About Charles Hoskinson: Colorado resident Charles Hoskinson is an entrepreneur in technology and a mathematician. He studied Number Theory and Mathematical Logic at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado at Boulder before transferring to the subject of cryptography via commercial experience.His professional expertise includes founding two Bitcoin-related startups, Invictus Innovations, and Ethereum. Additionally, he has held various intriguing positions in both the public and private sectors. He was the founding chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation’s education committee and formed the non-profit Cryptocurrency Research Group in September 2013. His current focus is evangelizing decentralization, teaching the public about bitcoin and blockchain technology, and making cryptographic tools more accessible to the general public.

Here is what he thought he would do. He would create a free course and put it online, give it away under a Creative Commons license, and call it the Bitcoin education project. The goal is to bring many people into Bitcoin and teach them why the revolution is so magical and unique. He got about seventy thousand students and over five thousand emails. It gave him an excellent opportunity to get to know people and a deeper understanding of the types of things people were concerned about. When you meet that many people and get that much interaction, it gives you a perfect chance to start a business. So he leveraged that to do so. He started IoHK in early 2015, and the first project they got once the company started was the Cardano project. Cardano was reimagining what one could do with cryptocurrencies and said, “Okay, you know, Bitcoin proved that you could have two centralized money and create artificial scarcity and have a decentralized transaction system where you can push value between people.” Still, these transactions are slow, and they’re dumb, and you know they’re just never what you want them to be, so Ethereum comes around and says, can we at least make the transactions more? You see this idea of a smart contract, and they can do all these cool things and are straightforward to use.

The good news is that cryptocurrencies it’s a pretty straightforward problem. You create a compressed representation of a blockchain, and then you say, okay, if you get a transaction from that can look at that compact representation and prove two things. The bad news is that all that side-chain research that has been talking about for all these years is a perfect way to figure out that approach from the legacy system. The bad news is the wrong story is that you can’t guarantee interoperability because their systems have to evolve a little bit. Their designs have to grow a little bit but what you can do is make their lives easier by giving people the ability to add metadata and attribution to the transaction so that when they enter that system, there’s some context that they can use to understand from a compliance perspective or from in or jump funds or whatever they need to know to be able to use these types of things.

Cardano hypothesizes that it can reuse the same things for a treasury mechanic for protocol upgrades. You change the weights, so you have a different quorum that’s required. Some very well-defined goals, so scalability, you know, as you add people, your system gains resources interoperability, you can talk to as many people as possible and sustainability you can pay and decide, and then you adopt a process that’s very conscientious that’s tried and tested and has worked in the past that allows you to grow and walk your way over there systematically.

So back in 2015, that was the dream. We got a fairly sizable contract to be funded until 2020, so it was an excellent little five-year project, almost like a DARPA project hybrid approach at IoHK where core infrastructure that we do not anticipate changing much goes through a rigorous high-assurance eventual development and then looking at-like medium-assurance technology like liquid For example when you’re adding refinement types to Haskell, this is not necessarily going to give you high assurance. Still, it will be much better than the plain old Haskell code. Still, it doesn’t give you a significant development slowdown. Maybe you add an extra 20 or 30 percent to your development pipeline. Still, it’s considerably better than everything before, and by the way, Haskell is five times better than Java.

Permit coins a brilliant idea for using proof of work to build a archival database and yet had that research thread been followed to this logical extreme it’d probably be file coin on steroids but you know it’s one of those papers where their academic incentives don’t align with the industry incentives so they just kind of moved on and went and did other things and thought that it’s really unfortunate so that’s another component of the card ah no idea is that not only do you get to work on these things that are academically relevant because it’s cutting edge state of the art research but also its interdisciplinary where you get to blend cryptography and distributed systems in game theory and programming language theory and other things have worked with colleagues that you frankly would never talk to and never do anything with and never jointly publish with but then you get to see them realize and systems that potentially could change people’s lives first thing that they did with their analysis is ask given kind of a weaker not so practical version of proof of stake you know nothing didn’t make it honest majority vital synchronization requirements these types of things is it even possible to create a secure ledger because if you can’t create it in the simplest possible case there’s no way to make it and create daily chances right so the answer is yes and that’s what proved last year and that Papers has gone through six revisions and it went through peer review and they were very happy with the design so now it’s a game of saying how do they make the protocol practical so you go from a synchronized environment to a semi synchronous environment because that’s the way the world works you want to be able to do things like bootstrap from the Genesis block you want to be able to generate random numbers very quickly.