More on Concurrency

Opens September 10th 2021 having published an IOHK blog post, Concurrency and All That: Cardano Smart Contracts and the Extended UTXO Model, amid community blogs from MinSwap, SundaeSwap, and Meld.

Reads that eUTXO from the Alonzo upgrade offers greater security and cost predictability, inheriting the per-branch design Bitcoin pioneered, and that dapps are not limited to one transaction per block since the block budget holds hundreds of simple transactions and several complex scripts, though a UTXO can be spent only once so you use many UTXO cells to avoid contention.

Sets of UTXOs implement design patterns like semaphores so different users interact with one smart contract without concurrency failure, since a contract handles many UTXOs as its state with off-chain metadata.

The Djed stablecoin paper proposes an order-book modeling pattern where a maker forwards minting or burning to the stablecoin contract, with living documents on scalable Plutus applications covering UTXO congestion and minting policy scripts, plus Meld's article on concurrent and deterministic batching.

Developers from the Ethereum account world must think differently about concurrency, comparing it to single-core to multi-core processors where software had to be rewritten for parallelism, not calling Intel or AMD a scam.

The eUTXO parallelism pattern is new, so they will keep writing blog posts, tutorials, and code and include it in the next Plutus Pioneers program, since the model gives high flexibility knowing where accounts versus eUTXO make sense.

EUTXO gives resource determinism and easier analysis of value flows where most bugs are, avoiding reentrancy, the DAO hack, multisig, and access-control bugs.

The Chimeric Ledger design running in full on Catalyst via Jormungandr and a lightweight version for staking rewards on mainnet, with partner Mune building an emulated account layer that could enable a follow-up paper merging the two systems.

Scalability comes from outsourcing computation to parallel actors like stake pools becoming batchers and serializers, with developers choosing a model based on operating cost, trust model, and latency, all wired into one unified user experience.

Calls the narrative bizarre that if five million applications and two trillion dollars of activity do not appear on September 12th it is a failure, since it is a completely new system turned on because it is safe.

The baseline functionality makes existing work for Ethiopia, the Foundation, and Emurgo easier, and will be augmented by Hydra with an HFC event every three months adding capabilities.

The Basho scaling solutions are faster to market than a fully sharded chain, so many Hydra components for concurrency and lower cost can be implemented throughout 2022 via isomorphic state channels and batch processing.

Syntactic sugar could make base-level programming easier but loses theoretical and applied certainty, so for that you take the Ethereum-style model coming soon where Solidity contracts run on Cardano and can call Plutus contracts, a superset.

Is at a loss over media coverage making the false one-transaction-per-block assertion that independent builders disproved, criticizing Adriana's article as a hit piece and a Decrypt article falsely implying Cardano's price collapsed disproportionately when the whole market fell together.

The third false narrative is that they claimed everything is finished September 12th, when the roadmap has Basho, Voltaire, and Shelley iterations like proxy keys and partial delegation still to come.

A large capitalized developer base and excited consumers will take months to build and deploy on testnet and mainnet, with periodic mainnet upgrades and a helpful community on Stack Exchange and Discord and over 3000 Plutus Pioneers.

Makes a meta point that he has never seen an industry so viciously polarizing where a delay makes you evil and every accomplishment is dismissed.

Vitalik said in 2014 that Ethereum 2 would come in 2016 and five years later is not there, yet Cardano shipping Shelley as the largest, most valuable, most secure proof-of-stake protocol is dismissed, unlike Microsoft's Satya Nadella criticizing Google without calling them criminals.

A Bitcoin maximalist should be excited that September 12th gives a free beta test of a path for Bitcoin to have smart contracts via extended UTXO, hardened by 100 billion dollars of value at risk.

Cardano's proof-of-stake and side-chain work is valuable to Polkadot given similar consensus, and economic research suggesting you may not need bonding or slashing questions Ethereum 2's design.

Everything is open with no proprietary code, patents, or hidden repositories, released with mathematical and computer proofs and peer review, like NIPoPoWs by Dionysios Zindros and chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias enabling FlyClient.

Asks what the scam is when Catalyst is the largest decentralized organization with over a billion dollars funding 150-plus ventures, a great data point for decentralized governance.

Criticizes a Weiss Ratings tweet saying smart contracts are allegedly coming September 12th and NFTs are only possible after the hard fork, when over 70,000 NFTs are already issued on Cardano.

He would rather look to the real world, the farmers, supply chains, governments wanting e-voting, water and energy rights, and telcos, who ask standard business questions not token-Dubai questions, with over 100 in the commercial pipeline.

He emailed his company to accept no new business until November due to backlog, struggles to attend Consensus and the Satoshi Roundtable given the tired dialogue, and finds kinship with layer-two and application builders.

The four-plus-year team did the homework with hundreds of presentations and dozens of papers, spending tens of millions to build a novel model, only met with lies and articles using an old Bulgaria photo, and that Chainlink community members made criminal threats he may file a complaint over while hiding behind decentralization.

Recounts tweeting congratulations to Solana's gracious founders when it surged, getting documentation on proof of history, then facing criticism for even talking to them, asking what toxicity and cynicism gain anyone.

September 12th is a celebration for the patient community, and pleads not to spike the football but be humble, a thank-you to employees, the 12-plus infrastructure companies, and the Plutus Pioneers.

The morning after September 13th is business as usual with more network load, then the PAB release and the summit spotlight, since greatness comes from humility and work over a six-year marathon since 2015, and that IO is now a systems company here to improve the world's systems with blockchain one tool in the toolbox.