Spring Seattle Meetup - summary and video!

Hi all,
We had our first Seattle Cardano meetup last night and had a fun time with a very robust discussion on many topics.
Thanks to Sebastien, we were able to live-stream and record so for those interested you can watch directly to get a feel for it. Link starts at 20 minutes in as we had some feedback/echo going on initially so jumping you past that:


(note that the camera was kind of flip opposite the AV controls so you’ll just see my back lol - next time we’ll correct.).

For a quick summary of discussion - beyond the initial slides presented (https://cl.ly/rvIV):

What is PoS version is running now - Ouroboros (classic), running in federated mode with Emurgo, CF, IOHK running all ‘signing’ modes.
With decentralization (staking and staking pools) then it moves to true decentralized network. Estimate Q3 for testnet with staking. Actual staking Q418 - Q1 of 19.

Is Haskell required to write smart contracts?
Answer - No. Solidity is the main language for smart contracts atm, Haskell is for the Cardano platform internals itself.
Sebastiens video on how the smart contract architecture is here:

General coverage of the overall timeline for different releases/updates. IOHK moving to monthly release cycles.
Discussion on wallet, lite wallet, hardware wallet, paper wallet.

Smart contracts written against settlement layer - basic but very safe. Contracts using computation layer = more flexibility but higher risk.

Discussion of DAG (Ouroboros Hydra) along with transactions per second.

Background on how Cardano started in Japan (via Emurgo) and then IOHK was added. Lack of press on Cardano may be related to complexity of the project (hard to present it in a media byte summary).

Discussion on interactions between Cardano and other crypto assets, Sebastien mentioned Non Interactive Proofs of Proof of Work and posted that they have a blog post today on it: https://nipopows.com

Discussion on real-life use cases. Several people had seen bitcoin atm’s but in watching the atm for up to 2 hours…no one used. Discussion on how merchant processing with crypto as possible killer app with Visa/MC taking 3% of each transaction, but chicken/egg issue with lack of merchants thus no customer use case. Superiority of crypto transactions vs wire transfer, but always issue of liquidity between Ada and US dollar (or crypto to fiat in general).
Discussion on confirmation speed for transactions (i.e. waiting for 5 blocks after paying for coffee, etc), proportionate risk, reversibility of transactions.

Discussion on keys and wallet for daily use - what happens when you die (how do keys pass on so assets are not lost?), multi-sig wallet as possible solution.
Discussion of Biometrics as key to wallet instead of passphrase discussed as possible long term fix for loss due to forgetting passphrase.

Finally, discussion on timing of next meetup and frequency - consensus was end of August for next one!

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Thanks very much for writing up Less! :slight_smile:

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