Sam Williams: We are building a real protocol - AO

Source: PermaDAO

We will not rush to deal with matters involving the security of the AO protocol, and we will not call it the mainnet until we are almost sure that the core specifications do not need to change. Because we really believe in building a real protocol.

Arweave founder and Forward Research CEO Sam Williams said that the progress of the super-parallel computer AO will not be rushed because their team firmly believes that they are building a real protocol.

Williams also said that the AO, which is currently in the test network, will not be called the mainnet until the core specification is not further modified.

"We will not rush to deal with things involving security. In the end, we will not call it the mainnet until we are almost sure that the core specification does not need to change. We really believe in building a real protocol," Williams said in a conversation with Jason Choi on the Blockcrunch podcast.

As for why the team is focused on building a proper protocol, Sam Williams pointed out that cryptocurrency has lost its way, and the boundaries between centralized startups, products, and so-called protocols have become extremely blurred. He also stressed that the protocol should be a neutral language that allows a wide range of participants to use it to perform tasks together.

"If it's always changing, then it's not a neutral language. It looks closer to a product, and if it's not a real protocol, then it can't provide rights to users," Williams said, further explaining that Ethereum's switch to proof-of-stake resulted in $8 billion worth of GPUs being rendered useless because the participants' rights were not protected. "That's not a real protocol," Williams said.

"So with AO, what we're trying to do is make sure that the protocol itself, the components, are stable before we call it mainnet. In fact, we're very close to that goal. We want to push it to a point where it not only works today, but will continue to work and scale without our intervention. This is the protocol that provides people with building rights guarantees," Williams explained.

Developers use Lua to build AO. When talking about why Lua was chosen instead of Solidity or Rust, Williams said that Lua is like JavaScript, which is simpler and reasonable.

"Lua provides us with an extremely simple and flexible language," he added, developers need a clear mind to write programs involving security, and Lua allows developers to do so "without distractions, because it is essentially a simple version of JavaScript."

At the same time, AO officials revealed that more than 75 million messages have been sent on the AO test network. Every interaction with a process in AO is represented by a message. The core of the message is a data item that conforms to the ANS-104 standard. Users and processes can send messages to other processes on the network through the scheduler unit.