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Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is January 16th, 2024, and it is a very interesting time. Next week, I’m heading over to Las Vegas for World of Concrete, trying not to have a hard time there while I learn all about the latest concrete technology. There will be a thousand vendors and 35,000 people. After that, I will be flying directly to Scotland from Las Vegas to attend an event called QIG.
I’m going to share the link for you guys and tell you a little bit about this event and what makes it special. QIG is something we’re putting on with the Ethereum Foundation and the University of Edinburgh. The origin of this event comes from a paper we wrote in 2020 that a lot of people ignored. It’s called "One Shot Signatures and Applications to Hybrid Quantum and Classical Authenticity." We wrote it with Ryan and a few others, including Agalo, who is also on the paper. Ryan is from Princeton, and Mark is from Princeton as well. There’s also an author from CUNY, Marios.
What makes this paper so special is that it starts exploring the intersection of classical and quantum computing. It proposes that if we had some quantum construct, we could create a signature that self-destructs after use. If we could do this, we could introduce quantum money with classical communication, enabling blockchain-less cryptocurrencies and signature schemes with unclonable secret keys, non-interactive certifiable minimum entropy, and a host of other applications.
When you look ahead to where the world is going with quantum computers, it raises the question of what we can construct with this new technology. We had a lot of fun writing the paper, and it was a nice forward-thinking piece. Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation stumbled across it and was inspired by the incredible possibilities, so he reached out to Agalo. The result is this event taking place on January 26th, between 9 AM and 5 PM at the University of Edinburgh.
A small committee was formed, including Agalo, Petros, Alexandre, and Justin. There are currently about 35 to 40 people registered for the workshop. It’s not a super public event; it’s not like a cryptocurrency conference. This is actually an academic conversation. I hope to discuss the next steps in evolving this paper from pure blue ocean research to more applied research, translating that into product development.
We want to explore what can be accomplished and emulated with a classical computer versus what is required with an actual quantum computer. For example, could we emulate one-shot signatures with an ASIC and achieve similar results without needing a complete quantum computer? What would that look like?
If you’re curious about this topic, I recommend two accessible books. One is "Quantum Computing for Everybody" by Chris Bernhardt. He spent a lot of time creating a nice 200-page book that provides a good introduction to quantum computing in a very approachable way. It discusses concepts like entanglement, teleportation, and quantum algorithms, making it more accessible than most textbooks.
The second book is "Quantum Country," written by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nelson. It’s a free interactive book on quantum computing and quantum mechanics, designed to maximize recall for readers. It’s a novel introduction to the subject, and I highly recommend both resources.
This is the beginning of the next generation of technology. In our industry, things are moving in many different directions simultaneously. The zero-knowledge side is probably the most advanced and interesting right now. We’re talking about the meta-blockchain, which includes the totality of everything that’s been done. Satoshi’s original vision was one of inclusive accountability, meaning that when you get a transaction, you can always verify, if you have a full node, that what you’re looking at has not been double-spent and that the tokens exist.
But what happens if you don’t have a full copy of the blockchain? Can we create a meta-blockchain that contains proofs about the blockchain, so that when you transmit that proof, it’s as good as having a full copy of the chain? This is part of a broader conversation about verified computation. People are trying to show that the state of a program—whether it’s a long-running blockchain program or a DApp—is what you think it is. You can check the proof yourself, and the security assumptions are very similar to having a full copy of the blockchain.
There’s been remarkable work done in the zero-knowledge space, from recursive SNARKs to rollups. There are many projects, like Midnight, pursuing this, using Plutus with Halo. The whole Plonk space has been fleshed out, and there are many adherents, like the ZK-EVM and ZK-Sync, doing their thing. It’s a very fertile area with a ton of papers. Hyper Plonk is another example, stemming from Ben-Sasson’s work at Stanford.
This area is essential. It’s less about the blockchain and its architecture and more about the meta-blockchain—the proofs about properties of the system that can be transmitted with the transaction. This is crucial for scaling. Another fertile area is exploring if we can run blockchain systems on different types of hardware that have special properties, which could provide new capabilities.
The most obvious example is trusted hardware, like trusted execution environments, which can preserve data integrity even if exposed to something. There are papers, like Town Crier, that explore this concept to its logical extreme. Bridges are another example, enforcing the logic of cross-chain transactions and governance key management, running in specialized hardware that’s hard to corrupt. Quantum computers would be yet another bespoke operating environment.
That’s really the point of QIG: to discuss what the horizon looks like over the next three, five, or ten years and what pioneering work is being done. If we can achieve something like a one-shot signature, we can unlock many possibilities in the Ethereum ecosystem that are currently thought to be impossible.
In the Cardano ecosystem, we have strong academic disagreements about protocol design. For example, we believe you can implement a proof-of-stake system with a 50% security threshold instead of a third. We feel you can bootstrap from Genesis and that you don’t need a slashing or bonding mechanism for finality or for ensuring your chain is secure. The evidence for this is that Cardano has been running for many years with Shelley and beyond, and the system has never had an issue. We have academic papers and rigorous mathematical proofs that have been peer-reviewed to showcase this.
This year, the final version of Ouroboros for the first iteration will ship around the same time as Chang. The Ethereum community thinks that’s not possible, which is why they’ve introduced their current scheme. Regardless of these differences, we can agree that if one-shot signatures existed, it would be a moot point on both sides. You wouldn’t need to use key-evolving signatures or have rigorous academic debates.
With the quantum property of key construction, you could destroy a signature after a single use. You could also embed, through calculations, the location where the key was generated and used, opening up possibilities for geotagging and geographic participation in your system. There are hundreds of use cases that arise from this, and there are many world-class experts at the University of Edinburgh and in our broader labs at Stanford and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
It will be exciting to see what the Ethereum Foundation brings to this collaboration. Despite our differences, there are many bright and talented people in the Ethereum ecosystem, and they have a gargantuan ecosystem worth over $200 billion, with billions of dollars in transactions daily. It’s tremendously exciting that they’ve taken an interest in our research.
For my part, it would be great to discuss what a special piece of hardware, like trusted execution environments, could look like to facilitate the creation of these signature schemes. This could effectively become the miner of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, especially something that could be put in a PCI card or USB stick as an augmentation to a stake pool, enabling a new class of signatures.
I’m really excited to see where this goes and to discuss the software and hardware implications and future research. It’s encouraging to see the Ethereum Foundation take a keen interest in this research line, which I believe will attract more investment and excitement. It showcases the power of collaboration.
When we look to the future, it’s important to remember that projects like Ethereum, Algorand, Cardano, and Avalanche are not too far apart in terms of philosophy. Unfortunately, there’s a cognitive effect where people who are slightly apart but agree on most things tend to fight more than those who are very far apart and disagree on many things.
For example, we interact with centralized institutions that are highly regulated in the legacy world, and we have a cordial relationship with the R3 team and the Hyperledger community. The most significant conflicts arise with those who, at least on the surface, value decentralization and principles like inclusive accountability.
If you take a step back and look to the future, you can overcome biases and find common ground, even with those you disagree with. I’m very excited to attend QIG and hope this is the first of many collaborations and discussions. All great collaborations begin with discussions, and I hope it leads to co-authoring papers and productive R&D.
It’s important to understand that social media, including Reddit and Twitter, is not reality. People often say harsh, unfair, and toxic things online, making judgments about others that they wouldn’t say in person. A lot has been said about me within the Ethereum ecosystem, including books that I feel are horrendously unfair and miss the totality of my career.
According to many in the Ethereum community, the only relevant thing I did was the six months I spent at Ethereum, and even that was deemed fraudulent. It’s curious that people at the Ethereum Foundation rarely mention Cardano or my name. I recently saw a three-minute video from the Ethereum Foundation discussing the one-shot signatures paper, and they didn’t mention Cardano or Input Output at all.
This is an artifact of the partisan nature of our industry and the opinions people form about those they’ve never met. Workshops like QIG allow us to go beyond Twitter and Reddit, enabling real conversations that can lead to collaboration. If done right, these discussions can position us to start real, productive conversations.
We’re never going to agree on everything, and the goal isn’t to be popular or liked but to be respected for doing good work. Input Output Research, whether you think we’re real or not, has published 201 papers—a phenomenal amount—with over 10,000 citations. We’ve collaborated with 168 scientists in more than 50 countries, and our work has appeared at the top of every major conference in the cryptography space.
Given that we’re at the top of our game, our publications include co-authors from Princeton, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard, MIT, and top institutions across Europe and Asia. We’re just getting started, with interdisciplinary publications covering everything from game theory and mechanism design to distributed systems and programming language theory.
We even have a zero-knowledge lab at the University of Edinburgh, staffed by people from Microsoft Research at the Cambridge campus. Some of our senior research fellows include Phil Wadler, a fellow of the Royal Society, who created the first online computer game as an undergraduate at Stanford. He later created the Haskell programming language, which is one of the minds behind Plutus, the programming language of Cardano.
When we focus solely on social media and unfair narratives, we tend to ignore or gloss over significant achievements. It’s preposterous to think that this movement would have materialized without coordination from Input Output. Research requires coordination, funding, and a mission. Our mission for over seven years has been to build a corpus not just for today but for the future.
We’re focused on everything from measuring decentralization to on-chain decentralized governance and how to represent the blueprints of a cryptocurrency in a formal language that’s machine-understandable. We’re even rewriting the foundations of mathematics at the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics, making phenomenal progress using Lean.
If you listen to certain narratives, none of this exists. I hope 2024 is the year we break through those misconceptions and recognize good research for the sake of good research. We’re actively collaborating with the Algorand ecosystem. For example, the Alba paper we published was co-authored with Leo Risen from Algorand, and it’s made us both better.
We also maintain relationships with various blockchain ecosystems, including Mina, Ergo, and the Midnight project. We love the people at Concordium, and we’ve been examining Concordium BFT, which is a phenomenal variant of HotStuff. There’s a fertile set of relationships across many blockchain ecosystems, and we’re always looking for common ground that benefits the space as a whole.
Every line of code we write ends up as Apache 2 open-source code that anyone can use. Every paper we write is under Creative Commons attribution, allowing others to use it in their projects. The existence of Input Output Research and our infrastructure arm has provided a massive amount of code, concepts, and papers for the industry to learn from and grow.
For Bitcoin maximalists, Cardano is the best ecosystem to study if there’s ever a desire to add smart contracts to Bitcoin. We are the largest extended UTXO smart contract system in the world, with years of track record on that programming model and how to build DeFi applications. The Cardano native asset standard is a realization of concepts from the color coins ecosystem long ago.
By studying Cardano, there’s a roadmap for programmability and asset issuance if Bitcoin ever wanted to add utility to its proof-of-work system. There’s an entire research thread called useful proof of work, which we published groundbreaking research in. If followed, it could allow Bitcoin to become one of the largest computers in the world while maintaining the same level of mining security without materially changing the mining protocol.
Similarly, non-interactive proofs for proof of work ended up being one of the core bases for a fly client approach to add sidechains to Bitcoin and introduce light miners. These are facts, and while they may be inconvenient for some, they exist. I believe our existence is a net positive.
I think QIG is a great way to open the year, and I hope that as we close out 2024, we all become a bit more collaborative and recognize that we all bring something to the table. I have been a bit partisan, especially on social media. While much of it is done in good fun, some people take it as an attack or insult.
I’m passionate about our beliefs and approaches, but we can always strive to be more diplomatic. I will never apologize for the existence of Cardano or my belief that it is an elite cryptocurrency. We have achieved great things with a great ecosystem and great people. I will also never apologize for preserving and protecting the core principles upon which this industry was founded.
It’s essential to measure decentralization and seek to increase it. It’s not optional to preserve and protect inclusive accountability and determinism—basic properties we take for granted with concepts like Bitcoin. We’re losing these in other ecosystems for the sake of convenience, adoption, and commercialization. It’s not acceptable to trade philosophy for money.
Wherever I see that happening, I will be a critic. This doesn’t mean people are stupid; it means they value different things than I do. True to form, Cardano is embracing a recursive governance structure, and that structure gives the community the ability to change the design principles of the system for better or worse.
If they want to abandon the principles of determinism, inclusive accountability, or fixed monetary policy, that is their prerogative. Good governance means making such changes difficult and requiring time and deliberative effort to ensure people are aware of the consequences of their decisions.
The next five years will be the most productive and consequential for our industry. They will solidify the philosophy of the industry. The winners and losers will not be those who get rich; most OGs in the crypto space are okay financially. The true winners and losers will be the philosophies.
These philosophies will determine whether you’re in control of your own money, your own bank, and your consent. You will decide how things evolve, and you can check everything. Nobody can stop you from doing that. Alternatively, we could regress to a world of centralization, custodians, high regulation, and a lack of voice.
In the current world financial order, you have no say in how your money works. Your bank account could be shut down at any moment, and transactions can be reversed. In the age of CBDCs, you could be told what you can and cannot do with your money. This is the reality for nearly two billion people under the orbit of Belt and Road in China, where the People’s Bank of China merged their CBDC with social credit.
The next five years will determine whether we have a third option between total anarchy and a dystopian reality of a well-functioning global system that has regulation and consumer protections while preserving human rights. I don’t want to live in a world where we surrender our freedoms for short-term profits to those who have always taken from us.
I believe the growth of cryptocurrency over the last 15 years is largely because people don’t want that world either. Events like QIG, while small, signify the importance of setting aside differences and recognizing a larger goal: to be in charge of our own money and to give everyone a bit more liberty and freedom.
As long as we remember those broad strokes, we can overlook the small differences and move toward a better world. I can’t wait to see everyone in Scotland soon. It’s going to be a lot of fun to see what comes of this. Even if it’s nothing, at least it will be a good conversation. I appreciate them reaching out to us, and I hope this gives you some value.
Thank you all for listening, and I’ll see you soon. Cheers!
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