Deadlines and Delays

Opens March 23rd 2020 alone in a Corona-filled Colorado office to address Reddit questions about deadlines and delays, with the Byron reboot the culmination of 18 months of engineering.

Cardano was honest as a scientific project and science is unpredictable, like the pandemic having vaccine candidates that cannot just be mass-injected, or people clinging to chloroquine on a single 40-person study.

Cardano never signed up to be yet another cryptocurrency among Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, IOTA, and Tezos, but to bear the burden of scientific due diligence from first principles starting in 2015.

To avoid waiting 10 to 20 years they took a two-prong approach in 2017, one team forking Haskell Bitcoin with Ouroboros to ship the Byron release in September 2017 while a parallel Well-Typed team under Duncan Coutts built the perfect version from first principles.

The September 2017 software from Serokell was laden with small design flaws hard to catch, causing the first wave of delays through 2018 as they tried to stabilize it.

The Serokell code was hard to maintain, so in September 2018 they pivoted, spinning up the Cardano Rust team he led that built Icarus in four months, becoming Yoroi, their fastest-adopted product.

Team shipped the Incentivized Testnet in 2019, which if they were just another cryptocurrency would be Shelley: stable, decentralized, hundreds of nodes, over 99 percent uptime, with a path to 1000 transactions per second.

The team committed to an evidence-based approach on the Haskell side as a social contract with the community, writing thousands of commits with a public chain of custody in GitHub, shipping every single week unlike vaporware.

The team moved formal methods from a 40-year slow waterfall into a rapid release cycle no other software company has done, so the Byron reboot is the end of an era, not just another release.

The reboot is built with evidence and QuickCheck, finding hundreds of bugs via formal methods, and is imminent with features frozen and only bugs being fixed while pulling Daedalus, the wallet backend, and the node together.

There was latency in their procedures they were not meant to feel because a different codebase was supposed to work, like vaccine candidates still needing a process, while competitors had hacks, shutdowns, and years of delays from ETH2 to Filecoin.

End users only see the product at the entry point, like Samsung, Google, and Apple R&D where Kinect took 10 years, HoloLens 8, and the iPad Pro lidar 6, all unseen until launch, whereas Cardano was demanded to show it from the first papers.

Cardano's public development is the first time the world sees the wizard behind the curtain of the scientific process, and like a vaccine the public will not get it until it is done, since even Haskell had to be improved for JavaScript, WebAssembly, and Windows over two years.

The team is spending the best years of their careers with weekend and holiday commits, and 100 days after IOHK, Emurgo, and the Foundation, thousands in Telegram now run the software independently with hundreds of stake pool operators making videos, real decentralization.

By year-end there will be smart contracts, full decentralization, governance, and scalability, the fruits of years of research critics never mention because they cannot understand the papers.

Bitcoin took years to build unseen while Cardano built in the open taking brutal criticism, like videos claiming only 5 people worked on the Incentivized Testnet or that it was wrecked, when today it has 99 percent uptime.

Critics will never be fair, always calling it just the wallet, because their only definition of success is market cap, and those people will be gone in 3 to 5 years trolling Game of Thrones or Rick and Morty.

He built this to last 50 years, permanently in the Academy and the evidence-based software community, revolutionizing asset issuance, the accounting model, DSLs, smart contracts, and consensus, and solving proof of stake, the hardest problem, in five years.

The research team figured out how to scale to a million transactions per second with principles through peer review, so you need not trust him: Ouroboros Classic has over 700 citations, the GKL model too, and competitors cite their papers.

The real challenge is building a process so code always ships even 15 years out when the custodians are gone, and after the imminent Byron reboot the fast and slow roadmaps merge into one iterative path to Shelley then Goguen.

Takes umbrage at delay complaints, comparing them to Windows Vista or Boeing's 787 as commercial realities of innovating new science, noting that if these vaccine trials fail like malaria or HIV vaccines a corona vaccine slips to 2022 or 2023.

Over 100 engineers in more than 20 countries touched the code, including Daedalus on Electron, an 8-person Haskell wallet backend, and completely new network stacks in Jormungandr and the Haskell node built on 106 pages of Haskell.

Says they tested billions of configurations across Windows, Mac, and Linux and ran a help desk processing tens of thousands of tickets with no credit, and warns that when Shelley and Goguen ship there will be no 50x on ADA in a global depression as the Fed prints infinite money.

ADA is not here to make day traders rich but to build a decentralized society's infrastructure for voting, property registration, and payments at the scale of billions, a hedge against a failing social system that covid is exposing.

Says what they are releasing is new and never forked anyone's code, predicting a thousand forks of Cardano in ten years, since the extended UTXO model could bring smart contracts to Bitcoin and their consensus runs a global system on 10 kilowatts of power.

Apologizes it took so long since consumers saw the product in infancy at the tunnel's beginning, insisting there is no hidden emergency code, just a competency and expectation-management gap, as community members explain Chronos and Hydra papers and write tutorials.

Community leaders who explain papers and write tutorials will earn democratic mandates or blockchain funding to write the DeFi smart contracts and run thousands of stake pools making Cardano the most decentralized financial operating system, and that social progress matters more than any release.

Funded two orders of magnitude lower than some competitors, they built a global movement unified by the scientific method and evidence, and every time they open the platform the community delivers, as with the ITN and soon Shelley, Goguen, and Voltaire testnets, with roles for developers, governors, and operators.

Closes urging patience and faith against FUD from people who only want to destroy one product to boost their own or manipulate markets, saying they pivoted when wrong and that after the Byron reboot everything is iterative on a two-week cadence.