Surprise AMA 11/16/2018

00:00 to 1:28:02

hi everybody Charles Hoskinson here I figured I'd go ahead and do another impromptu mea ma I'm in warm sunny Colorado right now no snow on the ground actually some decent lights so things they're looking pretty good here and I get my Hawaiian shirt on because it's not too hot or cold anyway nice to have everybody here and I suspect that more people will come in as I talk and I love doing AMAs and you guys love listening to AMAs so hopefully we'll have some fun alright so first a few announcements few things first off 1.4 is coming along well we're in regression testing right now we've had a few regressions but nothing significant found it's a lot of new code a huge amount of refactoring on the core new data new database solutions so we've gone from lots of storage to little storage much more efficient some improvements on the network side but the biggest is the wallet back end it's the first piece of formally verified code we have and we're having a lot of fun integrating that so code is were feature frozen the dev cutoff was a few weeks ago and we're just going ahead and working our way through QA and that's led by Allen McNichols and his team he's the head of the QA department at i/o HK so not much longer I'd say a few more weeks and hopefully we should have end of November or early December release 41.4 so it's the most significant update we've ever made to the Cardno ecosystem and then after that every update is going to be Shelley related so the first major update will be basically some new code for Boris BFT and that'll get us all aligned up so that we can start moving towards some variant of war Boris either processor Genesis or something along those lines we've been doing a lot of test implementations of or Boris BFT we've actually have five different teams that are using it in various capacities and we've learned a lot about that particular protocol and we recently published the paper on ePrint for horse BFT so look for that and then after BFD comes out we have a whole new network stack we've designed and it's a really cool piece of engineering you can either build them bottom up or it can build them top down we chose a top-down approach for it and we've come up with all kinds of cool interesting novel solutions to various problems that are endemic in the entire network world of the cryptocurrency space and some that are specific that we have to overcome for Cardno given the nature of war forests it's a completely new protocol but overall things looking pretty good they're vrf implementation and tests que es implementation is done for or borås so we have a pretty good understanding of what those parts of the protocol looked like in terms of key evolving signatures we're also looking into X MSS at the moment and we should have some early parameterizations for that depending upon peter Schwab's work so the good news is we're likely going to be quantum resistant in addition to having all these new fangled features for Cardinal so the rewrites coming along well just a little caveat if you're following the main repository you might want to look into the i/o HK github repo because there's several repos like hard on o chain and so forth which are separate from the main card on OSL repo and we're making all of the contributions there for the core rewrite that's coming for Shelly so you're gonna see a slowdown in code and card on OSL because the people who are working on that main reflow are now working on other repos so so if you're watching just one repo you might think that we're slowing down development but the reality is were just moving to a different area of github so make sure you follow those repos as well so you can see that weekly progress your ROI was recently just open sourced so congratulations to emerge oh and we're pretty excited to hear about ledger support and pretty excited to hear about treasure support treasure just updated their side so if you have a treasure very soon your ROI will support that and if you have a leisure device very soon your royal support that as well on our end we're rewriting the wallet back-end for card on O so that it's modular and it's it can be pulled out and it can connect to our rust code and also can connect to our Haskell code once that's done the very next thing we're going to do is migrate from the old address to the new Icarus address style and once that migration is done then we should be easily able to have led your support for our system in addition to that then we'll start allowing you to do some things like what you can do with the RUS client like manual transaction creation there's some videos showing that as a demo that Lars did and then choosing your own UTX oh and some other things that exchanges have requested so over the coming few months a lot of this stuff is gonna roll out I believe your ROI is also prioritizing multi-sig so that's gonna come soon I was in Switzerland recently and I picked up some these I had a great chance to go talk to the guys at tan gem now these are these are pretty cool so these are actually full Bitcoin and aetherium wallets and those little chips right there are actually NFC trusted Hardware modules and basically to use them it's really neat nifty I'll show you guys okay so here's my phone and you can just see the screen and everything like that okay cool and what you do too is you just tap the back and it'll actually bring up the app there you go and you can just spend straight from that so this is actually a full wallet and they only cost like a to make so we're negotiating with the company right now to build something like that for Cardno and it'll have a nifty ada wallet and actually our hope is to have them as a 2-pack so because they cost so little to make what we'd like to do is have a one of two multi-sig where you have one for a recovery and then the other one is a spending wallet and the spending wallet also has a ping code that you can program at so when you want to spend you have to enter the pink code and if you ever lose your spending wallet you can go to your recovery variant and just drain the wallet to a safe place so we're in discussions about our different options and what we can do there but our hope is that we can get support for tan Jim pretty soon and it shouldn't cost very much money to buy these like a few dollars per unit and there's all kinds of cool things we can do and once we get in the hardware space would be fun to see where we go with that so that's under way let's see if there anything else significant overall just a lot of code is being written Russ team is expanding we just hired a new person for it and more people are on the way and we have a lot of code that's coming out pretty much on a daily basis we also just opened up a repo that has a lot of multi-party computation code that that team's been writing for quite a while and that NPC code is for the Kaleidoscope research line that Bernardo David Mario large area and Rafael Dow Z created so if you're interested in seeing NPC applied to gaming and gambling that's a really good repo as a reference point and it'd be super cool to see if somebody could take that code base and then connect that code in some way to yella so either we'll try to do that or we'll we'll see if we can get a third party to go around that way but we think that's gonna be a lot of fun in terms of travel I'm going to Mexico soon next week I'm skipping Thanksgiving here and I'm gonna I guess have some turkey down in Monterrey for a wonderful cryptocurrency conference down there I'll be the keynote and then after that I'm going to Teela Thailand straight from Mexico for beyond blocks coming home for a little bit then I'll be in Vegas I'll be in Scotland for Plutus fest and then from flutist fest I'm going to I think Abu Dhabi and then after that I'm going down to Uganda where we're gonna have a lot of cool announcements about various things we're doing at Uganda and that'll be in December so look for those but our our pan-african strategy's really coming together and it's pretty amazing to see how fast things have been growing in terms of Plutus fest that's going to be really cool the Plutus team has been working for about a year and a half on Plutus we've gone through 16 revisions of the language and they've really done some amazing things there and Plutus fest is the first opportunity to kind of show this off to the world and we're working real hard to make it easy for people to write tests Plutus contracts we have this concept called a mock chain and basically the mock chain is make it like a fake block chain so you can write all these Politis contracts and you can deploy them on the mock chain and run them and it's an operating environment that's kind of like what you would expect when the Plutus gets integrated into Cardno so-so Plutus fest will be really the first time we open that up and do tutorials and our hope is to probably have a hackathon or something like that along with a few tutorial sessions there going to be two tracks with flutist fest one track is going to be 4pl experts and we're inviting all the people from Glasgow and st. Andrews and that whole area to come on over and talk about the nuts and bolts of how the language is designed and that's that's mostly meant for the PhDs and people who care about that stuff and then the other track is going to be for developers people who are interested writing polluted smart contracts and people are interested in this extended you TXO model as well as how does Pascale Plutus and Marlowe how do they all fit together and what does that development experience look like so the entire Plutus team will be there Michael Paton Jones Simon Thompson is going to be there Phil waddler is going to be there Duncan Koontz is going to be there I'll be there so we're gonna have a lot of people and you'll have a first-hand chance to meet them talk to them we're gonna be giving away free t-shirts some mugs with the Plutus logo and some other surprises we're also going to try to get the operational semantics of Plutus on a napkin because back in January of this year in Portugal we mused aloud if it was possible to get the semantics so simple that they could be on a dinner napkin so hopefully we can put print them on a paper nap you know we'll see if we can get that done by December so that'll be a lot of fun anyway so that's that's the most recent event as some of you are aware we also had a great piece of news with the Cardinal foundation where Parsons resigned and now Pascal is in the effort of cleaning things up I made a statement about that but the good news is now that we're moving in the right direction there hopefully we can wake up the foundation and get it in to where it was supposed to go in terms of community management in terms of funding the community so we had this concept that we proposed the foundation about a year ago this notion of a Cardno hub and basically the idea would be that a community group comes together and says we love Cardno so much that we'd like to work full-time on evangelizing and growing the ecosystem creating meetup groups doing podcasts and whatever else is necessary to spread the good word and get people excited about that hopefully we'll be able to resurrect that and see some of these hubs evolve in various jurisdictions throughout Africa throughout Southeast Asia the United States and other places the Cardo no effect power cast just got launched we were trying to get out and over and I'm super excited that they were actually able to do it kudos to Philip and Sebastian and Rick they really worked hard on getting that pulled together and you know that it's got a beautiful logo and the format's quite nice and I'd highly encourage everybody to go and watch it and I'd highly encourage everybody to give some advice and suggestions about what they'd like to see or improvements to the format it's really a pilot and it's only as good as what people put in so so I'd love for people to invest a little bit more time and effort and propagate that and hopefully we can make that show successful the format is basically two episodes a week one episode is topical in one episode is an interview episode so the interview episodes will be populated initially by Amer going on which K people just to get the ball rolling but then the hope is for anyone in the ecosystem who's really interesting and has a cool project something they're doing to come on and talk you know and so there's a lot of great formats for that like epicenter and triangulation and so forth and my hope is that they'll be able to emulate that in some sort of way so card ah no effect is out pretty cool and we're definitely gonna have a lot of interesting nice things to broadcast in the next I'd say 45 days 60 days on the community management side now that that that balls rolling again okay so those are all the updates let's go ahead and get to the questions I haven't been looking the questions at all so now this is from Adrian ball hi Charles good to see you I appreciate cardano's open sores but do you take notice of others concentrating on global patents ie right and there's also Algar and and hash graph and these guys and also what does open-source mean so there's a difference between free software and open-source so free software is this concept of saying hey it's under an open license and you guys can take it for kit do what you want with it but really the development model around that is mostly centralized meaning there's a curating company they have their own roadmap they're doing their own things and they're making those decisions I would argue things like the java virtual machine like what oracle is doing in an environment looks a lot like free software in that respect so it's technically under an open-source license but in the end of the day there's a closed group of people that it's kind of invitation-only who have a lot of control over what 1.9 2.0 and so forth look like then when you talk about an open source project that's more like hyper ledger fabric or Bitcoin and these projects are saying hey there is no leader there is no custodial company that runs everything there's no beneficent dictator for life and really there's some sort of open community governance process or steering committee which is composed of a federation or hopefully a decentralized group of people and basically the idea there is that no one actor is so critical that if they were to disappear the project would go away the project would continue and subsistent find ways to grow and evolve so our goal is to be an open-source project with respect to Cardno and we'd like to see that move in that direction so we hired a wonderful open-source project manager his name is Robin and Robin is going to help steer us in that direction so we've started taking all the steps necessary to really be an open project in that respect we're moving from you track to github and trying to put all of our issue tracking and other things there instead of having it in closed systems we're also going to start writing a series of blog post explaining what is the difference between source and then how historically our open source projects well-governed there are a lot of books and reading materials on this as well and Robin is going to create a reading list for us internally but then we'll also share that reading list with everybody in the community and then I will just start opening it up and start creating a nice dialogue with everybody in addition to that we're also looking into writing a card on an improvement proposal process every cryptocurrency that's legitimate needs one we're no different so as we get closer to Shelley all future updates post Shelley hopefully we'll be constrained by CIP process so we'll take everything we want to do put it into a CIP and just list it and github and so major releases will be basically in that format takes a lot of work to do that slows things down quite a bit so it's why we decided to skip that process for Shelley because the peak driver here is getting chilly to market as quickly as we can but moving beyond Shelley that's going to be a big goal now the advantage we have also is we can put a voting system to see IPs and a funding system to see IP so there's going to be a Treasury component and a liquid Democratic component for democratic consent of CIPS so we've written one paper on that and we have some videos on our git on our youtube page about that and I highly encourage people look into it but we're definitely going to continue that research thread and we're definitely going to continue heavy investments to get us to the next level of basically getting a functional Treasury model in Cardno and getting a functional CIP process into Cardinal with a voting system connected to it now as with all things you have to be really careful when you're talking about democracy because you can get it wrong - comical effects so it'll be a systemic and gradual process but the good news is we're not in this alone there's about 10 years of history in the cryptocurrencies face and there's a lot of projects that focus a lot on governance from - DJs owes and there's good models to learn from and my belief is that this does not not be a USP this ought to be a best practice like like the Bitcoin improvement proposal and the etherium improvement proposal so we'll get there okay alright let's see the next question here Tupac Mexico City let's here has I which gamer go or CF employed or hired and when from Africa who can assist in regulation planning our director of African operations is John O'Connor and we have engaged a lot with regulators and we've talked to a lot of people who are domain experts like Chris cleverly and so forth in in various jurisdictions like Uganda so the short answer is we don't have a dedicated lawyer who runs around but the longer answer is we do actually have infrastructure and thought leaders in Africa and we're gonna have a lot of opportunity to do some cool things there alright when will et Cie have that little wallet I wish I knew I mean it technically wouldn't be hard at all for them to support et Cie it's just there hasn't been any demand and you have to make a deal with them so that's the advantage of having a Treasury system is that the manufacturer themselves can say hey if you want us to support a pass and submit a ballot in the community can decide instead of you know the people coming down from the ivory tower okay what else we have here yeah iron axe so I don't know much about this iron axe deal or what a mergo Hong Kong has planned just on my side we were never in fully informed we were aware that they had built some sort of relationship with this exchange and I guess it's a pre-existing Forex exchange but we'd never been in any of those conversations on the I which case I'd and we don't know too much about it you know the reality is that it is important to have liquidity in many different jurisdictions in many different forms you know that's a necessity for the ecosystem to grow and for infrastructure to grow around the ecosystem you need good payment systems you need debit cards you know you need these crazy little hardware wallets you need things like that for the ecosystem to flourish and the bed of that is the exchange layer of the system so I'm glad to hear that there's an increase in liquidity but you know we 10 at I which K to stay out of those deals because they tend to be regulated and they tend to be very specific in its on it would not be proper for us to get involved because it would be picking winners and losers if we give some time and attention to one well why aren't we doing it for financer vetrix or any of the others so where we do get involved oftentimes as usually on the wallets side where the exchange will integrate and then they have technical questions about the api's or they're having an issue with the wallet and they send us some questions and we help them fix that or build some additional features for them but we try not to get involved directly in the negotiations of what gets listed or not we've had to sometimes because the foundation was responsible for that and under person's leadership they decided not to do that at all so for the good of the ecosystem we had to get involved occasionally but our hope is to stay out of those things and that includes that particular deal okay yeah the 2020 Olympics from Frey Frey in Tokyo you know is they're really taken that seriously in Japan I was in Japan not too long ago and we were talking to some government officials and every single one of them had the Olympic Tokyo 2020 pin on their suit lapels so it's certainly a big pivotal moment for Japan I think they're taking it as seriously as China did for the 2008 Olympics and it'd be super cool for us to do something special so my hope is that cardano's sufficiently evolved of that state where that the Japanese community organically will go and do something and it's a bit too far out for us to make any commitments today but I'd love to see something interesting it would be a nice coup for the Treasury system if we could sponsor the 2020 Olympics just from card ATO itself you know are or maybe pull a dogecoin and sponsor the bobsledding team or something like that and get some Jamaicans that's a good question can you explain more about the longest chain of the consensus protocol is more dense than an attackers chain what law of nature prevents an attackers chain from being more dense the assumption that you've never had a 51% attack since Genesis assumptions matter how many staking pools will Cortana have well there is no hard limit or minimum but we can tune the incentive system to try to encourage the system to converge to a particular number so the current best thinking is we'd like to have about a thousand so that basically what you do is we have some parameters in our incentives paper that we wrote out of Oxford and if you tuned them in just the right way you make more money if you get closer to that you make less money if you deviate from that so so our hope is to have a thousand stake pools give or take our assumption is run 80% of the blocks will you need by stake poles and 20% will be made by private interests technically you can go in any direction but you know these things tend to normalize around more Federation it's really incredible though if we achieve that because you know says 21 and Bitcoin has a roughly tennis major pools that control things so we'd be a hundred times more decentralized in Bitcoin and about 50 times more to centralized a gos just on the state pool level but loading will be easier now let's see what else we got here what do I think about the bch fork you know years ago I I heard about all the you know the fray between Roger and the Bitcoin core devs and it was really a shame that there couldn't have been a peaceful way of resolving the debate I mean it's perfectly legitimate given the way that network stacks work to have larger blocks it could have had two megabyte blocks even 10 megabyte blocks there's a great piece of research by Christian Dekker and Roger watt in Hoffer back in 2013 that actually modeled propagation of blocks throughout the Bitcoin network and you know the the research concluded that you know you could have larger blocks and it wouldn't cause catastrophic damage to the system so I'm not necessarily a big blocker but I didn't really fully appreciate why this was such a humongous issue for certain people that believes they should be so small but you know I as a result I kind of stayed out of it but then it got so furious that it split into Bitcoin cash and to Bitcoin and what really bothered me was the existence of Craig right in Bitcoin cash I think the guy's a sociopath and a fraud I saw him in Rwanda it was one of the most distasteful situations I've ever had in my life you know we were in the back room before we were sitting on a panel together and the entire time we were in the panel pre discussion he was on a cell phone and only looking up to criticize someone and then he goes and opens up his speech and Rwanda saying he has more money than everybody in the country I don't know what kind of a human being thinks this way or approaches life this way or builds legitimacy by lying and saying is Satoshi but there's certainly some people who follow them and the fact that they welcomed him into the Bitcoin cash ecosystem with open arms you know say hey we have Satoshi look how smart we are and we have the best people I think it was a huge mistake for that community and now they're reaping what they sow so motion well and I hope things turn out better but you know there are just certain people in the world you don't do business with and you you try not to have in your community nothing about Brazil and Latin America oh we have plenty plans for Brazil Latin America you know we actually have a lot of Brazilian cryptographers are in fact the head of our enterprise group is bruno paleo he's Brazilian and we have Bernardo David Mario Lauren Jarrah we love Brazil we have an office down in Argentina it's not too far away some bonus Ari's and the head of emerge oz their CTO is Chilean so we do have Latin American roots and there's certainly a lot of things we're doing on the development side we just haven't gotten around to trying to build out big community management pushing in that jurisdiction that said 2019 we will do that I was going to go to a conference down in Chile I just couldn't make the dates work with everything else but I will be going to Mexico and then moving further south I'd love to go to Brazil in 2019 a wonderful country lots of stuff going on great cryptocurrency community same for Argentina so we'll definitely push hard in flatten America one way or another it just needs things take time and we have a phenomenal director of African operations and mirko's and Asian companies so it's a little easier for us to navigate in those jurisdictions than it is at the moment for us to navigate Central America and South America but you know they're family too and we'll get around to it plus a lot of our research is done by Brazilians and so they remind me on a weekly basis that we should do more if anything just for the food okay what else we got here from the card Auto effect what do you think will be the major impact of open sourcing your oi I have a very firm belief that all wallets unless there's a very good technical reason must be open source if you are going to go to the community and say put your money on this wallet the community has the right to see the source code if anything just to verify you haven't put a backdoor and it's steal people's money or you haven't biased it in some way where you can skim off the top okay so that's just a standard and it's a standard we've had since the very beginning Satoshi didn't release some closed binaries of Bitcoin and say trust me the code was right out there and people could see it read it and that's how critic Rafi is done that's how good wallets are done so it's incredibly important for your ROI to be open source for people see the source code read the source code fork the source code and understand the source code know what's happening with their money so if anything super important glad to have that there a second the whole point of the Icarus project was to be a reference point for people to fork that code and build their own products whether that product be the what we've seen with infinite o where they have now a mobile wallet or that product B what we've seen with your ROI and so in a sense that open source nature of that reference client is mission accomplished and great things have been done and if you're is to be truly open source our hope is people will fork that and create their own wallets or their own experiences especially as the functionality tends to increase and that's only a net positive for the entire ecosystem so at the moment it's a small step at the moment it probably won't appreciate please see any returns but it's like a vector you know the if the earlier you are it doesn't matter what the angle is the further and further apart they get right as you go further along so that's exactly what will happen your two year three year four and eventually we'll have a vibrant ecosystem because of these open source projects so good stuff could you please give us some loss that heading on a second it's a web development question ah can you please give some example of what wept the developer can do with card ah no please really hard to imagine without first successful projects what kind of project could we do so when you're a web developer you're thinking about experiences for your user okay and those experiences are domain-specific so it can be I want to build a CRM system or I want to build a text editor or I want to build a PGP client that's built into the browser like manova loped and every single one of these has an intended user and use case behind it the point of smart contracts and cryptocurrencies isn't about saying we're going to go in and invent new experiences or going and invent new applications for your users so never been about that you know your creativity your creativity solve their problems the point is that there are components to your user experience whatever that might be that maybe are compromised or more difficult or in some way are too trusted when you're talking about a legacy system for example if you're WikiLeaks you have to use of legacy payment provider what happens when those people shut you out or it's the same deal if you're doing podcast and you're building a great experience but you're a bit too controversial maybe your sargon or maybe your Jordan Peterson and suddenly you've been deep platformed so in the legacy world even though you have this great experience and you've built these great things you've now been cut out and you in some way have to compromise either on the way you operate the nature of your content or the relationship you have with your users the point of crypto currencies and this holds the centralized infrastructure notion is to say that you don't have to make those compromises for the sake of MasterCard or Visa or for PayPal or you don't have to make those compromises for content providers like YouTube or or what-have-you or Twitter you can just dream up your experiences write them as they are and then integrate these platforms this is centralized in structure which is censorship resistant and it doesn't live with a curator so that's one dimension of it the other dimension is there are certain things with your experiences which are trusted so gambling is the canonical example but basically you can look at pretty much anything where you the server say trust me and the hope is with smart contracts and the hope is with decentralized infrastructure is it in some way you can take it from a centralized point you can take it from a trust us trust the server and break it down and say that there's a different trust model behind that whether you're storing information you're doing computation you're talking about a financial transaction where two people are coming together you don't need that middleman of necessity anymore you can cut it out now for this to work well for the web developer it means that you need to be able to continue using your experiences and tooling that you're used to html5 and CSS and pick your latest J's framework whether that be angular or react or whatever the hell you guys like using these days you should still be able to use that and then you need to have some sort of an interface so instead of talking to a server you can talk to a blockchain or you've already seen some great progress like with meta mask and these other ideas about how to do that and there's already starting to emerge a whole development experience with this whole notion of web 3 or you can take that notion of a decentralized infrastructure and connect it to your web application and what's really important to me is to avoid vendor lock-in what I don't want to happen is to say that once you've committed and you've deployed on a particular piece of infrastructure whether that be aetherium or Cardno or Chios whatever that might be you're locked in and you're trapped there and you're stuck with a particular token and that's that you can't move mitigate or migrate you know you're just you just live there so it's really important that you'd be able to switch between these platforms second it's important that you get to use the tools that you want to use and that the smart contract layer of the system is not there for the sake of being there but it's there to add another dimension to your application that allows you to continue offering the services the way you want or to reduce the trust model behind those services so in essence it's just one of those things where you say I have a problem I want to solve I have a customer I want to serve and there's some component of that problem customer fit that does require decentralized infrastructure or would be made better with decentralized infrastructure now guess what there's millions of things in the world where this doesn't fit doesn't make any sense you know if you're doing an MMORPG does it really make sense to have that be completely decentralized maybe not if you're if you're doing you know your your work server and you're allowing your employees from home to dial into that it's probably counterproductive to attempt to decentralize that because at the end of the day it's your company especially you're talking about your company's payroll or something like that that said there are certainly a lot of technology that we build that could be useful like NPCs threshold signatures next generation the signature stuff and an encryption to be quantum resistant or better than the PGP standard great but doesn't necessarily require a blockchain or any of these types of things but if your goal is to talk about federating trust if your goal is to talk about censorship resistance if your goal is to talk about alternative payment channels or complex financial contracts that you want to be settling without a counterparty or a trusted third party and if that's the case then it makes a lot more sense to go with the crypto currency side of things okay what do we got here our BT c8 atomic swaps on the horizon you know be really cool to do that it'd be really cool actually did to do some sort of Dex where we have atomic swap support for a long list of cryptocurrencies we've had some discussions about after Shelley what do we do well the great part about Shelley is we're gonna have all this wonderful infrastructure oh great Network protocol it'll be quite easy for us to layer more functionality on top of that we'll also have this notion of stake fools and they're gonna be quite robust and a lot of them will deploy relays in addition to just doing staking services there's a strong potential we could layer on top of that a payment channel system and layer on top of that an Oracle system and federate this things so that's gonna be a high priority for 2019 especially as we pull Plutus into the base ledger once that's there it makes a lot of sense to go and try to push a Dex into the system because people are going to be able to issue their own assets will have sidechain support and will have smart contract support via Plutus and Marlowe at the base layer so it would be very easy for us to put some sort of decentralized exchange on or the very least try to do time across chain swaps so there are already are some great protocols on market there already are some great projects so it's not a matter of innovation there it's just a matter of who's the market leader and what tech looks best and then trying to adopt something there and if you do need some sort of curated middleman to do that we could write a protocol into Cardno to make that happen so the a short answer is we're looking into a long answer is that it is something that would be probably after we get payment channels and Oracle's into the stake pools see what else we got here does the Microsoft protocol being released worried you and what effect will it have on card oh no can you partner with them I generally don't worry about big companies releasing cryptocurrency protocols what we found talking IBM Microsoft Google and many others is they have very little interest on the cryptocurrency side of things and they do have some interest on the blockchain side of things and generally how that interest works is either they just join an alliance like hyper ledger or they have an internal team at their company that does a skunkworks it builds some sort of cryptocurrency solution then they write some white papers they go take them to the right conferences and they go huzzah look at all the great stuff we have and maybe they even build a patent portfolio around that but at the end of the day what are they really doing they already have an existing enterprise business line and what happens is they sell the fortune 500 companies and the sum CEO of a fortune 500 company will call up the salesman or maybe their CTO or a mid-level executive and say hey I need blockchain there's a mandate from God you know it's coming from the board blockchains hot and sexy and we need that and what IBM or Microsoft will do is say well we have that you're buying one of our products you know we'll just layer it on top of that and we'll give you a blockchain they're like great we have blockchain now then they call their boss and say boss we were state of the art we have blockchain whatever that means that's what we found and our conversations with them it's not to say they're not solving real problems in fact I'm a big admirer of what's been done with fabric I think it's a great piece of technology really like the team I think the way the Christian approached pushing everything out was was quite pragmatic they built a product and go they wrote a white paper they reformed the product and then they built a great steering committee and there's just a lot of good people that are making contributions there and overall the it's a it's a decent approach with great documentation and there's even some good books that are floating around on how to use it but a long short is that my belief is that the who will benefit the most from blotching are in the enterprise setting are gonna come from places that are paper-based and they're throwing that out and they're going to a completely new system when you have legacy systems which are quite sophisticated and already digitized and there's billions of dollars of investment in those systems the the steering cost to going adopt a new system is just just too much but if you're talking about like coffee farmers in Africa where they're completely analog they're completely offline and you're saying well how do we move these people online it would be very easy to envision how you can build a blockchain layer and then create digital identities and pull them there and then you can talk about interoperability of that enterprise system with Cardno for example you know and same things that allow you to store money on these types of things could also allow you to store identity on these types of things it wouldn't cost much more to make it a really cool ID card so you know I don't worry so much about them we can partner with them where possible and if they're open source great no plans to use elixir at the moment although I'm a big fan of the language I don't worry about a theorems proof of steak at all so the question is what do you think about a theory I'm writing proof of steak they ever get there great welcome to the party I feel we are ahead of them in terms of research and in terms of engineering in terms of clarity on how we're gonna roll it out what we're gonna do i they worry about fundamentally different problems than were you worried about they're just obsessed with finality it's pretty easy to achieve that either on the probabilistic side or on using a PFT protocol you can get it instantly they're super worried about long range attacks you solve that with K ES and the Genesis assumption so I think they they overthink certain things and they under think other things and to be honest their research agendas never really made a lot of sense to me so I don't worry too much about them and even if they achieve it the best they're gonna do is just have a protocol that competes with Cardinal great we already have a POS and we have a wonderful vision on how we're going to accomplish sharding we have a paper coming out soon called parallel chains that with the side chains research it'll converge to aurora's Hydra and we have this beautiful foundation for how we're going to move our way into a sharted ecosystem and frankly if you wanted to shard with the approach that if your iam is using it would make a lot more sense if they just did a steak paste election system with you know like an MPC generating random numbers and elect you know 250 delegates and have them run something like rapid chain on close each epoch with a checkpoint but okay all right let's see here what else we got here are you taking care of your health when you travel no and everybody complains about that although I am losing weight it's gonna be a big 2019 thing get Charles healthy have a prediction contract about my weight quantum computing in cardano's quantum resistance so there is a there is a good indication that governments are worried about quantum computers when you see NIST get together and say hey we're gonna have a competition replace all our old crypto with quantum resistant crypto US government's standardizing protocols for quantum resistance it means that there is a strong belief within the US government that within 10 to 20 years we will see quantum computers emerge to a point where they can compromise existing cryptography you kind of have to get a transition quickly because what happens is when you transmit something a foreign government will archive that China will store it Russia will store it and we store their communications and we just say hey you know in 10 20 years when we can decrypt these things we'll know what you guys were talking about in 2018 so huzzah anyway so they're standardizing things now and in anticipation that within a few decades these things will materialize it's really expensive to build quantum computers and it's it's not clear exactly how to do it although a lot of people have great ideas and they've built some great proofs of concepts and there's even a company called d-wave which sells them and even sells cloud time for quantum computers and then there's discussions about using things called time crystals from memory it's pretty crazy how deep these things get but overall I don't worry too much about it but it turns out that some of the signature schemes that are quantum resistant also have Ford security so if you need a que yes it's really good just go that direction so we're looking at the moment into a variant of X MSS maybe we go in a different direction but how should base crypto is quite nice if we have that helps us with Genesis it also helps us with quantum resistance at the very least on the delegation and a ledger maintenance side now it's probably too heavy to use for things like transactions because right now the post quantum signature schemes are about 50 to a hundred times in practice heavier then then the elliptic curve counterparts depending upon the type of post quantum you use so so it doesn't make a lot of sense to inflict that upon your users but at some point in the future it would make sense to include an option to use that type of a signature scheme and people would pay a much higher transaction fee so if they're particularly worried about it or they're thinking about archival storage then you know that's the direction to go that said if you're you know cryptographer a big amount of cryptographers are studying post quantum cryptography and they're developing all kinds of innovations and optimizations and they're looking at new mathematical primitives that are potentially more efficient kind of like what we went from RSA to elliptic curve cryptography from that so so my anticipation is within the next five to ten years we should see the next generation of these things come online and based on what NIST is doing and what cryptographers are doing today those schemes will be quite useful for the transaction stuff the things use it with HD wallets and the things you use on cards like this which are very limited resource but then for delegation and for the ledger maintenance it does make sense because that's much lower volume you don't have a lot of signatures just one per block and then the delegation side of it is not much it makes a lot more sense to you know move in that direction sooner so we have a strategy and overtime will gradually move that way we also are kind of keen to understand what a quantum adversary looks like so what does an adversary who has a quantum computer what are all the things that that person can do it goes beyond just breaking signatures and that's a really deep and interesting topic and it's an understudy topic so it's something we'll definitely do after we have our feet wet with just picking a signature scheme for Shelley and then moving beyond that we'll examine Ora Boris in that perspective okay the shirt is from Hawaii I used to live there I lived on Maui in Makkah WA yes I'm going to crypto crows event in Ohio I just can't remember what it is [Music] [Music] Oh everybody Falls Sargon yes people can massively generate addresses but it really won't do anything if you look at the mathematics of it the key space is quite large it's like saying hey I put a swapped a single grain of sand on the beach over in Hawaii one of the Hawaiian Islands with a little itsy-bitsy middle ball that's painted to look like sand so why don't you go at random and start grabbing little grains of sand until you find that metal ball that's painted to look like sand good luck with that and you can only pick it up one little grain at a time now imagine taking that and making it even larger and that's that's basically the space that you're dealing with no I don't like coleslaw and you guys can are free to ask me about anything you want not necessarily even Cardno related does Cardno and Syrian labs have an agreement of some sort that was a deal my understand was negotiated by a mergo and I did actually fly to Israel for Euro Crypt and Wald was there I met with Moshe and had a discussion with them and they got to show me around their facility and didn't look too bad it was a really nice place beautiful skyscraper lots of really pleasant people and they were making good progress towards building the fini this was before their launch I'm not sure if the phone is out or if there's still a few months behind that but basically it's a cell phone and it has a trusted Hardware module in the back that slides up and then you can touch it and communicate with it do cool things with it and the trusted Harvard module will support their in embedded token as well as other cryptocurrencies and I believe the deal that was negotiated with the mergo to ceiran was to have a to support they've been very friendly with me and I haven't gotten any indication that they're not going to support ADA and but I'm not directly aware of when and how that support is coming but I'd imagine that it's coming probably soon although I reached out to a mer go and into Saren to get an exact date on that so how did I get into cryptography so I'm not a cryptographer cryptography is a really involved in deep topic and it takes about ten years in my view to make a good cryptographer so I took at cu-boulder a course in cryptography from Professor there named su Yin Yi and he's still teaching nice guy studied algebraic number theory and we use Silverman's book which is probably the worst of all books to study cryptography from and I always felt it was really interesting and then later on I took the Coursera damn Brunei classes and John Katz his class and I and I actually end up reading John Katz his book which is much much better than Silverman's book it's called introduction to modern crypto I read the first edition but the second edition recently came out and it's quite good anyway the appreciation that you gain is you think about things like confidentiality integrity non repudiation and authentication it's basically this notion of secure communication and this concept of knowledge how do you know somebody is who they claim they are how do they prove that to you what different ways can they prove that to you and if you have some piece of information how do you office gate it so that the adversary can't know it but then the desired recipient can and are what scenarios can you share that and you know other things too like this concept of zero knowledge cryptography where you know you kind of prove things without revealing it like I want to sell you my password I can prove I own it but I'm not going to tell you what it is so it's a super interesting field because it's a great intersection of psychology sociology mathematics and computer science and you're always thinking about capabilities you know you're so well what can the adversary do can they do a plaintext attack or chosen ciphertext attack or you know can the adversary does he have access to my computer you know the other access to the CPU itself you know or you know what level of insanity are we gonna go am i so paranoid I'm gonna go out to the beach with a cup and grab my own sand and make my own silicon and cryptographers are trained to think in a way where they can kind of go from bedrock all the way up and model protocols accordingly what's really elegant about the field is that it's a rigorous field it's it's one where you have assumptions and models and you have proofs and those proofs can be checked by third parties in some cases they can be mechanized there's actually a platform called easy crypt made out of India and allows you to mechanize the proofs and and computers can understand them and verify them and occasionally we can take the underlying math and write like an Isabel or Kok proof for it so if you're a mathematician it's it's always appealing to say hey they're using mathematical primitives whether they be sings with lattices or the things with entombing how hard it is to factor integers or the discrete logarithm problem and we're able to construct trapdoors and construct hardness guarantees from it or I should say like hardness assumptions because you can't actually prove these things are hard so I was always interested tangentially but it's really amazing to see what the professional cryptographers are able to do it's just a it's there's an elegance about that field especially with the papers that I see our cryptographers writing it's it's really admirable where you can see the development of wara boris where you're first it started from a very rigorous definition of what is a blockchain that's a gkl model and then from that they say oh okay by the way we can create that secure LED you're using this beautiful construction and it's secure because we can prove these interesting things about this object called for couple strings and then based on that you can just keep going and going and coming and talking about networks and all these other things and you can even throw away the clock we have this new thing called orb or Chronos it allows you to abstract that out so it's it's so incredible to watch that it's a lot of fun to watch that but it's not the end-all be-all you know the heart of cryptocurrencies is of course cryptography but it only works because you have secure implementations it only works because you have a scripting language it only works because you have a network and guess what those are different fields of computer science and if those things aren't well thought out you can have perfect crypto the system still would be junk so it's cool to see all those pieces come together but even if they all come together perfectly if you don't have a good user experience doesn't matter yeah you know nobody will actually do anything there is no greater example of that than PGP you know it's it's a shame that PGP didn't take off I often say if it had we'd have a password free internet and we'd have a totally different way of understanding who people are on the Internet you'd have a reality where when you go to login you just click a button yeah it's so when you go to create an account you register your PGP key it sends you a challenge you sign it it goes to them they look it up on the web of trust and they say oh that's Charles Hoskinson and it fills out the profile and maybe you can even send them over a shared secret for a profile card that's encrypted but they when they pull it they can decrypt it and fill in your login information and then whatever you want to login it'll just go ahead and send you a challenge you sign and it can verify that you you're the owner of private key so it's a one click login so you could have get rid of SSL certificates you could get rid of passwords you could get rid of usernames you could have a very easy way of propagating user accounts I'm is just a magical thing you know and it's just a much easier management layer and in addition to that you have cryptid email you know so you'd figure that given that there's this overwhelming advantage to the user and this overwhelming beautiful thing that you can do for users that people have recognized that adopted but PGP was a commercial failure an elegant beautiful thing in cryptography you know great for Phil Zimmerman and Finney and John Kallis and the others who worked on that and I it's just super impressive to see how clear their thoughts were and what they were able to accomplish with it but no one adopted it so crypto alone is not the only and I'll be all you really have to have great user experience with it why do you think the Chinese radio is higher than ADA don't you think they're trying to control the market I think any government that thinks it's a good idea to put everybody in a database and assign social credit scores to them and if you buy the wrong food at the supermarket or you associate with the wrong people your score goes down and then you get fired from your job and your money gets shut off probably doesn't have their priorities aligned with the priorities of cryptocurrencies so I take it as a mark of pride that iOS's higher rank than Cardinal I want to be at the very bottom of their scale I don't want to be anywhere near the top his flute is going to have dependent types like Idris Agda or and is a really good question the closest I think will come to that is probably refinement types if you're familiar with liquid haskell you should look that up and those ought to be sufficient for most verification work that you want to do we could do dependent types but then it begs the question of would it just simply make more sense to write a idris to Plutus or compiler and then you could just simply write things in idris you know then you could reuse that ecosystem but refinement types are certainly something we're interested in IOH kay is going to start investing money into liquid haskell and making sure that that ecosystem becomes much more prevalent we're also going to start in investing money into G H CJ s so it would be nice to see liquid Plutus and bring that in so that's something we'll definitely talk about it's a summit 31 no card on I was not gonna fail it's gonna survive do I talk to vitalik often he occasionally wishes me happy birthday and I see him at the conferences from time to time and I say hey Vitalik and he says hey Charles and usually that's the extent of our communications which is a shame see what else we got here hello Malaysia it's a lovely country food is wonderful why are there er C 20 tokens valued higher than card ah no is there one what's in the RC 20 that's higher than card ah no I think everything above us is non er C 20 unless is tether er C 20 always forget these days yeah maybe it is that's tether what are three books you would recommend any field what are you reading right now right now I'm reading grants biography called grant it was written by Ron chernow wonderful book ulysses s grant is just an incredible figure in US history for in 1822 died I think in the 1880s and grant was the guy that everybody just bet against he had this domineering father named Jesse grant he and his mother were kind of abolitionists you know parents who were high energy and his father was kind of like a jovial businessman along the lines of PT Barnum and it was a Tanner and grant was kind of quiet reserved and nobody really cared much about him or had high hopes for him so his father didn't want to pay for his university so he sent them off the West Point yeah net worked his way in to get a recommendation and grant went there and he was a very unassuming person he was 5 foot 2 when he enrolled in West Point he grew a hole 6 inches that year I ended up 5 foot 8 and his only notable differentiator I would say is that he was a great horseman so you figured that he'd become a Calvary officer but instead they made him a quartermaster then he had to go and fight in the mexican-american war it was rather unremarkable everybody was fawning over robert e lee but didn't care too much about him and then he ended up marrying this this gal named Julia who her father was a southern plantation owner in Missouri and he was really racist and didn't like grant at all and thought he was kind of a pushover so a grants father was an abolitionist and his father-in-law was a slave holder so it was caught in between two worlds and he had this doting wonderful wife who was a bit a bit head in the clouds she was a bit of an idealist and romanticized the the south so then grant was transferred to a series of outposts from the backwater in New York to a to a outpost out in California and he had a drinking problem so eventually well middle of nowhere drank himself to a point where he got kicked out of the army so he was a deposed captain and he kept falling prey to get rich quick schemes and people would borrow money and never pay him back so he ended up being unemployed and Ja and destitute with no savings he went back to to his wife and he tried to get a job with his dad really couldn't get anything there so he ended up getting a little lot of land from his slave owning father-in-law and he built a log cabin with his own two hands called hardscrabble and he lived on this farm and tried to be a farmer for four years and wasn't very successful at it and then at some point his father broke down and gave him a Clark job at one of his tanneries for $800 a year and nobody really thought he was a good guy then suddenly the civil war broke out and in the short order he managed to get a commission as a colonel from a captain to a colonel and fought in the Western Front and had a series of just stunning victories from Fort Donelson to Vicksburg and eventually worked his way up to Major General and then they decided to make him commander of the Eastern Front promoted him to lieutenant general first person in US history since Washington to hold that rank he crushed the Confederacy and became General of the army in the short order became the president of the United States so in just a period of a few years he went from destitute kicked out of the military for drinking nobody that everybody just bet against to a man who commanded a million people and man who ran the the United States for eight years but in true grant fashion after he left the White House he ended up getting swindled by another person who was running a kind of a Bernie Madoff style nineteenth-century Ponzi scheme and he lost all of his money again and he was diagnosed with cancer he had mouth cancer because he smoked 20 cigars a day and then he's like oh god what am I going to do I can't leave my family to be destitute so he decided to read his memoirs and he worked diligently dying of cancer and he barely got them done I think he died about a week after he finished them and they became a best-seller and I think are one of the best-selling presidential memoirs of all time it was really interesting is that he never even mentioned his presidency in his memoirs he just covered his entire civil war period in early history and so he was able to provide for his family there but really stunning guy and amazing person and it was a pivotal figure in the reconstruction of the United States destroyed the Ku Klux Klan the first instantiation of it he was a huge proponent of abolition and helping out the slaves and I think a very underrated president he was also one who was constantly taken advantage of by others and there's just so many examples throughout his life where he just got screwed over and over and over again from his presidency to his generalship to his own father and just great a great case study and how bad people can be to another person so definitely reading that book it's a big one it's about 800 pages I think and anything Ron chernow does is quite thick and in fact other books I'd recommend one of them is from his name will come to me in a bit it's called moonwalking with Einstein and it's a book on memory it's kind of ironic I forgot the name Josh for is is the name so highly recommend that a good book on how this journalist decided to study how people had a good memory and he learned all the memory tricks and he entered a memory championship and actually won the championship and what else would I recommend let's see have I read recently I'm also reading Jordan Peterson's book on 12 rules and that's always a fun book to read I like him okay let's see here the name was moonwalking with Einstein have I tried any other alternative approaches the mental health and well-being you know I think a lot of mental health issues stem from lifestyle and stem from a lack of purpose you know there's certainly genetic and physical issues that people have depression is genetic as is bipolar disorder and so forth but the problem with society in life is that we used to grow up with clear defined rites of passage you're 18 you graduate from high school you get the job get the life you have the kids move on and you have these phases of life you go through and you have these rituals you go through as you go through those phases of life and we kind of lived in these siloed worlds where information was kind of controlled and doled out and our perception of reality was mostly laden with tons of social fictions and it was hard to deconstruct them unless she became learning and the more learners you become then usually the more depressed people became then suddenly the internet comes around and you know society changes and those barriers blur and people don't graduate at eighteen and move out of their parents home they live till they're 30 in it and you know they don't have kids or they do they single parents and society has just gotten weird and it's really hard for people to find meaning and purpose and it's really hard for people to when they know that a lot of the things that they used to do were rituals and fictions to say okay from that where do we go Viktor Frankl actually wrote a book about this called man's search for meaning not specifically about our current modern society but about the human desire to understand their purpose and place in society you know the Albert Camus also wrote about this he had all these things that he wrote about Sisyphus Sisyphus is the classic Greek story of Hell where a person screws with the gods and so they screw screw him back and they imprison him in this endless cycle where he has to push a boulder up a hill I know and when he gets the folder to the top it rolls all the way back down and he has to go back to the to the base of the hill and roll the boulder back up he does this ad infinitum so the Greek notion is that this is held because you never accomplish anything you never get anywhere but actually Camus has the exact opposite opinion he says that Sisyphus isn't bliss because he now can focus solely on the act instead of the outcome you know every moment he can figure out a slightly better way of pushing the rock every moment he can find a slightly better way of putting his feet on the ground to get the rock up the hill just a little faster and there is no point to it it's almost like a video game you play over and over again you know you can't let's say minecraft you can't really win but it's the act of doing it and doing it a little bit better each time the Japanese also have a term for this it's called a key guy yeah you know way of life or the act of life the sushi chef who makes the same piece of sushi for 60 years but tries to make it slightly better so I think there's a lot of that in society where people don't have meaning or purpose and they don't value the things that they do and so they get a little hopeless I think there's also social medias creating a situation where people have a fundamental lack of empathy for each other there is no understanding anymore of what is the other person's position and why do they believe what they believe you know if a person is criticizing me maybe they're criticizing me because they have a financial incentive or maybe they're criticizing me because they heard just one thing from one person and that's their only view of who I am and they've created a 2-dimensional character that they want to attack so when you look at those things or you think about those things you say okay well if that's their only frame of reference I can understand why they're saying that it's not personal is there attacking a person who doesn't exist so so I think there's quite a bit of that too and unfortunately social media has compressed many people to become two-dimensional and has created a society where people aren't rewarded for deep understanding of each other and in some cases people are punished for trying to deeply understand each other you see this a lot especially in college campuses where if you don't have the right political beliefs those beliefs will be harshly punished and you can't even engage in dialogue they won't even let you speak it's not even about what you're saying or why you're saying and it's you're not in our camp and so as a consequence here the enemy and must be destroyed so I can imagine that certainly has a great impact as well but there is good news in that there are better mental models better social fictions that are being invented and there are better therapies and techniques that seem to be percolating especially with mindfulness and especially with physical health which I think will probably help people out a lot and instead of these being secrets that are guarded by a collective view these are things that are percolating throughout the world at the speed of the Internet especially through the intellectual dark web I mean all you have to do is listen to Tim Ferriss or Joe Rogan or any of these other guys and gals and you will have a wealth of information about various topics from people like Paul Stamets who talked about what mushrooms can do for us and all sorts of ways like lion's mane can regenerate nerves and cool things like that Michael Pollan has also wrote a wonderful book how to change your mind and then you meet people like wim HOF who can teach you how to pay sickly survive in the cold go climb Mount Everest without a shirt on it's pretty crazy to see these things that you hear about but you'd think oh no those are just super human genetic anomalies or those are made-up stories but you can actually verify them now and say that not only are they true we can achieve these things as well but at the end of the day whether you do these things or not there's still a notion of purpose and meaning you have to find meaning in life for myself you know I I wanted to do three things I said you know I'd like to do something in the world financial system I'd like to do something meaningful in mathematics and I'd like to do something meaningful in medicine I come from a long line of doctors and I studied mathematics and I'd love to contribute there especially with homotopy type theory and I'm in the cryptocurrencies face on the forefront of the financial Renaissance so if I can get to all three of those things and do compelling things in all three of those fields I think that would be a life well spent and I think most people are best served if they can kind of self offer and decide where they want to go and if they can't do that then I can understand why they are sad or not feeling so well now Ron Paul's a bit tool for twenty twenty guys I wish he I wish she was still fifty hide vote for him his son has been great though Rand will run yes I have tried flotation tank therapy and it's a great great thing gonna buy one of them one of these days favorite mathematical constant that's e Eastside Westside I was a Westside guy come on Tupac so while I have you guys here you know actually I was thinking about a crazy idea and this the first time I've ever shared it it would be cool to build a cryptocurrency like this so and this is completely new off-the-wall cryptocurrency idea and maybe I'll do it maybe I won't do it maybe I'll just write a paper and pull an Elon Musk like with the you know the thousand mile per an hour transportation system that he has but anyway the concept here is to take Han Chang's proof of human so basically this concept that you can do something to prove that you're a human being and what hong sheng did is he created a consensus algorithm and i'll post a link to the paper in the description of this and you take a trusted hardware module really cool trusted hardware module and what you do is that has a namespace associated with it and you use this proof of human to register the trusted hardware module for some period of time let's say like an hour or something like that okay then you connect that trusted hardware module to EEG let's say I'm use so a headset that can read your brainwaves so then what you can do is create a function that can basically act as a dampener or and you have that trusted hardware module registered to mine for some period of time let's say like an hour and basically if you're calm then it minds at the maximum rate and if you're distracted it minds at the minimum rate and there's a kind of a wave there so it'll oscillate on your rate so if you put these two things together a piece of trusted hardware a proof of human algorithm and you have some sort of function that can actually identify that it's an EEG and act as a dampener you put them all together you could actually create a cryptocurrency where you can mine by meditation think about that wouldn't that just be crazy you know so maybe that that's the Hyperloop but I got a call Han Chang and asked him about this because he wrote the the paper to prove that you're human and I think he can register a TPM and then it's just a matter of figuring out well how can you distinguish between randoms to castis ISM and actual meditation and then you know connect it to a device and I think the news has an SDK so you probably could put all these things together and have a mind meditation cryptocurrency but that would be that would be super cool to do postcard on oh you know once we're past jelly so one of these days I'd have fun with that and then it brings a whole new meaning of these Chinese mining farms because instead of having computers you just have thousands of Chinese guys with sanitation headsets sitting on a pillow for eight hours or ten hours meditating we'll call it tranquil see if we have anything else here looking for one more aren't they getting rid of plasma they're going to Starks we didn't put four million dollars into that but I guess they did come on guys give me a good question was Haskell a good choice yeah that's a great question I ask myself that every day you know so a programming language is just a tool and it's a tool to solve whatever problem is al yeah and selecting a good programming language is a surprisingly difficult thing because it turns out that there's a lot of these tools there's thousands and thousands and thousands of them so you have kind of different paradigms you know you can do logical programming or declarative program you can be like Prolog guy and you know live in that world you could do imperative programming or object oriented and write something in C C++ C sharp or Java or you can be a functional guy and then within there you have flavors of it where you say I'm functional but I don't like committing so you can do Scala or f-sharp or closure or you can say I'm functional I really want to commit so you can do a camel or Haskell or you know something like that or you can say I'm functional and I'm just batshit crazy so I'm gonna do interests or actor or or something so you have this spectrum of ideas or things that you can do and really when you say alright well why are we going to do this well it's this war between correctness and certainty and developer accessibility maintenance and speed of deployment so if you want to do things as fast as possible and you don't give a about quality and you want as many people as possible to understand what you're doing you pick something like PHP or Python or JavaScript you can move super fast and you can write lots of things and everybody can look at those things and get it because there's a huge pool of developers that understand it if you want to move really meticulously and slowly and methodically and great things in the most correct way you can't you could do use formal methods and write specs and then you can implement from the specs improve by simulation or do property based testing from the specifications and you you will probably have much smaller set of people that know what you're doing but of the people who know what you're doing you have much higher certainty that you're correct so what do you do well cryptocurrencies have money at stake they have and they're not big if you actually look at these protocols like we wrote for aetherium classic and now it works with aetherium a client a full node and it's only 15,000 lines of code in Scala so at the end of the day these protocols that are in the cryptocurrencies base the infrastructure layers of the system are not huge amounts of code they range from about ten to a hundred thousand maybe a little bit more but not a lot more code so you're not talking about a situation where you have to write millions of lines of code and swap it out a lot and you're always doing rapid prototyping for things you're talking about a situation where you have science giving you well-defined protocols to operate on and to execute on so if you live in that type of a world then in given that you have money at stake privacy at stake that given that the people have to trust these systems to run correctly for decades perhaps it makes a lot of sense to err on the side of correctness then instead of the ayat on the side of developer accessibility so that's one dimension of it but then within that dimension you have all kinds of compromises you can make there's a very strong argument to write these protocols and things like pure script or reason ml for example where you get all that functional magic and goodness but then your JavaScript actually underneath all of it there's a very strong argument to make that you could write these protocols in something like Scala and we've even done that we chose cardano's to have Haskell because we wanted to bring together some of the brightest people in the world to do original research and to think about the problems of the cryptocurrency space so it wasn't just about what does the ideal language and is this the fastest language to develop in or is this the best cost/benefit are we gonna have the easiest time with tooling it was more about saying if I wanted to make this interesting to Duncan Koontz or to Phil waddler or to Michael Paton Jones or to John Hughes what could I do to make it interesting to them what could I do to come to them and say there are 10 years worth of problems we've put up in a pile and we'd like for you guys to come and solve those particular problems in a way that they've never been solved before or in the most optimal way that we can prove and Haskell gave us that path it gave us the invitation to go and have these conversations and bring these people together and what we were able to do with that those conversations is inspire dozens of people to do some of the best work of their careers now it hasn't been easy it's been very tough I and we've made certainly a lot of missteps here and there some of the developers who worked on the project especially with the initial releases were a bit too junior in some of the developers who are working on the project were a bit too principled and the things that they wanted to do and they're optimistic about how quickly things could be done so injecting pragmatism when you you're in the ivory tower and you have deeply smart and principled people often times smarter than you has been very tough and we've had to figure out how we're gonna gradually loosen things up so that we can get a production system and the delivery culture and that's been quite hard but at the end of the day I think it has been very rewarding because what we've managed to accomplish is show that you can take this deeply arcane culture this deeply arcane language that mostly academics care about and of the people who do write it maybe they write it for very bespoke interesting things but not mainstream things and say that yes you can take these protocols and implement them in this language and we're really starting to see an output from that process we're really starting to see great work come out of that process and 2019 I think is going to be the year where it really starts shining and then suddenly you have a situation where you have twenty thirty thousand lines of code in almost no bugs and it's highly maintainable and very modular and very library like and it's really easy to adapt and upgrade and it has all these great guarantees about it in this beautiful test harness that you just never see in a JavaScript code base furthermore it'll inspire many many many more people especially really bright people know what the hell they're doing to come in and take this stuff seriously and do interesting work themselves it's not about the ICO is not about the money it's not about the token value it's more about the elegance of what we're doing you know if you want to do great things you have to attract great people and if you want to attract great people you don't attract them with pedestrian ideas or pedestrian challenges you don't go and say build me a laptop this thick you go and say don't be a laptop that thick that's much much harder especially if you want the same functionality here as you have there similarly you don't go to them and say hey I know you have a PhD in this topic in your world expert but can you go write it in JavaScript or Java because that's the accessible language and I want to attract some person that took a Codecademy class to read my code these are protocols that are written by domain experts and they're very complicated and they're backed by very complicated cryptography why in god's name would you want a junior or a sophomore or freshman or some cases someone was no professional training to be able to contribute to that code base and screw things up if they write the wrong code you lose all your money it's like saying well I want surgery to be more accessible I'd like everybody to be able to come in and take my liver out or take my gallbladder out or my kidney out we as a society expect that certain tasks whether that be the legal profession or that be medical profession or that be doing your taxes do require domain training so isn't it reasonable to say that the underlying protocols that hold up all of my wealth my identity my privacy my property those things should be built by domain experts who are the best in the world and why don't we build an ecosystem that's a bright burning light for those people to attract those people to come and build those types of things so that you can have an replenishing supply or inspiration and it continues to evolve in capabilities because if we don't have that well then what you end up getting is mediocrity and you end up getting is stuff that really doesn't work the way he thought it was going to work and a lot of promises that it will one day work until it doesn't and then you lose all your money so in a sense Haskell's been very painful but I think it was a necessary pain and it's one that I would do over again yeah we do a few things differently here and there we would have retained different types of people in the beginning and of course we have a huge amount of hindsight that we've gained but I don't regret the overall choice anyway yeah thank you guys so much for your time this was a heck of a lot of fun not only an hour and a half this time and I look forward to guys having the next ma with me soon Cheers