23.1.19 - Charles Hoskinson Live Video on Stakepool Taskforce and Staking

Charles went live on YouTube to discuss the upcoming staking testnet. Watch it here:

Summary of Video:

Charles streamed live to discuss the upcoming staking testnet. IOHK have been trying to get everything ready for playing and testing registration of stake pools and the delegation mechanics.

The roll-out of the testnet will:

  • start with a command line client
  • then move from the command line client to eventually full GUI
  • and once it reaches a certain threshold of quality, it will roll out into the mainnet

Staking in Cardano will be a different protocol from other projects. Because of this, we’ve seen many of the same types of questions and concerns being asked over and over. Therefore, it makes more sense to consolidate these questions into a single location for people to self-explain.

In the video, Charles explains that a taskforce will be created from the community. It is open for anyone to join.

  1. If you have questions about staking or are interested in running a stake pool/playing with the staking testnet. Please fill out the form here. Please include your telegram ID in the notes section.
  2. It’s important to get everyone into one place, so please join the Telegram channel that we have set up specifically for this purpose.
  3. Here, you have the opportunity to ask any questions or raise concerns about staking.
  4. Users who join this group will need to elect someone or a group of people who can filter and aggregate questions.
  5. These questions will then be pushed through to IOHK for the teams to answer systematically.
  6. IOHK will also use these questions and answers to create graphics, videos, informational material to describe how staking works in Cardano. With the community’s help, we will be able to create content so that everyday people can understand how staking works, what is registration, what is a stake pool and the dynamics behind Ouroboros.
  7. Those who are interested in running stake pools will be rolled over into the testnet once ready, so its important you fill in the registration form as well.

To add, Charles also talks about the recent workshop which happened in Berlin. The output from this workshop will be the completion of the ledger specification and the delegation specification. They are estimated to be ready in 1-2 weeks and will be publicly released. Right now, there is a formal and mathematical description of staking works but this is not consumable by the general public. If you are interested, they are technically available now in the IOHK github repo.

At this stage, the specs are being refined. Few things needed to be updated and changed and/or drawn out more. This is natural when engineers, scientists and formal methods team all come together and realize there is a little delta between what they wrote and what they need.
Gerard, Director of Operations at IOHK, is cleaning up the specs and will also be merging the Byron spec with the Shelley spec. Following refinement and merging, in short order, IOHK will also add the extended UTxO and multi-asset models. These will allow users to issue their own assets and smart contracvts.

Merging of these two specs is necessary. If you look at how the Cardano system works, they are changing the way validation works from ledger. In many cases, the changes are to simplify and make easier to understand and implement. Shelley will be massive improvement from Byron. But in order to be able to validate older transactions and run old chains, there needs to be old legacy rules that continue to work.

Finally, in terms of getting from testnet to production, it is explained how there are two competing, independent repos. Basically the wallet backend for Cardano (what was released in 1.4) is being decoupled from Cardano and its in its own repo. Once decoupling is done, it will be in a position to connect to either the Rust code or the new Haskell code. Whichever one is done first will end up being the first release of Shelley. Currently, Rust is a little ahead in terms of having the ability to run a testnet. So it will probably be the codebase for the upcoming Shelley testnet, which will work to build up a population of stake pools. To get there, there is a series of events that need to occur. Firstly, the Ouroboros BFT update (which is Cardano 1.5) and then the Cardano decouple (which is 1.6). After both these events, then the team can connect Rust or Haskell.

The reason IOHK decided to have two teams with different processes is to derisk delivery. In the event that one team is delayed for an unforeseen reason, the other team may be able to overcome the challenges faster.

Also with this rolling out, it should be noted how the network will gradually decentralized. OBFT
will run for all slots in the first epoch. Then, in the next epoch, some percentage of slots will be turned over to the stake pool. If they make all their slots or majority (meaning they’re correctly operating) then with the next epoch, it’ll double and more and more. Over a period of epochs and through this gradual winnowing, it will go from OBFT running all the slots to none.

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:+1:

I’ll remove my topic in education

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Here’s is the registration link: https://docs.google.com/forms/u/1/d/e… please include your telegram ID in the notes section.

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Thank you for adding the link Jotunn.

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Is that mandatory? I registered before seeing this.

Please see the summary below the video that @maki.mukai added.

Note, Stakepool Taskforce Telegram channel has not been set up.

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Thanks was wondering why link did not work :slight_smile:

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could we please use the forum instead of telegram or slack for it allows better non-linear higher quality interaction.

@maki.mukai @everyone ~ thoughts?

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why would it not just say “telegram iD” - it’s just so frustratingly backward that it would be pointed out on here on a random comment after majority of folks have already filled in the form from Charles’ tweet…

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Alas, Telegram uses “channel” https://www.telegram.org/faq_channels, an ID is a number and not as inviting.

Hi Maki

Thanks for all your great work.

There has been a lot of activity on the Telegram channel and we are now starting to see some saturation in questions through repeats being asked.

While not suggesting you publish a timeline for testnet commencement (as I appreciate it can be risky to specify launch dates), would it be possible to get an indication as to when documentation being prepared might be available? There are some fairly obvious questions I would expect IOHK will already be documenting (such as system requirements, basic install steps, how to register a pool, how to delegate stake, etc.) that if it was available would satisfy many of those asking questions.

Unfortunately with the announcement of a significant step in the project like this many people will become excited and impatient for more information.

Once the basics are available, then the Telegram channel can focus on more specific questions.

Thanks

Phil

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Hey Phil,

At this stage, we’re still collecting the questions coming out of the community. The document looks to be reaching 200 questions :flushed: so soon, these will be fed back towards the technical and development teams to sort through. There will be coordination with the comms teams to formulate answers/information and infographics where needed. It’s hard to predict for myself how long this will take but we are aware of how eager the community is!

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saw this coming.

this is what happens when the medium selected is not fit for purpose.

but apparently suggestions from the community aren’t taken into consideration or even responded to.

so the community has now been excluded from this phase?

The community member in charge of managing the document has yet to consolidate repeated questions and sort them.

And I agree that other mediums could have been used, but it was announced and we had to go with it.

And as for the final bit, no the community is not excluded - but the purpose of this exercise was to gather questions within the community (to which answers probably don’t currently exist) and have the teams behind staking and the protocol answer them so that people can better understand how staking on Cardano works. Hopefully that clarifies the situation? :slight_smile:

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Staking pool community questions has been great. Good community interaction and it is producing results. Already clarity on many issues and more to come.

@maki.mukai appreciate the response. the confusion wasn’t in that - but in the comms bit.

i’ve been waiting for the questions and answers to be posted in order to create visualisations illustrating the concepts. from what was written before it seemed/seems that we’re going to have to wait for the iohk comms team… when we can get the info and start producing stuff without waiting for them. what matters here is the integrity of the answers. which can and should be in text form. which means a much faster delivery. then the community should be given that to get on with, and the comms team can do their own interpretation in their own time…

perhaps my interpretation of Charles’ tweet reaching out to the community for this very reason was a misinterpretation?

https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1086390962572742656

my point here was not that ANY other medium could have been used, cause, i mean, yes, of course - but that telegram was inherently an inferior medium for the intended purpose compared to the forum. as it’s predictably confirmed.

and in choosing it, there are some, myself included, who have deleted telegram - cause of it’s cognitive overload linear conversation structure and spammy bot filled cesspool nature - have not participated. that’s just an aside.

so right now, the entire community instead of crowdsourcing this, is awaiting the bottleneck created in tasking this to a single community member?

i mean ~200 Questions vs 500+ voluteers…
https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1089209463968477184

Hmm…I think I’m seeing your point here.

So to confirm, we did go with Telegram and its unfortunate that you have deleted as that is the medium we are using at this stage to collect questions. I can post the Google doc link which is shared across the Telegram group here. Everyone has read access:

As for the community member running this Google doc and consolidating questions, this was chosen out of the Staking work group Telegram. We asked for volunteers out of the community who would be interested and added the community members who raised their hands :slight_smile:

The next stages will involve answers from the development team - which presumably will yes be in text form to start.

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i appreciate that, thank you.

on a separate-ish note, this may came across as nit picky but words matter.

from what i can gather, @vantuz-subhuman is the “community member” you refer to being incharge of the doc. please do correct me if i’m wrong.

if my deduction is correct, there’s some lying through omission going on there in what looks like an attempt to placate and make things seem like what they’re not. his status as an employee is material, describing him as a “community member” is disingenuous and trust eroding.

Ruslan has helped us out but there’s a community member, Isaac (his telegram username is listed at the bottom of the google doc) and he volunteered through the Telegram group.

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Hi @maki.mukai, we are now about in the middle of Q1 and I would like to ask what are the remaining steps (and estimated time if possible) before we can start testing the staking? Is it about going throw and answering our questions or are there still some technical questions to be solved before start?

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