Charles Hoskinson’s Surprise AMA on Shelley Incentivized Testnet Details 05-12-2019
(By @Eric_Czuleger)
On December 5th Charles Hoskinson sat down for another surprise AMA where he discussed the recent summit in Colorado and the next steps for the Incentivized Testnet. If you would like to see the write up of the last surprise AMA which took place on November 29th, click here.
SUMMARY
- A product oriented summit recently concluded in Colorado.
- The roadmap for Cardano in 2020 includes a focus on sharing our story with the help of McCann, the global marketing company.
- We hope to launch the Incentivized Testnet on December 9th, but if it does not happen then, it will be shortly after that date.
- We are seeing great forward progress in collaboration with the key entities that make up Cardano.
- Two new members have been added to the board of the Cardano Foundation.
Summit in Colorado
The recent summit in Colorado brought together IOHK’s product and commercial oriented teams. This helped us look forward to the roadmap of 2020 where we are focused on helping people use, contribute to, and build on the platform. To do this, we are examining everything from performance and partnerships to user experience and relationships with outside financial institutions. During this meeting we went back to first principles in order to focus on the vision, the mission, and the goal of Cardano.
All of this work will become inputs to give to McCann, the global branding firm we tapped for the Cardano marketing refresh. One of the difficulties we have faced in telling the story of Cardano has been our belief that the value of our work has been self evident. In reality, the story of our work has not permeated to key constituencies and personas who will become the consumers of the platform. That is why It’s important that we think deeply about communication and storytelling around Cardano.
After the summit we successfully released a large data dump about the upcoming Incentivized Testnet and there is more information on the way. This will include content on staking rewards. We believe that staking rewards will eventually land between 7 and 12 percent depending on participation. We’ve released a blog about this along with a stake pool calculator. Of course, this is only the beginning of stake pools. In the future, we believe that stake pools will be able to offer a litany of services above and beyond consensus and ledger. We’re excited to see how this materializes.
Incentivized Testnet
We are still looking at December 9th to launch the Incentivized Testnet. While it might happen that day, there is a possibility that we will run into a delay. If the Incentivized Testnet doesn’t go live on December 9th, it will launch in the days or week to follow. We hope this will be in the beginning of next week and we will tweet about it soon. We are always cleaning up and correcting things in our development process and the launch depends on how everything pulls together. Of course, this is difficult because each alteration becomes a breaking change. As updates are made, they have to be fully integrated to keep the system afloat during the development cycle. With that being said, we are getting close to the roll out and we will make sure that everyone is informed of when it will happen.
We’re looking forward to launching the Incentivized Testnet because it has been an enormous task. This is akin to launching a cryptocurrency in and of itself. We’re also excited to have users build their stake pools and get involved. At present, we have over 3000 people in the Telegram group. Users have also begun their own stress testing with a focus on stability and settlement times. At present Jormungandr has seen over 50 releases and over 1000 issues have been solved. Needless to say, everything is moving forward rapidly.
Accelerating development
The Haskell side is also beginning to evolve. We released the .1 Haskell node and we’re currently looking at the architecture of the Haskell side. Also, we have now begun two week release cycles. Seeing formal methods put into practice in an agile release cycle is very exciting. We are now starting to have meta conversations about how we compete, survive and grow. This is allowing us to look at some of the other challenges facing Cardano.
All cryptocurrencies have an ODCC model. (Operational, delivery, commercialization and capitalization). In terms of commercialization and capitalization we have to focus on how everything is paid for and how consumers make money using it. For operations and delivery we have to look at how the system is built and continues to function. This is a big job and Cardano has an added layer of difficulty because there are 5 entities involved in its development. Getting all of these elements to work together is challenging, but at the outset of 2020 collaboration is becoming a smoother process. Pursuant to that, we have recently added two new members to the board of the Cardano Foundation.
Looking to the future of the platform, discussions with the CF have begun about Cardano Improvement Protocol (CIP) process. This was a logistical conversation that included infrastructure, protocol, and marketing proposals to name a few. We’ve also begun talking about how a treasury and RFP processes will work. These conversations are important because we have spent a good amount of time in the IOHK silo. At the end of the day, for Cardano to be successful it must be a community effort. We believe the best way to do this is to begin in a federated way and develop into decentralization. The roadmap for 2020 looks promising.
As always, we thank our supporters for their patience and continued participation.
QUESTIONS
A lot of the focus is on pools and staking but Dapps are going to be the next thing.
How does the movement of 40 billion coins relate to the network health?
Is New Balance happy with the pilot?
How do I get my earnings from the snapshot?
Can you explain how you combine formal methods with agile development?
What do you think about nuclear fusion and the french revolution?
Do you require trusted hardware?
Why are dead kings on your twitter profile?
Is math invented or discovered?
Richard Dawkins or Yuval Harari?
Will Cardano decouple from Bitcoin?
Can I start a stake pool right now?
Will development on Deadalus Mantis resume?
Do we need to register to create a stake pool?
There is a paper stating that Ouroboros isn’t viable, has IOHK responded to it?
What do you think about the 8th hardfork of Vitalik’s chain?
Do you smoke cigars with Bill Clinton?
Will the excessive power usage of BTC be its Achilles heel?
Bitcoin will change to POS in the future?
Chico crypto accepted your fight invitation?
Will you hire a social and political scientist for the Voltaire side?
Will cardano start using TOR snarks for privacy?
How often do you check the value of ADA?
What are the masks in the background?
I noticed that you are a verified Brave Creator.
How many delays will Goguen have?
A report recently said that we were close to state owned quantum computers?
What happened to Virgil Griffith?
What about that critical bug reemerging from 2017?
What kind of music do you listen to?
Do you read books on leadership?
Can we run law systems on blockchains?
Do you have any Atala updates?
Will Cardano play any part in driverless cars?