Charles Hoskinson Cardano Updates and AMA - 26/04/2020
(Written by @Eric_Czuleger)
Charles Hoskinson sat down for an update and AMA on April 26th, 2020. There he discussed upcoming advancements in the Cardano ecosystem as well as delivering some criticism to the press.
Brief Summary:
-
Daedalus 1.0 has shipped with relatively few issues and we’re happy with the progress.
-
Some users have reported crashes, we believe that it is related to a lack of compatibility with older Windows operating systems.
-
Charles Hoskinson would prefer to be known for his work with IOHK rather than Ethereum.
-
There has been some criticism of Root9B but we are confident in the audit report they produced. We will work with them again in the future.
Daedalus 1.0
2020 has been one of the most unique years of modern history. It is a bit of a forgotten year due to how many things have been put on hold. Cardano is still going strong however. We want to elaborate on some of the things we’ve seen in social media and the general crypto media.
Daedalus 1.0 has shipped and there is a great deal of press about it. There have been comments about it crashing instantly. A good deal of these cases are coming from unsupported operating systems. If users are running Windows 7 or 8 they are unsupported. We will likely blacklist these operating systems.
Daedalus will only work for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. For those who say this is not reasonable, Microsoft support for Windows 7 has been discontinued. We believe that if they do not support the OS then IOHK should not either. Other than this issue we have had overwhelmingly positive feedback.
Adapting for everyone
We have gotten a few cases of lengthy sync-times. This is an anomaly. Most users are reporting sync times of 50 minutes to 2 hours. This information is coming from ambassadors, virtual machines and internal users. We are looking into this issue now. It is possible that a rare configuration is causing this.
This is one of the difficulties of writing code for Windows because there are so many different configurations. We developed this for the majority of cases and we understand that there are remaining cases. We are now working on a dedicated intervention. In spite of all of this, there is a good load on our relays and people are downloading. From this we can see what sync times look like. Diversity matters of course and if there are persistent issues than we encourage users to go to Yoroi.
Moving from ITN
We’ve also had questions about moving ITN rewards to the treasury. When the ITN was set up we stated that there is inflation every slot. That inflation then gets divided into two buckets. The rewards bucket which compensates people for the work that they’ve done. The other goes into the treasury parameter. When we activate Shelley all of the rewards get moved over including the treasury. This then goes over to Cardano mainnet.
There has been a question about where the transaction fees go that occur on Cardano mainnet. Those are being burned. They do not go to the treasury or to any other actor. This is about $50 thousand in fees over the totality of ada in circulation.
IOHK and not Ethereum
We would like to clarify the relationship with Charles Hoskinson and Ethereum. His work with Ethereum was for a span of 6 months. The work he has done with Cardano and IOHK is significantly more meaningful. The work he has done with Cardano is more important to him regardless of the market capitalization of Ethereum. We are building a global social and financial operating system and that should be the focus for both media and supporters.
For the journalists who are currently writing we hope that they will refer to Charles Hoskinson in the future as the founder of IOHK, or Cardano rather than the Co-founder of Ethereum. In the future, he will stop speaking about his role with Ethereum. Any journalists who have mentioned his role as co-founder of Ethereum will not be granted interviews.
We do not particularly care about any Cardano vs. Ethereum narrative and it is not something that we will engage with in the future. We believe that we are ahead in terms of our own goals. Oftentimes, the media is more interested in developing conflict rather than looking into the specifics. We believe that the success of Ethereum is the result of Vitalik and the other founders.
When we see flaws like an explosion of ICOs or DeFi weaknesses, they will be pointed out. We assume that anyone in the industry would point out difficulties in our protocols too. This is how messaging in the industry should be and we hope that journalists will take heed.
Root9B questions
Regarding the Root9B report, there have been some comments attacking our auditor. This was surprising. We looked exhaustively at the set of auditors who could audit Haskell code with a demonstrated track record. There were several companies like this. After talking with Root9B we felt they were the best candidate.
A lot of the people working with Root9B were looking for incredibly difficult exploits. They usually worked with military and government contracts. They wanted to get into the blockchain space so this seemed like a natural fit. We have an internal team that is quite good as well. We also have a good deal of infosec and cryptographers working with us.
The point of going to an outside auditor is to get an outside perspective. Some people on Reddit looked into the history of Root9B. In a competitive industry there will be cases which do not look good outwardly. These were looked into by Cardano. The people who we worked with at Root9B were very professional and diligent. We remind people that Google is not the friend of everyone in terms of researching many companies.
Investing in scrutiny
Root9B is a company of 100+ people with deep government contracts. We trust them implicitly. They are our auditor for now but we will rotate to new auditors as is best practice in the industry. If you read the audit report you will see the level of rigor. You will also see that there is more depth that we can go to. We invite scrutiny because we always win.
We put the most time into our level of scrutiny. We believe that we can survive 3rd party scrutiny for building complicated things from scratch. An example of this is Sonics. This is a SNARK which was built from the ground up and implemented. It will be showcased at the ZKProof workshop coming up.
Cardano Classic
There was a reddit thread about Cardano Classic. We were not aware that such a thing existed. If the project is still going we wish those people well. Building a cryptocurrency from scratch is quite difficult.
QUESTIONS
22:55:00 How is code released after decentralization?
30:19:00 Will a Root9B audit be done for each version of Ouroboros?
35:05:00 Why don’t you appear with one of your colleagues on a live chat?
37:00.00 Thoughts on the founders leaving Tezos?
38:14:00 When can we restore our earnings from Yoroi?
38:50:00 Can you talk about the minimum pledge for hosting a pool on mainnet?
42:00:00 Have you had your shot of Lysol to fight COVID-19
53:30:00 Any update on the brand refresh with McCann?
1:00:08 Any comment about the North Korean president’s possible death?
10:07:10 Will you change your reddit name to break ties with Ethereum?
1:07:30 Making games with the Unreal engine is great.
1:08:10 Could a game be tied to the Cardano blockchain?
1:09:38 Any thoughts on geothermal pumps for HVAC?
1:12:37 The CEO of AMD is great.
1:13:40 How is the Graphene battery working?
1:14:10 Still interested in Hydroponics?
1:14:28 Would love to hear developments on John in Africa.
1:15:15 Thoughts on Elon Musk’s starlink?
1:15:45 Any interest in projects moving from Ethereum to Cardano?
1:16:35 Complete press tour post Goguen?
1:16:45 Have the Rust team been reassigned?
1:17:07 Storm and Horizon, thoughts on both?
1:18:32 Thoughts on the Bitcoin Halvening?
1:19:02 Any plan for IOHK to go public?
1:23:07 When will you do another TED talk?
1:24:40 will Phil Wadler stop working for you after Goguen?
1:27:00 Any internship slots opening up at IOHK?
1:27:30 Could the Halvening lead to the next bull run?
1:28:15 Do you still retweet introduction videos?
1:29:00 Does the brain receive or create consciousness?
1:30:01 Movie recommendations?
1:30:05 Will adrestia replace Jormungandr for the mainnet?
1:30:45 Favorite scene from There Will be Blood?
1:32:30 Partnerships with Samsung?
1:33:50 Thoughts on Justin Sun buying Steem?
1:35:40 Thought on the class action lawsuit against Maker DAO?
1:38:05 Thoughts on the oil market?