I propose loose roadmap for now, as a 'goals' we should go into, and make happen:
Great idea.
1/ Web2Web and ACME integration - M1
This is ... (sucks finger, holds it in the air) ... about 75% complete. I'm currently concluding my “is metadata really an answer?” investigation after gaining some rough understanding of what's been apparently holding Datacoin back because a few years ago, all the elements seemed to be in place ...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=405992.0;all (only 4pp in all but it does comprehensively cover the issues). What I'm currently pondering is: limit display of (potentially raw sewage) to
IsMine() addys (no work entailed) or a configurable whitelist (GUI work entailed).
2/ Test network for segwit/porting from nav coin/particl - M2
This is where my “different perspective on cryptocurrency” pays off by giving me more accurate projections. To achieve the proposed goal, the code implementing the tripartite minting will have to be
rewritten in the new codebase and it would entail a hard fork, earlier clients will not be able to connect to the new blockchain. I predict that this will result in
two networks, the original (dare I write “classic”?) and the new. (Go peer over the fence, In the case of both Ethereum and Bitcoin and a few other minor alts the new blockchain
evolved as a separate entity co-existing with the original chain. So “evolutionary growth”, as expected from a Teal organisation and not “civil war” as expected from a hierarchy.) Note how many current Slimcoin users are quite comfortable with the old 0.3 version of the code and note that no-one can force them to upgrade, nor can sanctions be applied.
3/ Android Wallet - M3
Another major rewrite, I'm afraid, in order to extend the client to handle PoB.
4/ Smart contracts integration - test network - M4
Sure, but again, not the (sadly, hopelessly wrong) direction in which everyone else appears to be headed. I already
know that road leads to a sticky end.
(I find myself slightly shocked at some of the more egregious NIH failures exhibited by “the kids of today” - f'rinstance, all this business about ML algos picking up unwanted human biases was well-known in the mid-80s. ML-driven credit-scoring implementations in the US had already run afoul of what the USians call “red-lining”, a corporate optimisation and exploitation of the deleterious effects of social deprivation that was so pernicious that they had to pass laws to prohibit it. All the ML systems had “learned” was how to exploit vulnerable people, which they've done all over again because the current population of ML “hotshots” are, unfortunately, no such thing, as they have just demonstrated in spades that they themselves are too SQD* to be able to learn from others' previous mistakes and so they advertise openly that they are inherently incapable of designing ML systems, hence the general conclusion, “Oh, GIGO”). * I'm struggling to find a non value-laden term and “Systematising Quotient Dominant” is the best I can manage, although “Autistic-spectrum dominant” is more accurately descriptive.I see similar inadequate shallow models at play in the domain that is over-broadly painted as “smart contracts” and I can see the same mistakes being made
again - because SQD's have a weakness for focusing on the internal consistency of their models and failing to cross-reference the resulting simplified model with the complex models of inconsistent reality. The lawyer's slides in that slideset I posted a week or so ago contain a lot of cautionary material which did not pass me by.
I've already had a very encouraging chat with Steve (close friend and Labs oppo for pretty much the entire decade that we were both there) as to whether he agreed with my tentative assessment that
Ginger would be an appropriate approach...
Ginger is our attempt to build an elegant but friendly and practical programming system. It includes a programming language, virtual machine and supporting tools.
The programming language itself is syntax-neutral. By this we mean that you can choose any of several 'pluggable' front-end syntaxes - there's one rather like Algol/Pascal, another like Javascript, another like Lisp. They all get turned into an elegant back-end XML syntax.
Ginger is a modern programming language supporting automatic memory management, object oriented programming, pervasive multiple values and a simple but powerful data loading mechanism that includes data-format conversion.
Ginger is engineered to run on UNIX systems and is developed on OS X and Linux. Adapting it for other UNIXs is straightforward though.
Basically, the Bitcoin scripting language (described by gmaxwell as “adequately expressive for ‘smart contracts’” and that's one dude whose technical assessment I'm happy to take at face value) is too low-level for general use and so I would use Ginger to create a set of higher-level abstractions that were more attuned to end-user needs and more tractable to work with. Steve agrees that a Turing-complete language is
not what you'd want for this task and has basically “given the nod” to my idea of using Ginger and has even offered some assistance. It's down to me to identify, characterise and implement the higher-level abstractions. The approach would still reap the benefits of the computational predictability of the Bitcoin scripting language (just don’t ask Steve for his opinion of it, he's not as charitable as I am) but would be able offer more domain-focused and programmer-friendly abstractions with all the advantages that Ginger brings. (And yes, you did read that correctly, you can write in whatever syntax suits: Javascript, Lisp, Scheme, Pascal, Python, it all compiles down to an elegant back-end XML syntax.)
Where am I going for the higher-level abstractions? Well my first port of call is the
2004 W3C Choreography Description Language effort (sunk by MS pulling out I 'spect). If nothing else, it should give me a useful notational starting point, saves me having to start at Level 0.
The Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) is an XML-based language that describes peer-to-peer collaborations of participants by defining, from a global viewpoint, their common and complementary observable behavior; where ordered message exchanges result in accomplishing a common business goal.
The Web Services specifications offer a communication bridge between the heterogeneous computational environments used to develop and host applications. The future of E-Business applications requires the ability to perform long-lived, peer-to-peer collaborations between the participating services, within or across the trusted domains of an organization.
The Web Services Choreography specification is targeted for composing interoperable, peer-to-peer collaborations between any type of participant regardless of the supporting platform or programming model used by the implementation of the hosting environment.
5/ LN test network - M5
Unexplored territory for me, can't really comment.
I'll limit this post to specific observations on the mooted “road map”.
Cheers
Graham