More on Smart Contracts and Some Housekeeping

Opens September 6th 2021 to talk smart contracts, accelerating blog posts to put false claims to bed and lamenting how fast inaccurate information spreads.

UTXO came from Satoshi and Bitcoin's 12 years, with research from Blockstream's Simplicity, jets, and Liquid, plus BitML, Lightning, and Cardano's and Ergo's extended UTXO, giving beautiful properties for writing proofs.

Points to plutus.readthedocs.io's how-to on scalable Plutus applications covering UTXO congestion best practices: minimize transactions spending the same script output, decouple spending from producing outputs, and use minting policy scripts.

Rebuts Ethereum-space claims that UTXO cannot scale, citing the 2018 Chimeric Ledgers paper on unifying UTXO and account cryptocurrencies, already implemented in Catalyst's Rust Cardano, with UTXO more scalable than harder-to-shard accounts.

Cites Sebastien from dcSpark's 34-minute Chimeric Ledgers video and Mune's VOUM account view on UTXO proposed for Nervos, plus SundaeSwap's Concurrency State and Cardano blog, noting you do not need an account view for concurrency.

Highlights a Chinese systematization-of-knowledge survey reviewing over 150 smart-contract papers in 51 pages, which concludes smart contracts face five challenges: frequent vulnerabilities losing billions, incomplete design paradigms, inefficient analysis tools, low processing rate with limited complexity, and lack of privacy.

A similar internal survey was done when designing extended UTXO and Plutus to address those exact challenges, so extended UTXO was built for concurrency, interoperability, analysis, and increasing privacy.

Plutus comes from Haskell, one of the most beautiful languages for formal methods and verification, which is why formal-methods people use Haskell or OCaml over C++.

The model is not fully flipped on at launch since everyone drank from the accounts cup and must translate to the new thinking, with abstractions built for those who cannot.

Cites the ACE asynchronous concurrent contract execution paper from ETH Zurich, the Harvard of Switzerland, enabling off-chain processing under an m-of-n trust model, which fits Hydra with over 3000 stake pools as accelerators.

The survey shows you need both on-chain and off-chain since running everything on-chain bloats and slows the system, and anyone claiming to solve it is offloading to central actors, the problem with replicated computation.

You move from replicated to distributed computation via federation, side chains, rollups, state channels, or novel ideas like ACE, all anticipated in the extended UTXO, Ouroboros, and Plutus design rooted in 40 years of formal methods and functional programming.

A blog on deterministic transaction validation where Cardano's extended UTXO gives Plutus determinism for free, a lingering Ethereum problem costing lots of time and money.

Cardano is a deliberately designed new model for interoperability, off-chain and on-chain segregation, predictable execution cost, and local over global state, criticizing the Dunning-Kruger of people declaring everything wrong from one thing.

Building one system for millions to billions of adversarial concurrent users sharing common resources while balancing permanent and ephemeral storage is one of the greatest engineering challenges, and extended UTXO with Plutus is a significant step.

If it is not your model, the EVM and Yella side chains come to Cardano in 2022 after the Plutus rollout burn-in, and papers like ACE fit Hydra's shift from replicated finite resources to distributed where more users mean more capability.

Nothing is fully decentralized, not even Bitcoin, so you decide the level of decentralization a computation needs, whether five, ten, or a million sets of eyeballs, which is scalable via on-chain and off-chain services.

All on-chain computation long-term should be proof verification checking work rather than doing it, since solving a script is a proof predicate that Plutus is built for, and true concurrency needs hundreds of computers aggregating work with a proof.

Mandating every nation-state, bank, and exchange transaction into one shared encrypted space is nonsense noise, so you produce proofs that domains are accurate to preserve inclusive accountability, like Mithril for chain validation and Hydra's proofs.

The application developer and user decide their trust model on a spectrum where more value at risk means higher trust, paying minimal fees for maximal trust, calling Cardano a superset of Ethereum with a side chain running 100 to 1000 times cheaper.

Change management, since the hard fork combinator lets them change ledger rules and add capabilities like read-only UTXO painlessly and regularly, an important feedback loop rapidly enhancing extended UTXO.

Invites people to the Summit September 25th to 26th with four tracks on utility, impact, adoption, and governance, the governance track covering bottom-up Catalyst and top-down DCF Consortium Decentralized Funding.

The synthesis of Catalyst's wisdom of the crowd and DCF's domain expertise encapsulates how Voltaire will work in 2022, the final part of the original agenda, with formal specifications open on GitHub.

Shows the 41-page implementation-agnostic Alonzo specification with the extended UTXO and CDDL, implementable in any language though they use Haskell for its closeness to the math, and plans to build these blueprints into the chain's DNA so the same voting can authorize version control and eventually formal-methods certified clients.

The enormity of thought shows this is an adult professional project not a fly-by-night thing, thinking carefully about choice, identity, metadata, and automated compliance while preserving user privacy.

Jokes Satoshi Nakamoto joined the livestream, and covers housekeeping: the next Plutus Pioneers program with Prism Pioneers and PAB maturity, plus style, concurrency, and access-control guides with Lars around October or November.

Guest lectures will come from the eight development companies and community projects like Occam and SundaeSwap, and the digital summit at summit.cardano.org already has 35,000 to 36,000 registrants heading toward 50,000 or 100,000.