Cardano's Past: The Soul of Hell Charles Hoskinson
Editor's Note: This article comes fromMamoto Satoshi Community, Author: Adriana Hamacher, reprinted with permission by Odaily.
Original title:Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson: A Soul in Hell?
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With Cardano's decentralized mainnet about to go live, can Charles Hoskinson finally beat his old rival Ethereum?
In his Longmont, Colorado, office, Charles Hoskinson faces a strange painting on the wall. It depicts a Roman sitting in a beautiful garden. Amazingly, even though he was sitting in such a beautiful place, the Roman had a tortured look on his face.
In many ways, it's an interesting metaphor for Hoskinson. He built a new, highly anticipated, revolutionary crypto platform, Cardano.
He said: "People are kind of polarized about me. Either they like me or they hate me. Not a lot of people are neutral."
reality. As Cardano's founder, Hoskinson, 32, is known as a serial entrepreneur and polymath. But as the co-founder of Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain by market capitalization, he was ridiculed for incompetence and worse.
Hoskinson has entered a new phase. But if all goes according to plan, the reviews will be even more polarizing.
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air investment bank
Hoskinson was born into a family of doctors in Hawaii. He chose mathematics over medicine, but dropped his degree before earning his doctorate from the University of Colorado Boulder. Still, he believes that serious scholarship requires a slow and painstaking research process.
In 2008, the same year that Satoshi's Bitcoin thesis was published, Hoskinson joined the Republican presidential nomination campaign. He was drawn to Austrian economics and monetary theory, which argued that monetary systems based on fiat currencies were inherently unstable. "When Bitcoin came out, it was like the spiritual heritage that the Republican Party said it was," he said.
Charles Hoskinson
There are a lot of people in the Ethereum ecosystem who hate me, they say I am a monster.
But until 2013, he quit his day job and was "living like a ghetto", "100% invested in cryptocurrency, with no income".
Bitcoin zealot Anthony Di Iorio presented Hoskinson with Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum white paper later that year. Hoskinson has a lot of problems. So Di Iorio and Buterin invited him to an early meeting when the project was just getting started.
Hoskinson was very excited. He helped design ethereum's ICO and served temporarily as its CEO due to the need to register the foundation in Switzerland.
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However, they were divided over whether Ethereum should be run as a nonprofit. Hoskinson favored a for-profit approach, and in June 2015, he decided to withdraw. (Though others say he was fired.)
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Ethereum Japan Edition
Of course, Ethereum started a new wave of blockchain innovation, leading to the ICO and token boom. Hoskinson said: "The market has gone crazy, and ethereum is being used to fund all kinds of crazy ideas, like an 'air investment bank.'"
He had taken a sabbatical from the project, but was approached not long ago by fellow ethereum Jeremy Wood with a new project called IOHK ("Input Output Hong Kong," short for where Hoskinson lived at the time). Build cryptocurrencies and blockchains for corporations, government entities and academic institutions - better than Ethereum in terms of scalability and security.
Hoskinson later said that Cardano came about after an IOHK client proposed that developers build a “Japanese version of Ethereum.” At first, Cardano focused on the Japanese market, aiming to build "something at the intersection of commerce, computing and compliance," he said.
Cardano became a key project of IOHK, a public blockchain and smart contract platform hosting the ADA cryptocurrency.
Hoskinson said Cardano is an improvement over first-generation platforms such as bitcoin and second-generation blockchains such as ethereum. Calling it a “third-generation smart contract platform and cryptocurrency,” he claims it has been more rigorously researched, tested, and safe and scalable for companies, government entities, and academic institutions than its competitors. Aspects are better than Ethereum.
Cardano raised $62 million in an ICO in early 2017. It is marketed as a "retirement investment" and sold primarily to Japanese investors; in fact, 95% of buyers are Japanese.
Since then, it has expanded its base of supporters to include developers and corporate partners around the world.
In a few weeks, an "incentivized testnet" will be launched, which will allow Cardano token holders to stake and earn rewards while developers tweak the testnet.
interesting process
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Charles Hoskinson as Cardano Community Master of Ceremonies at the Platform Anniversary Celebration. Source: Decrypt
Shelley is planned to be released as a series with the aim of gradually bringing full decentralization to Cardano. Ultimately, the network will be 250 times more decentralized than other blockchain networks, and "once it turns on, it will function like bitcoin," Hoskinson said. This means Cardano is designed to run forever, without censorship or intervention.
Shelley's strength lies in the next-generation protocol Hydra. Cardano senior project manager David Esser told Decrypt that its development is nearing completion and it will ensure that multiple versions of the consensus algorithm can run in parallel, allowing you to get even better performance.
Shortly after (or even before) Shelley’s mainnet launch early next year, Cardano plans to add smart contract support for decentralized applications, a development phase called “Goguen.”
The final phase "Voltaire" is dedicated to on-chain governance and is expected to be completed by the end of 2020.
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the tortoise and the hare
Cardano is often compared to a turtle, struggling to keep up with the rapid development of other blockchain platforms like EOS or Tron. But the project is on track, Hoskinson said.
According to crypto ratings firm Weiss, testnet rewards will be transferred to the mainnet when it launches next year, giving people reason to buy and hold Cardano’s ADA token in the near term.
Juan Villaverde of the Weiss Ratings analyst team told Decrypt: “Cardano, we’ve always been impressed with everything that helps provide a reliable POS, blockchain-based ledger, etc. All aspects are of high quality.”
Weiss comments point to the talent of the Cardano team and the rigor of the research.
"Ouroboros Hydra," Hoskinson said, was the hardest part, and it was all done.
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Charles Hoskinson and Cardano Ambassador Vasil St. David planted a memorial tree together in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Source: Decrypt
He is most proud of the work his team is doing on the POS protocol, which he claims will put Cardano ahead of Ethereum, which is moving towards the same goal. Many believe that an efficient POS protocol will make blockchain networks more secure while reducing the power consumption of the underlying operating mechanism.
Buterin started planning his own POS solution Casper in 2014 long before Cardano. Hoskinson claims that despite its late start, Cardano has a better and fairer design.
Hoskinson stated that the full Cardano network (including POS and all adjustments) will be launched by the end of 2020.
“We are the first project to prove that POS can have the same security properties as Bitcoin,” he said, claiming that Ethereum has taken a “roundabout” approach and is “trying to reshape the whole world.”
The ethereum co-inventor also took issue with Hoskinson's claims about Cardano's technical superiority: "Last time I looked at Ouroboros, it didn't even try to deliver what Casper does. Finality, fast confirmations, etc."
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it's complicated
Although it's been five years since he left, Hoskinson's relationship with Ethereum remains complicated.
He took every opportunity to contrast Cardano's rigorous and methodical pace of development with Ethereum, which he believes has been hijacked by what he calls the cult of personality surrounding Buterin.
“In general, we don’t have a good relationship when we have to compete with Ethereum or EOS for competitive reasons,” he admitted.
But, as much as he loves bashing Ethereum, he doesn't like talking about his early involvement. He said he was repeatedly asked to describe every tiny detail. Three books have now been written about his entrepreneurial story, two of which have been selected for film.
According to Hoskinson, the source of the tension was actually his embrace of ethereum classic — the cryptocurrency that resulted from ethereum’s DAO hack and subsequent fork.
In his defense, Hoskinson argues that Ethereum and Ethereum Classic are non-rivalrous and can coexist and even complement each other. And, two years after the fork, that view now finally appears to be confirmed.
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soul of hell
Over 100 Cardano community members on the campus of the Agricultural University in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, participated in the celebration of Cardano's second anniversary as Cardano's decentralized process "Shelley" progressed.
Wearing a Cardano anniversary T-shirt and cowboy boots, Hoskinson got on his knees and planted a ginkgo tree. Cardano's self-proclaimed "community saint" Rasputin looks like Vasil St. Dabov, help get him along.
After the "Voltaire" phase, Cardano's autonomous phase will begin by the end of next year, with Hoskinson planning to step back.
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The painting stands out in Hoskinson's Longmont, Colorado office. Source: Cardano
He said he intends to hand over responsibility for overseeing Cardano's development to the Switzerland-based Cardano Foundation. Earlier this year, a new chairman, Nathan Kaiser, was appointed. It has been Hoskinson's job to create an interim board following a power struggle between Hoskinson and former chairman Michael Parsons.
There is still a lot of work to be done. "That's why we're planting trees here," Hoskinson said. "It takes a long time to develop these systems and establish these systems -- 20, 30, 40 years."
Tree planting, beautiful gardens, reminiscent of the painting that sits on the wall in Hoskinson's office.
