2019-05-05 · timestamps by ADAtainment
UPD 05/05/2019
- Shelley is late because Cardano is built on new research in the open, where every unfinished iteration is visible, unlike the hidden R&D behind consumer products.
- More than 50 full time engineers work on Cardano and none of them were moved to Atala: the two projects use separate codebases, and staff have actually moved from Atala to Cardano.
- Atala is the bridge that brings non crypto users in by solving real problems first, which is exactly what the Mongolia trip is about: counterfeit medicine, mobile banking and untraceable development funds.
14 entries
Broadcasting from Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia to answer five questions collected from Reddit and Twitter about Shelley delays, engineering headcount and Atala.
What is holding Shelley back: this is new science built transparently, so you see the delays and missed deadlines that industry normally hides before a product ships.
The Shelley formal specifications shipped in Q1 after months of prototypes and proofs of concept, and the protocol is now solid with very few changes left.
More than 50 full time engineers are on Cardano and anyone can verify it in the GitHub repositories, so read the actual commits before calling them meaningless.
Atala is written in Scala while Cardano is written in Rust and Haskell: no Cardano developers work on Atala, and the flow of people has gone from Atala to Cardano, including the former Atala lead who is now IOHK director of engineering.
Atala is the bridge for people who do not care about crypto: sell an Ethiopian coffee farmer better market access, not a token, and the identity and wallet come with it.
A blockchain is not a database, so dumping millions of IoT sensor readings onto a public chain makes no sense: a private strategy working in tandem with the open system does.
Calling Atala a distraction or a bait and switch is wrong: the choice was building something in house guaranteed to interoperate with Cardano or bolting on Fabric.
The same people who praised Enterprise Ethereum now attack Atala, yet Enterprise Ethereum does not use ether and is a completely different codebase.
A concrete example of a delay: picking a key evolving signature scheme and modifying Ed25519 was estimated at a few weeks and took longer because the crypto is new.
Looks at the actual progress: multiple full clients, paper wallet generators, a new blockchain explorer, and software being modularized and hardened to enterprise grade.
Mongolia is not a vacation: meetings with multiple ministers and probably the president of Mongolia are on the schedule.
Mongolia's real problems are what blockchain is for: 18 percent of urban medicine and 40 percent of rural medicine is counterfeit or adulterated, 93 percent have mobile banking access, 30 percent receive government disbursements, and Asian Development Bank money has a poor audit trail.
Be patient about the roadmap and the testnet: this has always been a long term, methodical, evidence based project with more than 40 peer reviewed papers behind it.