There has been a lot of change in the short time since Release Candidate 1 went out on December 22. Some of the team have swapped the short, dark days of winter for life in the Caribbean, as IOHK have sponsored an eight-week intense and high quality Haskell course in the University of the West Indies in Barbados. Meanwhile work has been getting done on the Daedalus Mantis integration 1.0 release.

The security audit report came in and was digested and published, and a close eye was kept on the bug reporting in Github and the Ethereum Classic forum.

Happily there were very few reported problems. There is a known issue with installing the Daedalus Mantis integration over an existing Daedalus wallet install and this will be fixed in a future version. For now the workaround is to uninstall the Daedalus wallet before installing the Daedalus Mantis integration. Unfortunately it is not possible to install both simultaneously, support for multiple wallet types is something the Daedalus team are working feverishly on.

The most visible impact of the security report was the dropping of support for the automatic download of the bootstrap database. This feature was based on MD5 checksum, which is more broken than we realized.

It is still possible to download a bootstrap database and install it by hand to reduce the amount of time spent syncing the network and it is recommended. Although a small bug fix to the discovery process and some tuning have also reduced the sync wait time, so both are good options now.

And so we can finally after a huge effort from the team and without further ado announce the release of the Daedalus Mantis Integration 1.0!

Planning for next release, 1.1, has already begun, focused on performance improvements and refactors and while we have no dates yet we expect it to be in the first half of this year.

Sincere thanks to those who supported the team, the project and Ethereum Classic over the past months, it is greatly appreciated.

At its heart, cryptography is the science of secure communication. We have all secrets, expectations of privacy and assertions of truth about messages we receive that require some notion of verification or quantification of trust. Cryptography provides us with a toolbox to better understand how to transmit and verify these artifacts of communication in the presence of an adversary. The challenge is that transmission mediums change and the capabilities of an adversary change with them. The earliest days of secret communication ranging from Caesar to the American Confederacy involved substitution ciphers and elegant physical devices to accommodate the decryption of messages.

The apex of these approaches was the Enigma machine used by the Nazis during World War Two.

As with all cryptographic algorithms, the security of such techniques is always dependent upon assumptions about the capabilities of the adversary. For example, interception of encrypted messages was a deeply personal affair involving finding the spy or messenger moving the scroll. With the invention of wireless communication, listening posts could easily collect all messages transmitted without the sender even knowing.

Decryption without the trusted hardware device, would require the adversary to have special knowledge and the ability to perform enormous amounts of calculations. The creation of the Bombe at Bletchley Park made this task automated for the first time in human history.

The invention of computers and later the internet has fundamentally changed the entire field of cryptography. Human and transmission limitations as well as knowledge transfer are now such that cryptography had to transform from clever algorithms and security through obscurity to a science assuming an increasingly more sophisticated adversary that is usually only constrained by physics and mathematically hard problems.

For the past few decades, we’ve been converging into a reasonable model of security that is comfortable for internet connected devices. Usually security is no longer compromised by an unknown weakness in our ciphers, but rather a flaw in their use or implementation in software.

As much of a triumph this convergence is for the field of cryptography, like Bombe in the 1940s, we are now forced to contend with a new adversary capability: quantum computation.

Quantum computers seem to present the challenge that fundamentally hard problems which secure our modern cryptographic algorithms may not be hard anymore. Should this occur, most of the modern algorithms we use will have to be phased out and replaced with fundamentally different ones. Cryptocurrencies are consumers of these modern cryptographic algorithms from the simple, such as public key systems and hash functions, to the complex, such as zero knowledge proofs and multiparty computation. As there is an explicit and ever increasing bounty for breaking the security behind a cryptocurrency, the challenge for IOHK is to imagine how to provide long-term security in the face of future adversaries, including ones that possess quantum computers.

Therefore, we have launched a long-term research agenda to gradually harden all algorithms used in Cardano’s protocol stack against an adversary who possesses a quantum computer. The first part of this agenda is to harden our consensus algorithm Ouroboros.

All good research agendas need strong leaders who have a proven record and thus we are extremely fortunate to anticipate the inclusion of Professor Alexander Russell of University of Connecticut, USA as a senior research fellow in IOHK research and an external collaboration with Assistant Professor Peter Schwabe of Radboud University. They will play key roles in our first attempt at hardening the Ouroboros protocol for the post quantum setting.

Professor Russell (Ph.D. MIT 1996) has a deep understanding of quantum computation that spans over two decades. His work on quantum computing has focused on algorithms for algebraic problems, intractability results, and quantum-secure cryptography. He was also one of the co-authors of the Ouroboros papers and thus the combination of his deep understanding of blockchain protocol security and his expertise of quantum computation and post-quantum security put him at a unique position to lead the effort of projecting Ouroboros to the post-quantum setting.

Professor Schwabe (Ph.D. Eindhoven 2011) is one of the rising stars of the field with contributions from his work on SPHINCS to lattice signatures such as Tesla and Dilithium. He is also participating in NIST’s competition to harden the cryptographic algorithms used by the United States government against quantum computers.

As this is long arc research, the output will be many papers, conference discussions and iterations; however, we are excited to start the process and conversation. It is our belief that over the next 50 years cryptocurrencies will become the standard way of representing and transacting value.

Therefore, it is essential for us to proactively prepare our protocols against the threats of the future with the hope that Cardano can enjoy the durability that TCP/IP and other long-lived protocols have demonstrated. We also believe it is essential to structure the conversation within the cryptocurrency community to involve university partners and domain experts as soon as possible in order to avoid common mistakes, incomplete solutions, and have access to the best available knowledge.

In the short term, the first output of this workstream will be to choose and properly parameterize a post-quantum signature scheme for Ouroboros Praos as well as examining our protocol against the capabilities of an adversary in possession of a quantum computer. Our hope is that this work will be finished and implemented before the end of 2018 in Shelley’s first major upgrade.

The Symphony of Blockchains is an interactive, visual and auditory exploration of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and the blockchain. It is an ongoing research initiative with a singular aim: to help bring about greater understanding of both blockchain technology and the ever expanding (and contracting) cryptocurrency marketplace. The term ‘blockchain’ is being increasingly found in everyday language, with little explanation or understanding of the technology and its implication for the future. This work aims to explain both blockchain technology and its most visible application — cryptocurrencies. Through this visualisation we explain the concept underpinning blockchain as well as the individual transactional detail and ultimately the health of any cryptocurrency.

As the technology becomes more pervasive and it impacts on everyday life more, it’s important that we attempt to explain it in a meaningful way.

At Kuva, a design studio of artists, designers and technologists, we help define new metaphors through which to understand these technologies.

In Symphony we explore the blockchain of Bitcoin as a physical structure. We examine its inherent underlying qualities by encapsulating data as crystalline forms connected in space, that are immutable and persistent. Using this as a metaphor provides a means to understand the Bitcoin blockchain. Blocks take on the properties of the data, their size, colour and orientation represent various qualities. Blocks are orientated in a spiral tracing back through time, each periodic rotation representing a day in the life of the blockchain. Their size and colour represent the total value of transactions made.

Symphony also explores the blockchain as an auditory experience. We ask a simple question: ‘what does the blockchain sound like?’. Using the frequency and timing of Bitcoin transactions as a foundation, the audio extends the crystalling structures by encoding as an sound based entity.

The background sound is an ambient soundscape created from real recordings of computer power supplies and fans to emulate the sound of Bitcoin mining.The intensity of the sound varies with the hashrate of the network.

The audio of the Merkle tree is based on the transactions of the block. A repeating loop is set to run every musical measure (a segment of time corresponding to a specific number of beats in which each beat is represented by a particular note value) Transactions are arranged in ascending order based on the time they were made. The timescale of a block from the earliest to the latest mined, is mapped from 0 to 30 seconds.

Each transaction sound is triggered and set to loop based on the mapped time value (quantized to the nearest 32nd note). As the master loop repeats, notes accumulate and build up a pattern.

The note of each transaction sound is based on the position on the y-axis, to the nearest note in the Aeolian mode.

When it came to the user experience we wanted to ensure it was effortless to explore. The concepts and technologies we’re attempting to explain are complex enough. We didn’t want users having to fathom out a complex navigation system on top of it all.

Once the blockchain is loaded users simply scroll up or down to move forward or back in time through the blockchain. Using their pointer (or finger on mobile devices) they can easily select an individual node or block in the chain to investigate it further. Once accessed, the user is presented with a view of the unique Merkle tree that identifies that specific block. In addition to the Merkle tree view, the user is presented with a plethora of information giving detail about the transaction the selected block represents. To exit the block view the user simply clicks away.

A blog post on the Steemit website appeared recently making a number of claims regarding Ouroboros. The article contains several factual inaccuracies. For instance, it is claimed that “DPOS” in the Ouroboros paper stands for “delegated proof of stake”, while in fact, DPOS means “dynamic proof of stake”, or that the protocol requires a "2/3+" ratio of parties being honest, while in reality it just requires an honest majority, i.e. the stake controlled by parties following the protocol is more than half the total stake. For the benefit of those that are interested in the Ouroboros protocol and who appreciate its general philosophy, we feel it is appropriate to provide here a response to this article making along the way a few broader points. While pointing out inaccuracies in the blog, we take the opportunity to highlight some of the general approaches followed in the design of Ouroboros and in the related research efforts that are currently underway at IOHK.

Ouroboros is a proof of stake (PoS) protocol that uses delegation in the spirit of the PoS idea as discussed in the Bitcoin forum starting from 2011. The references that influenced its design are listed in our paper. PoS is a powerful concept that has inspired a number of other efforts prior, concurrent and post the first Ouroboros paper. Among all other implemented PoS blockchain systems that carry real assets, Ouroboros is unique in that it was designed in tandem with a formal security model and a mathematical proof that it implements a robust transaction ledger. This marks a fundamental shift in the methodology of blockchain system design.

Blockchain systems are in a period of transition from curiosities to critical infrastructure; as such, the all too typical software industry approach of releasing a “minimum viable product” as early as possible and then fixing bugs as they appear, is not appropriate. Failures of critical infrastructure have a significant impact on people’s lives and thus require rigorous engineering discipline to the highest possible standards. Dependability, rather than maximum performance according to some arbitrarily chosen metric, is the primary goal. Performance is important, of course, but the performance required is a function of the ultimate application domain, and from the point of view of dependability it is the worst-case performance that is important, not the ideal-scenario peak rate.

Like all other protocols in the blockchain space, Ouroboros requires some degree of synchronisation. The block production interval has to be consistent with the likely time to complete the required information exchanges. The 20-second slot time in Ouroboros represents a conservative choice for a block of transactions to traverse the diameter of a peer-to-peer network, where the peers may be significantly geographically distributed, the system is operating at peak transaction load and the interconnection is significantly less than perfect. It is improbable for a block of transactions to consistently traverse a global network much faster than that, and as a result any solution that does significantly better (or claims to do significantly better) is either wrong, or provides a weaker level of decentralisation or security, i.e. it solves an easier problem than Ouroboros. There is a tradeoff between achieving a robust, global, participatory service that delivers sustained effective performance even under an adversarial attack, and creating a high performance, limited participation (in geographical scope or network resource requirement) solution that makes overly optimistic assumptions on network stability.

Irreversibility, the property that transactions persist and are immutable in a blockchain protocol, has to be presented as a function of the level of the adversarial strength. This is true in Nakamoto’s Bitcoin paper and also in the Ouroboros paper, see Section 10.1 for the actual time needed for confirmation of transactions. Thus, one should be very wary of statements about irreversibility that do not quantify the level of adversarial power. For instance, Ouroboros will confirm a transaction with 99.9% assurance in just five minutes against an adversary holding 10% of the total stake, which in today’s market cap in the Cardano blockchain would amount to more than two billion dollars. Byzantine agreement protocols can provide a more “black and white” irreversibility, in other words the protocol can be guaranteed to be irreversible within a certain time window provided an honest majority or supermajority exists depending on the protocol. Nevertheless, the performance and decentralisation penalty suffered is very high if the level of adversity is allowed to come close to the 1/2 barrier, which is the level of adversity that Ouroboros can withstand.

The issue of possible dominance of the consensus process by a small group of stakeholders holding a large proportion of the stake is important but is not applicable to the current release of the Cardano system (the Byron release). What we have proved for Ouroboros is that it can facilitate a “fair” transaction ledger (where fairness here means that the ledger can fairly record all significant actions that are performed by the protocol participants despite the presence of an adversary). This enabled us to neutralise a number of rational protocol deviations (e.g. the equivalent of selfish mining attacks in the PoS setting) and provide a Nash equilibrium argument showing how the protocol can support many different types of mechanisms for incentivising participant behaviour. Currently, IOHK Research is actively working to finalise the incentive structure that will be incorporated in the Shelley release of Cardano, where stake pools will be supported and delegation behaviour will be properly incentivised so that it offers effective decentralisation of power. The crux of our methodology is the engineering of a novel reward mechanism for rational participants that provides appropriate incentives to partition their delegation rights. The objectives are first, to avoid concentration of power to a small group of participants – as it could happen by a naïve reward mechanism in a Pareto distributed stakeholder population – and second, to provide appropriate incentives to ensure a desired number of delegates. We are very excited about this work; it will be the first of its kind in the area and, as before, we will be disseminating it widely including full technical details, as well as submitting it for peer review.

This brings us to the final distinguishing advantage of the philosophy of Cardano. Scientific peer review has been refined over centuries. The way it is implemented by the International Cryptology Conference (also called Crypto), where Ouroboros was presented, and the other top conferences in the area, strives to remove conflicts of interest and produce the highest level of objectivity. The method of reviewing is known as "double blind”, i.e. papers are submitted anonymously and reviewers are experts that also remain anonymous to the authors. The committee of experts that reviews submitted papers each year is formed by two program co-chairs that are appointed by the International Association of Cryptologic Research, the pre-eminent organisation of cryptology research that was founded in 1982.

Being invited to serve in the committee as an expert is an important recognition of an individual’s long-term commitment to the area of cryptography (and even a precise count of how many times one has served is maintained). Blockchain protocols fit perfectly within the cryptography scientific literature and thus scientific peer review is to be done by this community. Of course, we welcome reviews from anyone. That is why we make public very detailed whitepapers with precise and specific claims that leave no uncertainty about what is being claimed, and we appreciate any factual discussion about any of these claims. We strongly encourage other projects to submit their work for scientific peer review as well. They will enjoy the benefits of thorough, well-founded and objective critique and they will have the opportunity to showcase any advantages and novelty that their approach possesses.

Hotel Ginebra is a boutique hotel in Catalunya Square, which if you have visited Barcelona you will know is a prime location in the heart of the city. Guests can wake up in the morning to a great view of the city, but what they may not know is that the hotel has earned its place in history. It recently became the first business in the world to accept Ada, the Cardano cryptocurrency launched at the end of September. I went to check out the hotel, to meet the manager, and to learn the story of how it came to accept Ada. Alfred Moesker is one of those who fell in love with this city. Born in the Netherlands, he had owned a hotel in Rome for years before he came to Barcelona and with his partner Yvonne Daniels took over Hotel Ginebra in 2013. Alfred and Yvonne are innovative managers who believe Ada can bring big benefits to the hotel industry, as well as to the wider world. I decided to make use of the offer to pay in Ada and found it was easy and efficient: the first of many transactions to be done, I am sure about that!

I asked Alfred what he felt about being the first business to accept Ada in payment.

“Incredibly proud,” he said. “For reasons we even fail to completely understand ourselves, we are more proud about it as we have been about anything else we have done for a long time. But working with Ada just feels right to us and it is a project that we feel we can identify with, not just something we just use and then throw away later.

In the short time since my visit, Alfred says quite a few people – including from Japan – have walked into the hotel inquiring if they can pay with Ada if they were to book a room. In a follow-up email he said: “To see how excited they get when we tell them ‘yes, you can’ is fantastic to witness.”

The hotel is in a typically Catalan building, with a regal style on the outside and a modernist feeling once you go in. It has been completely reformed on the inside and the rooms are cozy and quiet; they range from small, single rooms to big suites, so the hotel is very versatile. There are also great common spaces for guests (the use of which is included in the room price), computers with internet access, break rooms with tables and sofas, and snack rooms with tea, coffee and pastries available at all times. The staff are wonderful, kind and efficient, there’s a 24-hour reception service and they will greet you with a nice glass of wine and a chocolate once you’re settled in your room. If the location and the well-kept inside wasn’t enough to make it a great stay, the staff totally top it!

It’s not hard to see why Alfred and Yvonne moved to Barcelona. The hotel overlooks Plaça de Catalunya’s famous fountains and the main streets: La Rambla, where there are restaurants, museums, and shops, before you finally get to the beach; Passeig de Gràcia, if you love haute couture or want to have a taste of fancy Barcelona take a stroll around here, and Portal de l’Àngel, which leads to Barcelona Cathedral and the gothic district, and where you will find the famous Santa Llúcia fair if you’re visiting in winter). What all these places have in common, aside from being Barcelona’s heart and soul, is that they’re a three-minute walk from Hotel Ginebra.

Alfred came across Ada after reading an online article. He was just learning about Bitcoin at the time and was put off by its huge price volatility, fluctuating values not being nice and predictable for a business. He wondered instead whether alt coins might have a role to play in his business. A friend warned him that cryptocurrency was “like the wild west” because it was an emerging technology, but he preserved with his research and came across Cardano and the whiteboard videos.

“I liked the idea behind cryptocurrency,” he said. The peer to peer principle definitely is very attractive to us personally. We have had our share of bad experiences with banks and the idea that there is something else out there that can make the system a bit fairer just sounded all too appealing.

“Then I read about the Cardano project which seemed the opposite of exciting. It featured a photo of Jeremy Wood and Charles Hoskinson, both clearly the academic type – bordering on "nerdy" in a good way! When we read how they had been carefully constructing this project in order to take out the flaws of other cryptocurrencies and offer a much more "balanced" product, we thought ‘bingo’!!!”

Alfred liked the fact that Ada had been designed to be used as a cryptocurrency and also that it was part of Cardano, a system that would “lay the foundations for many projects in the crypto industry for many years to come”. “We get a strong sense that Ada is a product that will do good in the world and that has been set up for the right reasons,” he said.

Ada could also bring big benefits to the hotel industry in Alfred’s view.

“Accepting a cryptocurrency in general opens up a new segment of the travelling global population,” he said. “Accepting Ada will very importantly give us a chance to also go back to peer to peer relations with our potential customers. Nowadays the big reservation portals have so much commercial power that you are pretty much at their mercy.”

“Imagine if and when Ada has been distributed globally. A lot more people, that now do not have a credit card or have credit rating problems and can’t easily make a hotel reservation, by using ADA will be able to make a reservation in one minute. In our opinion it will promote financial global equality, at least that seems very likely from what we see happening with the hotel reservation process and hotel industry.”

All in all, visiting the hotel and meeting Alfred was a very positive experience. I spent a wonderful night in a nice hotel with kind staff in the center of the city, waking up in Barcelona’s heart at a good price and used a safe, direct form of payment. Either if you’re travelling for business or on holiday, alone or with friends or family, I can totally recommend it.

Alfred was very excited about Cardano’s potential and proud to be a part of the community.

His words about what attracted him to Cardano and its community were:

“It is hard to define…it is just one of those things you come across in your life sometimes and you just know it’s right, even when you only understand a fraction of the “why” at the time.

“What we do know is that it seems to connect us also on a personal level to what is apparently a pretty special group of people who also like this project and what more can you wish for in life?”

This article was contributed by a guest blogger and you can show appreciation for this blog by donating Ada to Olga at the following address: