Georgia Special AMA 06/18/2019

hi kids this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Georgia the country not the state also known as the kingdom of Georgia and that place that everybody invaded and somehow they managed to keep it all together throughout the years a wonderful lovely place when I come to these countries and I have an opportunity to explore these places I always get a nice briefing in fact this one came from Dan Friedman and he's a big star Wars fan so it says Georgia a long time ago in a former Soviet republic far far away and as 32 pages long and pretty magical stuff but what literally was amazing was that what was a deeply technical document covering everything from the GDP to every index to how the banking system works I had a chance to go with many of the former ministers of Georgia on a pretty grand tour throughout the entire country and it gave me a great opportunity to get to know the culture the customs the religious practices and basically their their myths and their beliefs for example we toured one church that was 1,400 years old and it was a really amazing seat up on the mountain top and it has tunnels underneath it for people to escape during sieges and they've had to use them multiple times throughout the last millennium and a half we also had a great time going to a Cathedral where apparently they had part of the crucifix according to legend that Jesus himself was crucified on so overall this was just an amazing cultural trip but the real meat and potatoes was the work that we started doing with the Georgian government directly so many people aren't aware but Georgia in the last 10 years has gone through one of the most incredible Reformation of any government and probably in the entire world has gone from around a hundredths to one hundred and tenth ease of doing business to about six they used to have one of the most corrupt police forces they completely decimated it shut down the whole force and restarted it using us practices and training and now they have one of the least corrupt police forces they have high GDP growth salaries go up by year and actually the country of Georgia is passing a constitutional amendment that will force them to spend six percent of GDP currently 25% of the Georgian budget on educational expenditures in addition we met the Minister of Finance and he told us how the tax system in Georgia works took three minutes because they only have four taxes business tax a property tax a consumption tax and the income tax which is a flat tax I think at 10 or 20 percent I forget the exact amount so really just a well-put-together country they're very forward-looking and one of the few countries in the world that is already using blockchain actively and several of their systems in particular they're exploring blotching now for everything from health records to land titling and registration and this is principally because bitfury and other partners in this jurisdiction have done really an amazing job evangelizing the power of blockchain and the kinds of things that can be done and should be done to make governments more modern and records more portable and also to promote concepts like self sovereign identity and so forth so what are we doing here well George is one of the few places where we can immediately hit the ground running and actually do an academic credentialing project so basically the idea is that professional credentials whether that be a credential saying you're a lawyer or a doctor or a high school diploma or a university diploma your transcripts we would like to take those hash them sign them put them into a specialized format that standardized throughout the entire jurisdiction and put that onto a blockchain so that employers can easily verify when an employee comes up to them with that credential that that credential is legitimate and not counterfeit not adulterated in any form or fashion so we signed several MO use one with the Free University one with BTU went directly with the Ministry of Education and then we had a meeting this morning with the prime minister of the country who's a wonderful guy very very lively and we had a very deep and detailed 45-minute conversation with him and several other ministers you knew I was a mathematician so he brought his own mathematician who is a topologist who used to teach at University Sylvania was also friends with one of my advisors at cu-boulder so that was that was a great experience and we really enjoyed it and then we got a great photo outside and and we got to see the beautiful Georgian mountains I also had a chance to see this pilot we're gonna hope to try to combine it as something between atala and Cardno this type of a system requires innovation not just in hashing of academic records but also Identity Management as well as the payment system and so it would be really cool to see if we can explore how to build a payment system to pay for these transactions when people are doing verification events on a consortium ledger in this case it's hala and it would be great to see if we create that token to carry the instrument of value using the card on network so this is one of the first opportunities we've had right out of the gate to be able to build a hybrid ledger where there's a so it's still early days our professional services group will be coming to Georgia in July they'll be sitting down with ministers and university partners and other consortium members and collecting business and technical requirements and basically that will result in us being able to put a feasibility report together and then eventually a pilot and should that pilot be successful we should be able to actually figure out the scale out cost for the entire country as well as the value for transaction and the estimated transaction volume so this is just picture-perfect trip it's been amazing to have just so much packed into just a few days unfortunately I've had a gout attack and this is the country of wine it's actually where wine came from the very first vineyards were here in Georgia and I couldn't drink any of it so that's basically a modern-day story of Tantalus there okay so that's what Georgia is all about that's what we've been doing here next up is Israel I'll be flying out very early in the morning I believe 5:00 a.m. so I hope I get the bed at some point and then from Georgia I go to Israel to Tel Aviv and we'll be doing a hackathon and a lot of card auto related events I'll be talking with a lot of partners people I work with like Endor the cryptographic community developers and people the financial industry Israel is a huge cryptocurrency hub there's a lot of really amazing things going on there and it's a country I should visit more often given a significance and prominence to our industry so I promise you that we're gonna have a lot of fun and that's going to be interesting and I'll take a brief private tour to Jerusalem and the Dead Sea and we'll have a chance to kind of experience history as we did experience history here in Georgia so Israel's gonna be quite nice so anyway let's talk about Shelley and the progress of Cardona so hard on oh is red at a major point in its evolution we are converging to a viable test net for the Haskell code which is really remarkable because it was an engagement rewrite effort using very rigorous standards and on the rust side we are now ready for a self no test net in fact some people didn't even want to wait for our documentation and the website and the docker files and the other things we prepared and we're also preparing packages for snap craft and chocolaty and homebrew they said well I'm just gonna stall ourselves and they actually started doing that last week and we've already gotten quite a bit of feedback from it so we're doing a rolling release the people who sent in all the forms the 150 people who filled out all that information will get kind of a sneak peek of the stuff that we're planning on releasing on Friday and it would be a nice soft launch so that if there's anything we missed they can help us make sure we can put that back in and we're going to do a big dump so there's going to be a blog post and probably some video content there's pretty extensive documentation about the node and other such artifacts and so David's going to do an AMA on Friday and basically the first part will be covering what is being released and how to use what is being released and then we'll be available for your questions so I believe that Tim will probably post a link in reddit or something like that either today or tomorrow for questions to accumulate for the AMM Friday and will also announce Oh time for that AMA usually we do these around 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time because David is based in Silicon Valley okay so we're rapidly updating things and what we're doing is every every week to two weeks we're cutting another release of the rust class of the rust client in fact I think we've done four releases in the last three weeks and the Haskell wallet back-end is rapidly evolving as well so the wallet back end and the rest client are colliding with each other and getting fully integrated together and that integration should be towards the end of this month so the initial self note test net will just be for the rest code and then the next major update will be probably rolling out the rest note alongside the Haskell wallet back end or something like that alongside a lot of fixes that come from the QA process and comments from the community now basically what this is doing is giving our community the opportunity to have a blockchain in the box basically this is the first time that anybody the general public would have the ability to run workhorse Genesis and you're just running it as if you're in god mode you basically decide the distribution of the token you decide how many nodes you want you decide your delegation mechanics so who you want to delegate to and then basically or force is going to run so this is this is a really exciting four step because it's kind of a feature test to show end to end what Shelly's going to look and it's a really convenient parallel testing method to the next iteration of the test that we're going to be doing which is the open test network it reflects what you would normally see with a traditional test now so basically there's going to be a common State amongst all the actors so right now you have God mode and it's a great way to get used to the code the API is and generally speaking what this engineering is going to look and then at some point in the coming weeks we'll make an announcement of exactly how we're going to launch that unified test that for everybody and that's basically going to be a network stress test and not an incentives test so basically there we're trying to figure out make sure that the system is going to work with lots of users in it then run a bunch of Hazard scenarios and so forth and we've kind of roll over the group of people that haven't playing around mastering the use of this test that the self no test net to actively participate in the system now once that's solidified a little bit the final version of the test net will be an incentive test that and the point here is to take what we've written in the formal specifications and what we think is a good incentive scheme for how much state pool rewards are going to be etc etc and to that roll it out and then solicit one final review of community feedback we're probably also going to have a third party auditor come in and take a look at the incentive scheme that we've developed and basically this will give us a a good sense of whether we're close to the mark or not so there's various waves that review now if not to be outdone the Haskell team is converging to a test that we probably will see siren ish test net for fire an arrow functionality with the system sometimes in July and we should probably see Shelley functionality late July to August so as we enter August it's entirely possible that we'll have a Haskell test net an arrest test net running there are design differences and differences of opinion between the rust cloud and the Haskell code and what's going to happen is we're going to basically converge to a final design what are the advantages of our new development processes is that we actually had competing teams build the same product in parallel giving one a mandate to follow a very rigorous formal methods systematic process and the other one the mandate to follow a more traditional Silicon Valley agile software development process but of course we're a functional programming group and we have formal methods people so we couldn't resist but you throw in quick check and all these other property based testing techniques for the rest side and it's this stuff happens so so both of them are quite well designed but there are differences between these two clients and so some decisions are going to have to be made about whether to go left or right and that will be the major discussion internally as we get closer to the maintenance so things are moving along quite well the teams are working in parallel finally very well there are small teams usually about three to seven people they're mostly agile at this point we're getting weekly updates and we're seeing very quick releases and rapid iteration of things and this simply just was not the case with our old engineering standards last year so that's a huge organizational win and it's a testimony to the resilience and rigor of our engineers and desire discipline of our engineers to just keep with it it's really really hard when you keep getting beaten up and some cases you're encumbered with very bad code with high technical debt to keep motivation to just show up every day and take the punishment another event this month probably towards the end of this month will be shipping 1.

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