Feedback Loops

hi everybody this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado always warm always sunny sometimes Colorado I got a nice Hawaiian shirt on we're having a Hawaiian day this is my attempt to pretend we're all laid-back and relaxed but the reality is we're working our tails off to clean everything up and get everything ready to go some of you may have noticed that some of the exchanges wallets are disabled there's good reason for that because we're upgrading to Shelley and boy there's a lot of fun and excitement there I'm we're happy to get them on enterprise-grade software and we're happy to get them on firmer foundations and it's great to work with finance and Patricks and Moby and the rest of the gang we're really close to the to the finish line here for Shelley and I can't help but think about the nature of feedback loops which is the purpose of this video complex systems has many subtopics but one of the most interesting parts of self-organizing self emerging systems is this concept that your system gets changed by the actions of the past so we have a lot of deep detailed things in the design of Cardno that are very different from the nature of Bitcoin so for example when you think about staking in stake pools you think about all the parameters the reward parameters parameters like how many stake pools should there be with the pledged amount the formulas behind them how that system works the mere existence of it inspires people to think about it and change it and propose things just the other day I saw an incredibly long conversation in our forums with Lars Bruna's and there was an alternative formula provided for a certain parameters in our system and our chief scientist saw it and he posted a picture of it and said hey we should talk about this in our next chief scientist meeting this is a formula that came up from our community not us and it just is an amazing experience when you see things like that because you say to yourself Wow basically the mere existence of the system the fact that people are incentivized to think about the system encourages people to contribute thoughts and ideas to it and what does this effectively mean that over time the system self evolves through feedback loops and that means we now have hundreds of people thinking every day one way or another with financial incentives to think every day about how do we make the system more fair how do we make the system more decentralize how do we make the system more Galit aryan or is that even a good idea and it's now a dialogue and it's a dialogue we listen to we participate in and other people listen to and participate in and that means that over time the system will become that way it's the same for the voting at the end of the month we'll have our product summit our product update that we always do and we'll start introducing basically how people are going to participate Voltaire and in short order we're gonna get lots of ballots and there's open questions about well what is a good proposal versus what is a bad proposal what is the minimum standard we as a community need to have in order to accommodate that and what process should we as a community go through before it even gets to the point of people voting on it and how do they vote quadratic voting preference voting thresholds voting all these types of ideas at some point will work their way into the Voltaire framework and the way we've constructed things is every six to eight weeks we can rapidly evolve so that's another example of a feedback loop where you the community participate we operate other people work and then over time the system becomes very different so that thread is starting and very soon we're gonna have the native asset standard and we're gonna be moving ERC 20s over to the test net to demonstrate that building security tokens developing tokens spending policy all kinds of really cool concepts and that will create a feedback loop to evolve the tokens standard and make it more functional as we'll exchanges and integration partners like wallets why because they have to list them they have to secure them and they'll come back to us and say hey this standard isn't as good it needs to be we need to improve it for example we had an idea of how to list crypto currencies on exchanges and then talking to many other people working with rosetta which is a coin based product and all these other things we really inspired us to redesign the way to list crypto currencies on exchanges and what does this mean it means that we now are converging to enterprise grade software in a single stack so it means the very same thing that will allow by Nance and bit tricks and mobi these other guys to have hundreds of thousands of accounts and do operations on massive sets of transactions is in the software that you have for free it's there it's one software stack and when we make security improvements to cardano's stack for example layering in the capacity to do cold storage and use hardware devices in that stack for exchanges it will work its way down all the way to you the user it's really an incredible thing when you think about it so native assets standard it'll evolve that's another feedback loop and it's just we you guys use it we modify it and it grows very rapidly then you look at smart contracts like Plutus and marlo and these concepts these ideas super exciting we're gonna open those floodgates and we're taking a lot of the old things that have been learned from the haskell world things that have been learned from aetherium and solidity and web 3 and all these concepts and we're blending it with a lot of the new this DSL driven approach and Plutus and what's gonna happen is we're gonna get hundreds of developers write stuff they're gonna come up with all these crazy wonky interesting ideas and they're not gonna be super happy with the first generation no one ever is and based on that the system will self evolved and if you think about the totality of all of this the concept that the smart contract stack will rapidly evolve the concept that the incentives layer of the system will rapidly evolve the concept that the governance layer of the system will rapidly evolved and the enterprise use of the software will rapidly evolve the software you have all these forcing factors that will cause hard no as a platform to become infinitely more resilient useful faster secure and ultimately be fit for purpose for pretty much anything people would want to do with it in the context of a financial operating system and this in a way I think is the highest achievement of engineering oftentimes when you build something no matter how great the thing you build is it can be a monument that stands for thousands of years it's perfect it's as good as it's going to get at the finishing of construction the pyramids will never look more pristine beautiful and elegant than at the time that they were finished and despite the fact that they've stood for thousands of years they clearly show the signs of erosion the system we have constructed here is better tomorrow and that's the standard that's the power of feedback loops that's the magic of self evolving resilient systems is that they get stronger they grow there it's almost a life form it's organic in that respect it's like real time evolution and every piece is there you have an incentive to bring in brilliant business people you have an incentive to bring in people who think every day about how to keep it secure you have an incentive to pay people and you actually have a Treasury system that can do that which will attract increasingly stronger and better smarter actors and to contribute to the ecosystem so all those pieces are there and we have the right foundations for and we have the right culture for that discussion about the stateful parameters was just amazing and the fact that we had something so deep and so profound so early in the system is a direct consequence of the things that were done in the past and the processes fall in the past or poorest as a protocol continues to evolve we're now taking into account very profound nuances that no one in the space has really thought about like how to recover from spikes a dishonest majority without using a check point in a proof of stake system and we're looking into all kinds of new con one-shot signatures for example those are signatures that take advantage of quantum cryptography so that they can only be used once and then they self-destruct it's really amazing where you can go with these types of ideas and over time they will eventually be made available to the broader world and the very same feedback loops that allow our system to evolve allow our system to ask how can we accommodate these types of things and benefit from them and pull them into the system the most magical part of all of this is it's universal so the moment that we adopted it's available to everyone every single user of the system for whatever they want to do the richest person in the poorest person are the same in terms of their access and capabilities to them because the very same thing that makes your money private can make your vote private the very same thing that makes your money secure can make your vote secure the very same thing that can allow you to do a ten billion dollar massive multi-jurisdictional transaction to acquire a company could use the same settlement system in the same foundations and frameworks have the thing that can allow you to tip two pennies to your favorite YouTube livestream think about that think about how amazing that is so feedback loops matter and I'm so incredibly glad that we're starting to really see them in the Cardinal ecosystem there's a lot of work that we're gonna have to do I'm moving into the future especially in 2021 and that's gonna be a high priority that we make sure that those loops are there they're quantifiable they exist and I'd love collaborate with great organizations the Santa Fe Institute and others that study these things full-time and bring on some dedicated researchers whose day job is to think about how to build systems and promote these things especially when we talk about the economic dimensions of the system and we talk about the expression and consent parts of the system and in essence this is probably the greatest advantage that we have over other projects like Bitcoin and even aetherium in that respect we do not require when you have the existence of self-organizing self-evolving feedback loops to improve the system centralized control and we do not require a deification of the past or of prior founders to get ourselves where we need to go we have certainty that the system will change but it will change always remembering where it came from and the values and principles that it has and it'll changed in order to accommodate more and more people so we can go from thousands to tens of thousands to where we're at today in the hundreds of thousands to the millions and eventually the billions working with exchanges you can get a sense of how vast we've already gotten because they're dealing with hundreds of the thousands of addresses and the accounting systems that they're using the addresses actually match verified users so the fact that we're seeing that scale just on the exchange side is one example of how big Cardinals grown but in essence we're very small and the greater scheme of things and if we keep this growth rate in this trend we will see tens to hundreds of millions eventually billions of people in this framework and every single new user gives us all their strength and knowledge and capabilities and we give them ours that's the work of a lifetime the pursuit of a lifetime and I hope it fascinates you as much as it does me and I hope it really does give you the same sense of awe as it gives me we don't normally see these things in humankind and today we have them so here's to the future here's to the upcoming hard fork and the many more to come here's to all the progress we've made and all the progress we will make and thank you all for listening thank you all for hearing my pithy musings and I look forward to the feedback loops of the future Cheers