Alonzo Update Proposal Submitted

Opens September 7th 2021 announcing the Alonzo update proposal was submitted, with the hard fork combinator event triggering at the epoch rollover at 2145 UTC on Sunday the 12th.

The rocket is in the air with no going back, so the Alonzo hard fork happens on the 12th with a watch party, enabling Plutus smart contracts on mainnet.

Enormous post-launch work on infrastructure, design patterns, and dapps remains, but the underlying infrastructure runs on mainnet, so Plutus code can be submitted and run on the 12th.

A few toy smart contracts were written for fun including a Poly Market challenge, and the PAB beta will be available on September 10th with most development in September 2021.

Concurrency templates and abstractions are software built above the infrastructure, which will not need to change, like Solidity libraries on the EVM.

Developers using Cardano create a feedback loop of questions on Stack Exchange and Discord, with a support program after the October summit and many development partners brought in.

A cleanup HFC event will remove rough edges, with Babbage before year end and another in Q1 adding functionality plus compression optimizations and cost-model analysis, iterative not revolutionary.

The Basho scalability strategies and the Voltaire transition to a self-sustaining, self-evolving, community-run organism will be detailed at the summit, admitting everyone is exhausted after the busiest 90 days in the company's history.

Thanks stake pool operators, Plutus Pioneers, and the community including innovators like MinSwap, admitting he was harsh in prior videos, since the hyper-polarized space weaponizes any testnet issue to attack a project.

Bram Cohen, the admired BitTorrent creator behind Chia, tweeted that the extended UTXO model is unnecessary and Chialisp is the end-all, which he compares to saying only C++ or only C# is the true language.

Every development ecosystem is trade-offs, and they brought in language creators like Phil Wadler, a Haskell co-creator with 36 years of hindsight, studying all smart-contract languages and the Ethereum paradigm to identify areas to improve.

The infrastructure is the assembly language for developers' dreams, with differences of opinion shown via tools and libraries like Ramda writing functional Haskell-looking JavaScript, and via new languages compiling Scala to Plutus Core plus layers like Mutual Knowledge Systems emulating an account layer on extended UTXO, akin to Meteor, React, Dart, and Polymer.

The third difference is the computing model itself, resolved via the Yella and EVM side chains, and that extended UTXO was built hand-in-glove with Ouroboros since it emits stake pool operators for parallel distributed computation via Hydra's head and tail protocols.

The model was built for extensibility with side chains and domain-specific languages like Marlowe that hide complexity, enabling parallel teams on developer experience, Hydra, SPOs, side chains, account abstraction, and formal verification.

The node, Daedalus, Yoroi, db-sync, Rosetta API, GraphQL, and formal specs all now evolve at their own release cadence, which is why this is such a significant release.

On the 12th you can issue tokens beyond NFTs, soon a stablecoin, and advanced NFT spending policies and royalties, since issuing a token did not even require Alonzo, which made Cardano predominant for NFTs.

Says if you do not like it, come back in a month, a quarter, or a few quarters and it will have evolved with different paradigms, never compromising the evidence-based chain from formal specs to papers to code.

The process discovered bugs faster and gives confidence in the software, since this is a marathon of years and decades not a flavor of the week whose wings melt, and extended UTXO inherits Satoshi's 12-year battle-tested wisdom, so the dog barks and the caravan moves on.

Everything launching is the product of disciplined people, with designs started in 2018, informed by mistakes in mainstream languages and Ethereum's failures and successes, though not everything is perfect on the 12th.

Compares it to the transistor taking years to beat the vacuum tube then never looking back, believing extended UTXO will out-compete the account model with infrastructure funded by Catalyst's nearly billion dollars.

The core accomplishment of extended UTXO is enough expressiveness while preserving safety, and that had it existed at Bitcoin's creation, Bitcoin Script would be Plutus and Bitcoin's model would be extended UTXO, the best of both worlds.

Manages expectations that not everything is ready on the 12th with multiple dev-experience iterations, but smart contracts are here the moment Plutus runs, like Ethereum was ready when the EVM ran not when Solidity was done.

DcSpark has strong differences of opinion represented by their own tools and models running in parallel, and Mutual Knowledge Systems' Globe language with account emulation will coexist, the beauty of a decentralized ecosystem.

Great ecosystems admit diversity, like Chalmers' Idris-to-EVM thesis, Serpent and Mutan for Ethereum, and Scala, Kotlin, Clojure, and Frege compiling to the JVM, all on one core, making this the most important update since Shelley.

Admires the leadership of Manuel Chakravarty, Michael Peyton Jones, and Jann Muller and the team, expecting cool mainnet things Monday and extraordinary quarterly growth like the transistor's hockey stick.

Bitcoin should take extended UTXO seriously to stay relevant and he will write a BIP for it despite the culture's likely resistance given Simplicity, jets, and BitML, calling it the privilege of a lifetime to innovate an entirely bespoke stack with a new network stack, accounting model, languages, consensus, source code, transaction model, and serialization format, the last such effort at this scale being Ethereum.