2022-03-07
Some Updates
- An update from a week of workshops with Cardano Foundation leadership on restructuring Cardano as a proper open-source project, modeled on the Mozilla, Apache, and Linux foundations.
- Previews the Mamba EVM sidechain launch as the introduction to Cardano's whole sidechain strategy, plus the pipelining and input-endorsers roadmap.
- Argues for objective metrics for decentralization and throughput, since TPS is as misleading as CPU clock speed.
- Turns philosophical on meta-governance, a machine-understandable Cardano constitution, and the technology of freedom, closing on the 2014 TED Talk promise and Bermuda.
37 entries
Opens March 7th 2022 with Cardano Foundation leadership and senior management in Colorado for a week of workshops on structuring a better open-source project for Cardano.
The Colorado workshops studied the Mozilla, Apache, and Linux foundation models for how one becomes a contributor and how merit is measured, plus a standards process like Ethereum's EIPs and ERCs versus Cardano's CIPs.
The workshops weigh how far down the formal-methods stack to go and whether to keep Haskell as the reference client or move to a polyglot ecosystem, plus documentation and training pedagogy like the Linux Foundation's.
Education plans include Mastering Cardano and special Plutus courses, and that he will attend a London learning conference in May to outsource curriculum development into repeatable community courses.
The Cardano Vision 2025 to 2027 goalposts are commercial competitiveness, sustainability, and self-determination, with pipelining, input endorsers, Mithril, side chains, and UTXO-HD delivering the first two.
Self-determination requires an inclusive bureaucracy legitimized by community voting and endowment through Catalyst, and thanks over 500 people across organizations for building Cardano.
He will be at Consensus in Austin June 9th to 12th with a big Cardano event, and wants to replicate the C Fund with geography-specific funds starting with Africa.
A pipelining blog post is imminent with an input-endorsers follow-up in March, outlining design principles, challenges, and scalability value.
Pipelining has no paper since it is not scientifically novel, but input endorsers are, built on the Parallel Chains paper, the original Ouroboros paper, and the Ledger Redux paper, and this is the first design pulling the threads together without DDOS problems for post-Vasil hard forks.
The Mamba launch is imminent in March and April 2022: the Ethereum Classic codebase with OBFT on top, brought to Cardano as the introduction to the whole sidechain strategy from his 2016 settlement-layer and computation-layer whitepaper.
The settlement layer establishes a route of trust that spins up computation layers with different models, and unlike Ethereum's Solidity and EVM accounts model Cardano uses extended UTXO and Plutus, so a side chain beats emulating EVM on the base ledger.
Mamba is the first crystallized view of how to connect and operate side chains plus a generic footprint for users to make their own, creating separate revenue streams so SPOs earn multiple tokens for running consensus.
Milkomeda already showed a third-party approach while Mamba is the canonical abstraction, and future chains like the Catalyst voting network running the Jormungandr code will become Cardano side chains enabling hackathons in both Plutus and Solidity.
Calls it bittersweet being almost done with the original third-generation vision, since the next self-governance phase will be as much the community as anything he could design.
IO has a no-intellectual-property policy, never filing a patent despite 130 papers and open-sourcing all its software, believing in FLOSS but knowing collaboration needs a different management mindset.
Getting a small group in a room over pizza is fast, but giving millions a voice needs advanced governance tools, which is Cardano's ultimate USP since no one is smarter than everyone.
Acknowledges the cost that more inclusivity means slower releases, a balancing act aided by 40 years of open-source history that now underpins the world's infrastructure.
Many institutions must form, community-led and counterbalancing, including research, execution, and standards bodies, plus alliances like the Cardano DeFi Alliance essential to the financial-operating-system mission.
Says he will personally cut grants to these alliances as will the Foundation, and notes ongoing debates over protocol parameters like K and the pledge curve.
CIP 007's pledge curve is well thought out but measurably reduces Cardano's Nakamoto coefficient, so the process must explain and improve it, and pushes for objective metrics and inclusive accountability.
Nobody has a benchmark for what decentralized means and throughput lacks one too, citing Alex Chepurnoy and Dan Friedman demoing an Ergo transaction with 5000 outputs that would take hundreds in an accounts model, so TPS is as misleading as CPU clock speed was in the Intel-AMD wars before Apple silicon.
Every future change must be scored on real-world performance, decentralization, and whether it compromises a user's ability to self-verify the system.
Daedalus is slow because it is a full node running the whole stack with a full blockchain copy, while Mithril gives the same security with a light client, likely portable to side chains but maybe not exotic ones.
Founding institutions in academia and standards bodies will create objective metrics for the whole industry so Cardano can finally know how it stacks against Ethereum, Solana, and EOS beyond crude Nakamoto coefficients.
Consumers must level up and demand performance while keeping their principles, and shares Moxie Marlinspike's article since much of web3 is centralized web2 owned by the likes of JP Morgan and easy to co-opt.
A constitution or Bill of Rights has always been implicit, like Bitcoin's 21-million cap versus Ethereum changing monetary policy with EIP 1559, and that meta-governance and constitutions are underdeveloped.
His 20 million dollars to Carnegie Mellon's Center for Formal Mathematics is capturing math as machine-understandable, the first major rewrite since Hilbert 120 years ago, analogous to making a system's ethics and intent machine-understandable.
Privacy has tradeoffs since a system helping Russian dissidents resist could also enable child trafficking or terrorist financing, and you cannot trust one government's backdoor because Russia, Iran, or China will use it too.
As expressivity and side chains grow Cardano absorbs others' technology like the Borg and will eventually have more capabilities than any other cryptocurrency.
The name Cardano comes from Gerolamo Cardano, a nuanced Italian Renaissance mathematician, doctor, scoundrel, and gambler who invented pieces of probability theory, fitting since crypto can be good or bad.
The point of regulating structures is to blunt crypto's bad uses without a government, using smart contracts as trusted custodians, so 2022's open-source project includes a deep conversation about Cardano's Bill of Rights.
Calls machine-understandable constitutions the most ambitious and dangerous part, moving from science to hard engineering on unsolved problems, since no government or policy is universally loved.
He will never stop the AMAs and might even go to space someday, and that what makes the job special is working with the best people on a shared mission to improve the world.
He returns to Bermuda in October to cash the check from his 2014 TED Talk promise to bring economic identity to the developing world, now achievable eight years later.
Points to El Salvador's experiment and Nigeria being the world's third-largest crypto adopter, citing Paul Halmos on telling them what you will do, doing it, then showing what you did.
Calls this the technology of freedom that puts you back in control, lamenting that society is losing self-sovereignty while cynicism insists decline is inevitable entropy.
The tools of the few have been taken as far as they go, and the next terrifying challenge is building a global governance system that, if solved for Cardano, means you no longer need kings, presidents, or CEOs since it can be done at the bottom.