On March 24, 2019, Dexaran, security expert and Callisto Network’s co-founder, answered questions from the community about the smart contracts upgrade-ability, and the EOS platform.


 

@Dexaran: Hello, Callisto Community!

Hi Dexaran! What kind of reaction Binance, after the audit found errors in the BNB? Have the developers contacted you?

I would say no.

Everything is calm as if nothing happened. No one pays attention.

I would say that this is a typical situation for ERC20 token problems. People are still losing money. However, the developers do not pay attention. Also – they can’t fix this problem, and they prefer to do nothing.

And you could solve this problem? Is it possible?

It is possible to deploy a new contract. However, this will require to announce that the old one is deprecated, warn every exchange and stop the trades until the migration is completed.

This is unlikely that they will ever do it.

I’m not sure I understand this answer. It seems like you’re saying that even though Callisto found problems with a contract, the creators wouldn’t go through solving it, or are you referring specifically to Binance Coin audit?

I’m talking about the fact that the demand on smart-contract audits is not so high right now.

As for BNB, not all auditable contracts can be fixed. In most cases, developers can fix the problem if the contract is not yet deployed. It is way harder to fix a problem in an already deployed contract on Ethereum. EOS contracts can be fixed at any time, unlike Ethereum contracts.

Theoretically, could Ethereum be upgraded to support such functionality if they really wanted to?

Yes, they could. I think that Ethereum is focusing on “code is law” paradigm and trying to build an environment of unchangeable programs which is impossible in my opinion and from a historical point of view (TheDAO, Parity multisig and other hacks).

BNB was the customer of the audit?

They didn’t request this audit. We did it because a third party side asked us.

Hi Dex. How are you?

Keeping the course of improving the crypto security.

When will the partnership with a major exchange be announced?

Please, ask @alejomc about marketing activities.

Dexaran, in the next future, you will change rewards for stakers and miners?

Yes, the monetary policy is already announced.

You can read more here: https://github.com/EthereumCommonwealth/Roadmap/issues/56.

Can you explain how CLO is accrued during Cold Staking? Any formula?

https://callisto.network/cold-staking/.

What is the next thing for the community to look forward to? Promotion? Building?

This is related to marketing activities. Please, ask @alejomc about marketing activities.

When will you deliver cold staking for ETC? We are waiting for you to submit an ECIP, and you promised to do it last week.

I’m aware of this and I would be really happy to do it in the near future. I was busy during the last week – that’s why I couldn’t submit it.

What new is planned to be done by marketing?

Please, ask @alejomc about marketing activities.

Due to the new rules of reducing coins for blocks, what will happen in the distant future when the rewards for blocks are no longer enough to pay for auditors’ work?

We are planning to start charging “gas fees” in future. However, this is still in the discussion stage.

Is the demand for smart contracts auditing growing? What is the dynamics?

It is hard to say. However, I expect a significant increase in demand at the beginning of the next bullish cycle.

Hi, Dexaran! Thanks so much for listing on Bitfinex. Tell me, please, is it expected to introduce additional functions of the Callisto Network project in the near future (except for the audit of smart contracts)?

It is planned to develop a decentralized governance system. The governance system is intended to serve as an agnostic source of funding for those developers who are not Callisto team members.

Why not start a new monetary policy earlier?

These changes require hardfork. First of all, we need to develop, test, and prepare the solution. Then we need to convince exchanges, mining pools, etc. to upgrade their nodes. This is way better to make it properly rather than rush and make a fatal mistake.

Dexaran, are we expecting interesting news in the near future on partnerships with other crypto projects (or large companies)?

I don’t have any official announcements yet.

What are you working on now if it is not a secret?

I’m developing a new formula for the calculation of security auditors’ payments and preparing the ground for the EOS security department functioning. I’m working on an EOS-based smart-contract for self-education reasons to achieve a better understanding of underlying technology. EOS is evolving quickly. Even my 2-months-old contract from Kylin testnet is not up to date now.

So you prefer EOS contracts over ETC and ETH contracts?

Yes.

Because of programming language or for other reasons?

C++ is a better choice over solidity, but this is not the only argument. The whole idea of “unchangeable programs” is a myth, in my opinion, and from what we have seen. It is impossible to write error-free code – that’s why up-gradable contracts are the only viable solution.

In conventional contracts, the contract change is performed only by agreement of the parties, how to be in a distributed ecosystem where the number of parties is millions?

If we are talking about the “upgrade-ability” option of a contract then I would say that the ability of the contract to be upgraded is defined by the contract owner in EOS.

As for Ethereum – they could use the same approach if they would aim to provide this functionality.

Dear Dexaran, the idea of paying for work with the help of cryptocurrency is very promising, especially since the Callisto network has the opportunity to hire and pay for work “to its employees”. Maybe you have considered the options for the implementation of other projects and the audit of smart contracts, if so what?

We don’t have any official announcements for now.

Are you satisfied with the work of the marketing department? Just when you look at how dead projects grow, there are doubts in marketing policy.

The pump&dump growth is taking place in your scenario. I would say that each project is growing in its market phase. Some altcoins tend to move in “packs”. I would say that CLO should move when the growth stage of low-sat coins come during the next bullish phase.

Just to mention – it would be nice to implement a button to stake all CLO in CEW because it is annoying to copy-paste these numbers by hands, and also, will it be possible to do button like “restake with claimed reward”?

I would say that this is possible, but we are not planning to do this in the near future. It was planned to upgrade the Cold Staking contract in the next hardforks. This will allow to restake automatically.

Dear @Dexaran, there is an urgent need to develop marketing and advertising, and you, as the founder, need to control it and take it seriously. Thank you, sir.

I would say that building a working product is of decisive importance, in my opinion. The demand will come at the proper stage of the market cycle. Keep patience.

Dexaran. How long do you stay anonymous??

I don’t know exactly. Probably 3-4 years.

The developers of the EOS along with your idea about audit smart contracts on the network EOS?

It seems that I didn’t understand the question. Can you rephrase, please?

The developers of the EOS, along with your idea about smart audit contracts on the network EOS?

There was not so much attention. We need to do something useful/show some results first. EOS community is very large, and there is a lot of news apart from our announcement.

How can I view incoming transactions from cold stacking? They are not displayed in the main explorer.

Do you mean the transactions that are “claim reward” calls?

I want to conduct an analysis of earned coins on the cold stacking, how can I do this?

You need a script to collect this data from the blockchain.

You could start here: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API

Hi Dexaran, I know you are focused to develop the audit team but did you consider implementing with the team a mechanism to give the CLO coin an extra use like special audits, priorities, or new services on exchange of CLO payments that will be an extra fund to the devs as an incitation too to use CLO ? Not speaking in the near future but more long term.

We have an “increase the priority of audit request by paying CLO to Treasury” feature. This is not a great source of income now.

Hi, why is the project so slow? Why so few regular exchanges? The exchanges are a good advertising for our project. And more different people will be able to trade the coin. For us we need – exmo.com, poloniex.com, kucoin.com, binance.com, bittrex.com, kuna.io.

From what I know:

1. Binance requires too many fees, and only ICOs that raise $10M can afford it while we are not an ICO project.

2. Bittrex, Poloniex – in progress

3. Kucoin is dying, and it is not worth our resources.

Other exchanges – I don’t know because @alejomc is responsible for this.

How many Callisto nodes are currently deployed compared to ETC and ETH nodes?

I don’t have the exact info at the moment. However, it would be nice to collect these statistics. I am adding this point to the TODO list.

@Dexaran, You several times mentioned @alejomc why he does not complement your words? Where is he? It would be interesting and useful to us. We can solve all the issues at once here today. Thanks.

Admin: Most of the team are here, but today’s AMA is with Dexaran to allow questions more focussed on the technical side.

We done AMA’s before with multiple people at the same time, but it is very difficult to follow then. If you have any urgent questions, you can always send a message to @alejomc directly or wait for Alejo’s next AMA.

Where will you deploy the resource rental contract for eos?

I didn’t understand the question. What exactly are you asking?

Does CLO have an official address at EOS? If your auditors test contracts in a live environment, you need to give them resources. You could refer to testing results in the report.

We don’t have an official address at EOS.

Our auditors are also not performing any tests in “live” environment (in case of Solidity contracts). However, I found this idea to be useful. I can write a faucet and provide CPU/NET for each member of CLO security department if necessary.

Bitcoin was born as a currency, then become a business. After that, we had the start of a lot of cryptos. Now there are still many projects, some interesting like CLO and a lot of other coins… but the original concept of “digital money” was almost lost. And the market is done by whales and investors.

What will be the future in the market? There will be a moment where we will buy goodies at a local market using crypto? If so, there will be only a little bit of used crypto. Or you think that experimental projects, distributed computing ecc will be the future?

Censorship resistance is the ideology behind Bitcoin. I would say that BTC is the worst crypto from a technical point of view – it is the slowest, the eldest, and it should be deprecated at some point.

The distributed computation market is still an unsolved problem, and I’m waiting for a “computation markets” to be developed. I don’t know if some of today’s crypto projects will be live in 10 years – the industry is evolving very quickly. My bet is that XRP will be one of the most adopted crypto assets.

How do you plan to expand glad your specialists, talents who work with you, and supporters? After all, your project is entirely dependent mainly on an intellectual resource and therefore must always surpass many other projects.

The more crypto industry is growing, the more security auditors/marketing we can afford. With the growth of the whole industry the growth of CLO (and CLO team) will come.

Appendix

Previous Ask Me Anything sessions with Callisto team:

Alejo Chababo’s Ask Me Anything on 08/02/2019.

Dexaran’s Ask Me Anything on 21/01/2019.

Miscellaneous

Why Audit Smart Contracts?.


Trust the Blockchain, Audit the Smart Contracts.


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