2019-11-13 · timestamps by ADAtainment
AMA 11/13/2019
- The balance check is optional, runs locally on your own machine against your own copy of the blockchain, and nobody at IOHK ever sees or asks for your keywords.
- Anyone asking you to type your 12 or 24 keywords into a website, a Telegram DM or a fake Twitter account is trying to steal from you.
- No new ADA is created by the incentivized testnet: rewards move back to the mainnet and are deducted from the back end, so the total supply is conserved.
- The first snapshot is a deliberate wake up call, and the rotation data it produces measures how decentralized and how participatory Cardano really is before Shelley rolls out.
- Development velocity is climbing, with Jormungandr going from rc1 to rc7 in under two weeks, and a December internal summit will define the full 2020 roadmap.
19 entries
Broadcasting from snowy Colorado after a cryotherapy tank at negative 200 degrees.
A clarifying update on the balance check, because the forums, Reddit and Twitter are full of confusion about security and what the keywords actually mean.
How a UTXO blockchain builds ledger state from the Genesis block, what a snapshot copies into a new Genesis block, and why HD wallet keywords work on both the old and new system.
The balance check does the cryptography locally on your machine against your own copy of the blockchain, not on a server and not on a stake pool.
IOHK will never ask you for a password or your keywords, so any website or private message on Telegram, Instagram or Twitter that does is a scam from a fake account.
If you worry about the new client being compromised, rotate credentials first: create a fresh Daedalus wallet, move your funds, then use the old keywords to check.
The same rotation applies to hardware wallets, since your old 24 keywords on a Ledger are useless on the main system once you have moved to a new hardware address.
The two stage process is a deliberate wake up call, because a lot of people had a Dunning Kruger moment and discovered their written keywords were shredded or lost.
The balance check is optional and so is the later snapshot in November 2019, but skipping it means losing out on revenue from the incentivized testnet.
Denies that the supply of ADA is being doubled: testnet rewards move back to the mainnet and are deducted from the back end, so the total supply is conserved.
Security audit results should be published in January 2020, and the Haskell wallet backend shipping in November 2019 uses formal methods and QuickCheck property based testing.
The incentivized testnet will not run for a year, it runs while IOHK collects metrics, builds a stake pool dashboard for the end of the month and teaches block explorers about pool performance and saturation.
The sandbox also gives IOHK room for a frank discussion with exchanges about staking funds on behalf of consumers and about adhering to enterprise addresses.
Snapshot rotation data is a public global metric of how decentralized and participatory Cardano is, and it lets the community act as product owners shaping a responsible Shelley rollout.
Velocity keeps increasing, with Jormungandr going from rc1 to rc7 in under two weeks, over a thousand issues solved and multiple commits an hour on some repos.
IOHK communicates in Korean, Japanese and other languages through the YouTube channel, Twitter, official Telegram channels, the blog and Zendesk, so do not succumb to FUD from unofficial sources trying to move the price.
Decentralizing a cryptocurrency is a tremendously difficult task, and some argue it has not been achieved even by Bitcoin.
Control your keywords, write them down and keep them in a bolted safe or safety deposit box, and multisig plus hardware multisig in Shelley scope should make two of three or three of five Ledger setups possible.
The new wallet backend and Daedalus interface ship in November 2019 for the first time, and an internal summit in early December 2019 will define the 2020 roadmap on top of 50 research papers and a million lines of code.