Alonzo Update Proposal Submitted

everyone hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is september 7th let's make sure my broadcast is looking good yeah it looks good all right today is september 7th and i want to make a very quick video to tell you guys that we submitted the update proposal the hfc event is in flight so for many of you who follow cardano you are aware that how updates are done that once a proposal has been signed the proposal takes effect at the epic rollover the next one is going to be at 2145 utc on sunday the 12th which is about 3 45 mountain standard time pm mountain standard time so it's been triggered submitted the rocket's in the air either reaches orbit or it doesn't so no going back now that means we're all a go for alonzo the alonzo hard fork is going to happen on the 12th so i will have a watch party look for our tweets and our communication channels we'll all be there together live and we'll witness the rollover and that means that you'll be able to start submitting pluto our contracts to the cardinal blockchain now there's an enormous amount of work that has to be done post launch because there's lots of surrounding infrastructure and design patterns and abstractions and templates and dapps that have to be built and like any development ecosystem that has to happen that said the underlying infrastructure to run those things is now operational and running not on a test net running on a main net which means that if you have plutus code for your application come the 12th and you can submit it and get it running it will run on the main net okay so smart contracts are here congratulations we have a few toy smart contracts we wrote for fun one is for the poly market challenge just to demonstrate that and then also we're gonna do some other things that i think you guys are gonna enjoy and that's a it's gonna be a great day and a great moment a lot of work to do on the plus application back end beta will be available on the 10th and there's more to do beyond that but we anticipate that throughout the totality of this month most of that development work will be done then there's a lot of open questions about for example templates and abstractions to help application developers decide how they want to tackle concurrency in their application and a litany of other things that those will be ongoing developments that people will deploy and use so the underlying infrastructure doesn't have to change to accommodate those those are abstractions and software and things that are constructed above and design practices that are constructed above to enable those things just you saw with solidity and the evm and these other things you don't necessarily need to change the underlying infrastructure to build a library or these types of things if you're doing it right you shouldn't have to do that so it's a major moment for us smart contracts and it's important to always take a look at that moment within the context of broader things that need to be done now that developers will be using cardano there's going to be a feedback loop that's happening dozens if not hundreds of questions every day on the stack exchanges lots of people talking about things in discord and then going past the summit in october we're going to make sure that there's a support program in place to help developers with their applications and make sure that they're following best practices and these types of things and that's one of the reasons why we brought in so many different development partners we'll work out some deals there and the foundation will work out some things as well and we'll kind of figure all those things out now what'll happen is that certain things are rough edges as with any development ecosystem and there's going to have to be a cleanup hfc event to remove those rough edges or add in some more functionality that we'd like to see so we're rolling a lot of that up to the next two hfc events one is babbage and that'll happen before the end of the year and then the next one will be in the first quarter of next year sometime and these are adding some more functionality and they may add some things to make it a little easier to develop but then there are also optimizations some improvements in compression these types of things to actually get better on-chain stuff obviously as apps are running cost model will be analyzed and other things will be analyzed a lot of optimizations need to be done there but it's more iterative than revolutionary in that respect now we'll have a lot more to say about the basho era and how we're going to achieve great scalability in the strategies that we've been using at the summit and we'll also have a lot more to say about the volterra era about how do we transition the project to be an organism that's self-sustaining resilient and self-evolving that's completely run by the bottom up the community in that respect and what tools and techniques can we utilize to come accommodate that so attend the summit and of course that'll be there but it's really an amazing thing to be here i'm exhausted we're all exhausted to be honest with you it's it's been the busiest 90 days i think in the company's history and so much has happened so many moving pieces have been encumbered so many t's had to be crossed and eyes had to be dotted and it's truly a mark remarkable achievement i want to thank all of the stakeholder operators the plutus pioneers and the community for working with us and and all the people who wanted to innovate like minnesota and others i perhaps was a bit harsh in my prior videos about things it's great to see people trying to do things well or at least try to push out there and get things done any normal test net there'd be no issue but we live in a hyper-polarized space where there's competitive incentives for people to take anything and scale it out and use it to brutally attack a project for example just today there was a tweet from bram khan the founder of chia and a person i deeply admire he's creator of bittorrent who said that the extended utxo model is completely unnecessary and then his chia thing with chia lisp is the end-all be-all and that we all don't know what we're doing you're going to see a lot of that and it's completely unnecessary it's like saying that java is completely unnecessary only c plus plus is the true language your c plus plus is unnecessary only c sharp is the right language every development ecosystem is a collection of trade-offs and assumptions about how people intend to use it build with it and maintain their software life cycle we looked at the design space of the smart contract space and we brought in people who have built programming languages before or worked on programming languages like phil wadler for example was the one of the creators of the haskell programming language and has the advantage of 36 years of of hindsight of what was done well what wasn't done well we also looked at all of the smart contract languages and the ethereum development paradigm very closely and we identified a bunch of core areas that we felt were areas that needed a lot of improvement and polish the underlying infrastructure that's turning on today is the assembly of that and there's certainly a lot of great tooling that already exists and tons more will be constructed very quickly to accommodate that but it's an underlying virtual machine for the dreams of all the developers who come there after now there's going to be differences of opinion and those will be represented in three different ways one it'll be represented by different tools techniques and design patterns in libraries two for example with javascript you can write javascript in an imperative way or you can write in a functional way and there's languages like ramda for example it's it's actual design paradigm a language paradigm in javascript to write functional javascript code that ends up looking a lot like haskell but still javascript okay so using the language but using it differently two they're going to be new languages it's entirely possible to write a compiler for scala for example to plutus core or other such things and then within that paradigm also layers that things run on for example the guys over at mutual knowledge systems have a way of emulating an account layer on top of extended utxo so they're doing that for us and we're just working out the details of where and when that can come and if you want to program in that paradigm that might be easier it's kind of like these javascript frameworks like meteor or react or angular or things of that nature where you build an emulation layer same for dart and polymer and so forth okay so those things will come and they'll bring in different types of developers than the opinion developers and then finally the computing model that we've chosen extended utxo for whatever reason people may view that there are differences that need to be resolved with different computing models and that's why the side chains exist yellow and evm we built the ecosystem for all of these things also always keeping our eye on the prize about scalability so we said okay how do you outsource computation how do we make sure that that's possible and that's why we built extended utxo with our boris hand and glove because auroboris emits the growth of stake pool operators which means you have a large set of people to do distributed computations in parallel and there's tons of paradigms that exist the one we've chosen is hydra with both the head and the tail protocol and there's all kinds of things that can be done with hydra to enable that distributed computing so that you don't go from a replicated system that has a heartbeat and it's very focused on a very rigorous ordering you go to a far more distributed system with different trust models and smart contract developers have access to that we built this model for these things to plug right on in and they work we also built this model for extensibility for example the ability to add side chains and we built this mod at domain-specific languages like marlow for example where a lot of complexity can be hidden from the user from the developer and they can just focus on the core business logic and solving that business logic so the underlying infrastructure that's deploying on the 12 is really the the most foundational and abstract thing we could think of to enable this entire vision that we have and what's nice is because of its existence we can now work on that entire vision in parallel so there are different teams for each of these things some people worrying about improving the developer experience some people worrying about getting hydrated done and augmenting and upgrading it some people worrying about how do we bring the stake pool operators into this some people worrying about how do you get side chains done and get those done in a timely manner so that they can be added and augment the system other people worried about building infrastructure an account abstraction or these types of things and other people worried about formal verification of smart contracts so that the applications that you write can adhere to certain standards and be certified all of those things are now open and possible and will become iterations and just have their release cycles and come out just you expect any other part of the software the cardano ecosystem the node software address dia daedalus urroy dbsync the rosetta api the graphql infrastructure etc etc all of those things the network libraries the formal specifications all of those things you just get them every time a release happens and now there's a whole set of new things that are being added to those things that are now evolving at their own pace that's why this is such a significant release a lot of people ask well what can you do as of the 12th well a lot you have smart contract capabilities it's limited to the skill imagination and tooling of the developer you issue a token you can go beyond the nft now very sure in short order it should be fairly trivial to get a stable coin on the system you can start doing all kinds of advanced spending policies on your nft if you want to put royalties on an ft these types of things can be done and hundreds of other ideas and applications are now possible as a consequence of what is shipping on the 12. now some of those things will be harder to do because of the nature of the maturity of the tooling some of those things will be trivial and easy to do because of the design choices that we had for example issuing a token on cardano didn't even require alonso and that's a magical amazing thing that that's worked its way out it's why we've become one of the pro dominant systems for nfts because it's so easy to issue tokens on the system the same for metadata and so forth okay but the point is that don't it come back in a month and it's evolved quite a bit and don't it come back in a quarter it's evolved even more don't it come back in a few quarters and you actually have different paradigms as well now you can use different computing models that's all possible because of what's being presented here today and we never once compromised the evidence-based nature of how we design the system there is a chain of evidence from the formal specifications back to the scientific papers all the way to the code and that chain of evidence demonstrates very clearly the capabilities of the system in the beginning it was very slow and painful to do this because it's never been done before in our industry in a lot of startups never been done before now it's gotten so efficient that we're really starting to see high velocity and speed up and there's certainly certain areas that are definitely right for improvement for example optimization and performance tuning it's now going to become an increasingly higher priority as we exit the year but that process is working and it's discovered plenty of bugs and issues along the way that we're able to proactively correct or were able to get to the root cause significantly faster because of it ultimately what that means is when we do these types of releases we have so much more confidence in the underlying software there still can be issues and bugs but the set of those issues and bugs is greatly diminished and reduced because that's what you deserve this has always been a marathon and this has always been a game of years and decades not weeks and months there's always going to be a flavor of the week that somehow has great marketing and capabilities and surges high into the sky until the wax on their wings melts off when they fall cardano has always been about this idea of an ecosystem that moves systematically methodically and was great wisdom in foresight the extended utxo model inherits the wisdom and foresight of satoshi 12 years ago that idea that came into our industry battle tested at a trillion dollar level and it made that model better and its existence means that we've opened up a whole litany of new capabilities while preserving a model that is very amenable to privacy and scalability and preservation of a system that's sustainable that's a very powerful thing and you'll hear the flavor of the week complain and say this and say that there's an old saying the dog barks and the caravan moves on you can never stop dogs from barking believe me i know i have too many of them but what you can do is not let it bother you and not react to it everything that you are seeing launching on the 12th is the product of disciplined people committing chunks of their professional careers to get it done there's nothing here that was fly by night or arbitrary some of these designs and specifications were started in 2018 and they're now realizing it today this was not accidental this was not like well let's just figure it out and the people who did these things have the luxury of having made many mistakes in their career with mainstream programming languages and recognizing that it was perhaps not such a good idea to do it one way or the other way in cleaning that up and also the hindsight of the things we've learned from the failures in the ethereum ecosystem and the successes in the ethereum ecosystem that doesn't mean that come september 12 every single thing is completely done it's perfect and we flip a switch and then suddenly cardano is now a bigger ecosystem than ethereum any more so than any magic piece of technology subtly wins the transistor for example took many years to beat the vacuum tube but when it did we never looked back and we never moved beyond we never moved in any sense of the word to to that arc we just said transistor is the way to go and that's exactly the same situation here this model in our view will out-compete the account model it needs infrastructure to do so and that's being built some by us some by partners some by you the community and if we're doing our right job there's proper funding and attention and mindset and incentives which is why catalyst exists with almost a billion dollars of value inside of it and development challenges are going to saturate the pipeline of catalyst for quite some time and why there's a big ecosystem of infrastructure providers to continue building these things up and just the transistor versus the vacuum tube over time it's going to out-compete that model because it's built better for the movement of identity value and state that is what utxo excels at there was enormous wisdom in the design of bitcoin for that model but it is a super complicated programming language question how to get enough expressiveness in that model while preserving the safety of that model and that is the core accomplishment of extended utxo i firmly believe had this model existed and was in academic literature at the time of the creation of bitcoin bitcoin script would be pluto's and bitcoin's accounting model would be extended utxo i firmly believe that and why not because you get all the safety and structure that bitcoin provides but then you get equivalent levels of expressiveness and programmability that ethereum provides it's the best of both worlds in that respect and that's effectively what is shipping on the 12.