communicate with people accurately and succinctly you have to allow lots of debate to form you have to know that the ballot is sound you have to know that the level of participation is where it needs to be and this is among one of the most difficult things you can do anywhere not just in the cryptocurrency space and to do that for short-term events is quite hard so when this experiment first started I was very skeptical my belief was that the most likely outcome was that we would not get enough participation with the ITN to even get to the second pho and we're right at that threshold and holders of ta des if you haven't will make that decision if we get to that second vote the burden then on us as a community to have good tools and good explanations of why will this produce value create value for people in the cardinal ecosystem but another point is that you have staging you have to understand there are different constituencies here one is that group of stake full operators their small business owners and they're providing value to all of us they basically are running card on oh very soon after July 29th August 18th is when I think the first blocks will be made and also they allowed us to test protocols that we invented in laboratories and verify that those protocols are real and realistic and ultimately they're going to be the ones that host the large chunk of great services and interoperability bridges and Hydra channels and so forth so we have as a community relationship with them and the first question was would you like to stick around to do some more work above and beyond what's coming on the Haskell side so that was their vote and leave on your pool past the 19th then we had to treat the IT end like its own thing it's not card no it's its own chain it's doing its own thing and we had to ask well you guys want to keep this chain alive owners of that chain and that was the ta-dah vote and although we built a tool your vote what didn't quite get out fast enough and that's why there's been a lot of confusion and a little bit of issues on the messaging but that's what's occurring right now is that that change trying to make a decision if they want to go and keep the experiment rolling and if those two things happen only if those two things happen do we get to the third stage where the Cardinal ecosystem as a whole gets asked hey what are we going to do do we want the take this this other chain and do something with it that provides value to Cardinal and honestly there's a very high threshold there we had to make sure or horse work so that's pretty high threshold because that's the heart of everything we do with card on oh so okay that makes sense but above and beyond that the community as a whole has to come together in at least two-thirds of the active stake has to make that decision of whether they actually want to have that chain do something so the most likely outcome is the answer will be no even if it's a really good idea because that's a such a high threshold for entire community the point is that this is the first time where people are actually free to go and express themselves and not follow a road map and say when Gogan and when Shelly and when this and when are the Wizards going to come down from their ivory towers and give us something it's the first time to really think about what does this all mean why are we doing what we're doing where do we want to go what type of ecosystem do we want to have four cardinal implicit in this discussion is the concept of side-chains and our relationship to other cryptocurrency networks for example when I originally wrote Y card on Oh way back in the day in 2017 I mentioned card on ocl and card on OSL I said hey we have this primary ledger settlement layer and then we have all these other layers these computational layers and they're different one might look a lot a theorems computational model one might look a lot like wasum one might look like yella and maybe you want your ADA to be able to run smart or power smart contracts and these different models okay well we can do this in a feudal model or a captive model where those chains exist and just solely are secondary to the primary chain or we can do this in a partner model where they're actually their own system and we pay something for that system to recognize ADA so it's almost a blockchain - blockchain partnership there's also the question of native tokens in Cardinal Cardinal is going to be a multi asset system we're imminently approaching that and if you're very clever you can look at our github repos and see the multi-asset specifications and realizations of these papers that we've published and we'll have a lot to say about that vision at the virtual summit and I think you guys are going to be very happy about the technological out of that but then there's an open question of if I issue an asset in card on oh do I pay my fees with Ada or in the native asset if we say ADA like everybody else like aetherium with the RC 20 and so forth if we see the native asset then that opens up a completely different ballpark and game because basically as an assitant issuer it's like having my own cryptocurrency I can even perhaps have my own address structure with don't custom labeling and then I pay fees with my tokens so why would I want to go and create my own cryptocurrency why not issue a card on oh and the US well how does that benefit ADA well if you're paying your transaction fees in the native token it means every single person who holds ADA in addition to getting staking rewards and ADA they would get part of those transaction fees in those native tokens so as a thought experiment imagine if this existed in aetherium world that means is a holder of ether if they had a system like ours you'd get some golem and some dye and you'd get some Lincoln whatever else is in the our c20 token and the system in addition to your either from these taking rewards okay is this something you're interested in or not as a system architect I can do a or B however somebody has to make that decision and what's happening is we're starting to leave thee everybody's aligned and everything is the same and whether you're me on you we're gonna make the same decisions let's go build a great Network stack and great ledger rules and a beautiful consensus protocol and now we're moving into the realm of philosophy and trying to make a decision are we going to be multi chain or single chain are we going to be native assets that are captive to Ada or native assets that are first-class citizens with Ada or not and it turns out we have the capacity to go in either direction but the community as a whole has to start making these decisions slowly they're not going to be able to make those decisions as we saw with the ITA and we kind of took a hands-off approach and said all right if I 10 wants to be its own thing let's see what the community behind the ITA does and you noticed it wasn't quite where it needed to be yet it still needed some shepherding and that's exactly the case for every one of these major cryptocurrencies if the etherium foundation was to disappear tomorrow it will create a lot of problems for theory despite the fact that they've been around for a long time if any entity in the Bitcoin space was to go out of business block stream or otherwise it would not materially impact bitcoins evolution progress so it does show you that Bitcoin in many ways is more decentralized on the decision-making development spectrum then aetherium is so similarly we as an ecosystem system have to aspire to move in that direction but that does require a lot of innovation it requires good voting systems good voting experience good information flow good innovation management divergent opinions the ability to disagree without being disagreeable and this is really a great challenge for the second half of 2020 as we open up the year it's not just about getting to centralization and small contracts but also it's gonna be a lot about how do we govern a system like this how do we make decisions like this and the power of the IT an experiment is it's a clear demonstration of the chaos of a decentralized system and how hard this really is how hard it is to get accurate information without reliable sources how hard it is to know which software to download how you use that software what are you really voting on what's the broader purpose of this what does failure mean why should you participate what's your incentive for participating do you get anything for it we could in no matter how informed I'd the community be there's an economic principle called rational ignorance which means that the value of being informed is less than being at the time you've had to spend to be informed so in other words you can spend days and days and days thinking about this reading blog post watching my videos talking to people but after that at the end of the day these are your upside for that is less than the cost of the time that you've spent the most rational thing for you to do is just not do it not participate and extend that to questions up should we have native assets that pay fees with the own asset or pay fees with a de extend that to how are we going to build our sidechains model and are we going to go with a block stream style approach primary/secondary where they don't have their own tokens and they're completely subservient and controlled by the consensus system of card on o or do we want to go to a partnership model where we can actually make deals with entire other cryptocurrency communities maybe hive or other people and they get some ADA and we get some of their token and basically there's a token partnership there we can get goo do either or these types of models and the technology for this is sufficiently general that both of these systems will work and in a way we've already partnered with another cryptocurrency implicitly that was the ITN we partnered with that to run as a parallel system and we paid them for six months out of the inflation pool of Cardno to basically give us a set of operators test or boris and to really show that our assumptions were true so that when we upgrade the main network the two billion dollars that's there has much lower probability of being at risk and being compromised it was a small price for us to pay to get something like that but that's a partnership anyway so I just want to make this video and say that with all things the goal posts are really what you make them to be and if the goal posts are here that we always do everything perfectly and everything's going according some grand plan or design you're never gonna win because even if that's your intent this is a decentralized world of a system and surprise this has happened and Black Swan events happen like this this coronavirus and so forth if your goal posts are to demonstrate to people how truly hard on chain governance is democracy is and getting a decentralized ecosystem to act quickly I think we've achieved a lot I can see it in the frustration and the ambassadors I can see it in the frustration in the community and I can see it communications that we've had people are starting to realize that this is not simple democracy's hard decision makings hard consent is hard and we're starting to realize that we're not as unified as we thought we were and guess what every single cryptocurrency has that moment so this is actually a major step forward for Cardno as a whole as we start leaving the safety of a unified roadmap and we enter into the uncertainty of the real world and we start truly decentralizing we realized that actually keeping people unified keeping people together keeping people behind some broad concept is a truly great challenge now here's the great part about that if we achieve it we're unstoppable because people who have different philosophies different languages different cultures different religions different values different perspectives have made a conscious choice to work together for a common set of principles and a common protocol when you have that you can overcome any law when you have that you can overcome any event any Black Swan a plague a war whatever it might be when people have come together to work together despite the fact that they're different for a common good nothing can overcome that and you will always win it's why it's so hard to accomplish and there's why there's so much in society and life that has built from the ground up to prevent people from coming together for example in the United States if we look at our media it's not built for unification it's built for division all day long the people and those groups focus on the things that make us different and the bad things that we do and showcase why we should hate each other and why we should disagree with one group over the other that is by design it's not by accident it's good business it's good it's good revenue for their particular model but more importantly keep Society fracture and then there's a group of people that are very very good at operating in fractured society to maintain wealth and power should people start unifying it's the single most terrifying thing to those people because that unification basically means that those people will be kicked out of power and society will change and obviously wrong and bad things will actually get solved nothing is bad or wrong by accident in a big system it's bad and wrong because somebody financially benefits from that and cryptocurrencies are similar I'm slowly it was siloed I remember as a kid many of you do I had to ride my bicycle in the rain to the library to get a book and suddenly we moved to a world where information moved instantaneously and that was a thought experiment of well could we put society into that same model can we put your reputation your identity your value your property your business all these things into the cloud into the internet and somehow do what the internet did for information for them well that's what the cryptocurrency in blockchain space is basically about but in the process of doing that we don't just put those entities in to the cloud and suddenly start anew all the things about humanity that lives in the real world will also get replicated in that world our cognitive biases our inability to admit that we're wrong when we probably should the problems we have in society with listening to each other and understanding each other our lack of empathy on a collective sense our tendency to follow straw man or strong men or great leaders and surrender our will to them so cult of personality and of course basically the systems that were designed to control the old system will work their way into the new system so all the tricks in trade of the media the flood these things will work their way into our system as well so the point of cart Dada is first principles the point of cardano's tried to do things a little differently and try to ask well what have we learned oh and can we apply the best tools for this job I can with science use the scientific method and peer review and involve the people that devoted their lives to doing good science and bring them in and build it a centralized brain we've accomplished that guys we've accomplished that as an ecosystem no matter what happens where I go where I'll Global goes there will be hundreds of papers written over the next five or ten years that are derivative works of the papers written for this project and you as a community we as a community everybody together we'll all be recipients of that value created now I have the opportunity to dial it up and turn up the science even faster and get more into our ecosystem as a consequence of unlocking those doors and creating the right incentives model but mission accomplished so science is done we have the right path and I can accelerate it but it will happen inevitably it's just a matter of d1 in ten years or do you want at five years okay on the engineering side we said we need to do coding differently this is why we used Haskell and form methods and why we said we have to do functional Fuhrer's because we recognize there was a moral hazard there was incentives for people to do a sloppy fast job to get money up front but then the people who pay for the consequences of that poor decision-making would be not the people who got the money but the people who trusted the people who got the money it's why the Dow hack was so precious and the parody failures and all these broken defy applications and so forth and we said that we have a moral obligation to do things differently as a project great but the third great pillar this concept of governance and sustainability this concept of working with you guys and saying hey we as a community do things differently the problem is that nobody has come up with a perfect government there are obvious advantages to the use of a math based approach and software development and we have 40 years of evidence to show that there are obvious advantages to structured scientific thinking and peer review we have 400 years of evidence and modern medicine and rockets in the sky and planes and cars and all these things that demonstrate in the very computer I'm I'm talking on to demonstrate the obvious benefits of the scientific method but yet you have to ask yourself which government in the entire world more than 190 governments is working properly which corporation has perfect corporate governance which company have you worked for where you honestly woke up and said every decision was made correctly I always felt I had a voice I always felt I've been listened to the answer is none no one can point over the long run for all types of crises whether it be sustaining resilience in the case of a crisis or making rapid decisions in the face of a crisis no one has come up with a perfect system for that so we as a project are now leaving the safe harbor that we've set up for ourselves where we have certainty and absolute focus into a world where no one has solved this problem now we have some ideas and you'll see a lot of those ideas come out at the summit and I think a lot of people be very excited about it and say wow we've made some leaps forward and frankly 200 years of political science and hundred years of careful thought and things like arrows theorem and all kinds of stuff has come up so it turns out that we have a lot of tools to work with and one of the beautiful things is that a lot of these tools didn't get used in society because they were bad ideas a lot of these tools didn't get used in society because they were inconvenient to those who have power and so instead of them being adopted they got pushed away by design and purpose because the people in power very comfortable with the system the way it is at your expense in my expense so for the first time ever we now live in a situation where for 200 years of things that are sitting in a warehouse we finally get to open up the doors grab these tools whether it be preference voting or delegative democracy or innovation management all kinds of cool concepts we get to open those doors reapply them and pull them and bring them into our system the ITN vote who cares if it succeeds or fails there's a few hours left to see if we hit the participation threshold or not but the lesson again we should be learning here is why was it hard it was hard because the tools weren't right the support wasn't right and that anger and that feeling that people have about it productively we can channel it into the a conversation of well what needed to exist for me to have felt good about and in the month of July we're going to start that conversation of things that we think will solve that problem but that's our first step and we're gonna have to move quickly and we're gonna have to be clever about this and there are no right answers or wrong answers it's just what do we value as a community what do we want to achieve towards the end of the year we're gonna have to really think deeply and carefully about things like how fast should the project move and how should we innovate as a project and where should that innovation exist and based on what we fund and the architecture we choose will answer those questions and also broadcast those answers to the entire cryptocurrencies space we tend to believe naively that innovation being as fast as possible is the right way yet somehow Bitcoin the least innovative the least capable the least feature-rich of all crypto currencies is the market leader by far and the one that gets the most media attention and the most adoption by far so perhaps fast-paced innovation it has to take a backseat to stability resilience and consistency on the other hand there is a strong argument to make that if we get above a certain capability threshold we can get mass adoption millions to billions of people entering our system that the system currently doesn't have and we move from just an asset just something people trade and store value in and occasionally do some side things with just something that can fundamentally transform society if that's the case then we have a very small window of time to dial it up to 11 and really maximize innovation as quickly as we can now I have an opinion but what Charles Hoskinson the founder of Cardno is becoming less and less relevant and now what's happening is you the community are becoming more and more relevant and I get to share my opinion you all do but at the other day I will not be the one who makes that decision it's gonna be you the community that makes that decision and I it burdens on me to make a good argument why I think it should be a or B to show how we can get that technology there or show how we can execute that strategy but in the marketplace of ideas it's just one of many that will come and this project will be a failure if it's just one we need many because at the other day it's the synthesis of ideas the flow of ideas that matters because no one is smarter than a well-informed well engaged well communicating crowd okay so anyway a few more hours left the vote if you want to participate if you hold ta de jour votes there and next month is going to be a really fun one from a governance perspective and I think everybody's gonna be so excited about it and we're gonna have some of the best conversations we've ever had in the history of our project soon and a lot of these things about the direction of Cardinal start flooding into our reddit and it's going to empower a lot of people who have stayed silent previously to start speaking for the first time ever and their voice is going to become more and more meaningful over time and eventually the most meaningful it's also going to force the acceleration of a lot of great concepts and tools and the burden is on me to try to get as many of those tools out into the domain and let people know that they exist like before I started a lot of people weren't even aware that there were things like condor SE and ford accounts for preference or during voting and that perhaps preference sorting is a much better voting system for certain things then up-down votes or threshold voting for example see so that's a conversation we need to have we needed to demo and showcase these particular tools and we're going to do our best job we can to do that and this itn vote it's kind of the accidental project we never got around to that Blade Runner and so there was a great opportunity to kind of start the conversation for democracy and show that it's a frustrating one but what encouraged me the most is that people hung together and it despite the fact that they got frustrated and despite the fact that they thought that things weren't perfect or that things weren't handled the way that they should have been they never lost faith in the project and the fact that they cared so much was because they had so much faith in the project and that really meant the world to me and that really that really showed that our best days are ahead of us I believe we're gonna be the ones who solve this project we've done great work on the mathematics side in the science side and if that's all we ever accomplished we built something that was beautiful and amazing and probably profitable but I'd like to believe that we have the capacity to solve the bigger problem which is the governance problem the voting problem the decision problem and should we do that it will be a great beacon for the world to look at and ask why don't our governments behave this way why don't our corporations behave this way why can't we make decisions like this for our leaders why can't we make decisions like this for human rights and for what's illegal and what's legal and then the burden will be on the legacy system to somehow say that what we've constructed is wrong the more valuable the system comes more people in the system eventually you'll understand the hypocrisy and hollowness of the criticism of that so this isn't in fact perhaps the greatest contribution Cardinal can leave there always will be using utility and as a business owner and of course I'm going to try to maximize using utility because I like making profit I like hiring people I like being able to have a big company and lots of employees and pay them well and give them good bonuses that's fun and that's all great entrepreneurs want to do that but at the other day I'd like to also believe that the things that we do here really can have a chance to transform society above and beyond making things more efficient and profitable for people but actually transform people's lives and if we've learned anything from 2020 the lock downs and the riots and all the social discord that we're going through it's that we all need to change the way that we do business from a governance perspective and that's our great challenge as a project and it's my belief that we have a good shot at fixing it because we have the right community we have the right principles we have the right tools and they're coming fast believe it or not and ultimately we have the right experiences as well so make the best out of the ITN yeah if you're a TA - holder got a few hours to vote as I said the links in my tweet and I'll put it in the show notes I believe is called your vote and whether that succeeds or fails has no impact on Cardinal in the long term no impact on the delivery of anything in the long term and in what we should ask the right question is what do we need moving into the future so that this is a good experience so thank you all for listening I really appreciate it and I'm having quite a bit of fun and I hope you guys are having some fun too and no matter where the passion said do remember that we all care about each other and we're all in this together ok so I'll see you all at the summit and I hope you guys attend and I mean have so much so much excitement being able to share some of the cool things we've been working on Cheers