Add the story of how this codebase came to be

src/introduction.md

@@ -3,37 +3,117 @@
 All claims, content, designs, algorithms, estimates, roadmaps, specifications,
 and performance measurements described in this project are done with the
 author's best effort. It is up to the reader to check and validate their
-accuracy and truthfulness. Furthermore nothing in this project constitutes a
+accuracy and truthfulness. Furthermore, nothing in this project constitutes a
 solicitation for investment.
 
-# Introduction
+# What is Solana?
 
-This document defines the architecture of Solana, a blockchain built from the
+Solana is the name of an open source project that is implementing a new
+high-performance, permissionless blockchain. Solana is also the name of a
+company headquartered in San Francisco that maintains the open source project.
+
+# About this book
+
+This book defines the architecture of Solana, a blockchain built from the
 ground up for scale. The goal of the architecture is to demonstrate there
 exists a set of software algorithms that in combination, removes software as a
 performance bottleneck, allowing transaction throughput to scale proportionally
 with network bandwidth. The architecture goes on to satisfy all three desirable
-properties of a proper blockchain, that it not only be scalable, but that it is
+properties of a proper blockchain: that it not only be scalable, but that it is
 also secure and decentralized.
 
-With this architecture, we calculate a theoretical upper bound of 710 thousand
+The architecture describes a theoretical upper bound of 710 thousand
 transactions per second (tps) on a standard gigabit network and 28.4 million
-tps on 40 gigabit. In practice, our focus has been on gigabit.  We soak-tested
-a 150 node permissioned testnet and it is able to maintain a mean transaction
-throughput of approximately 200 thousand tps with peaks over 400 thousand.
-
-Furthermore, we have found high throughput extends beyond simple payments, and
-that this architecture is also able to perform safe, concurrent execution of
-programs authored in a general purpose programming language, such as C. We feel
-the extension warrants industry focus on an additional performance metric
-already common in the CPU industry, millions of *instructions* per second or
-mips. By measuring mips, we see that batching instructions within a transaction
-amortizes the cost of signature verification, lifting the maximum theoretical
-instruction throughput up to almost exactly that of centralized databases.
-
-Lastly, we discuss the relationships between high throughput, security and
-transaction fees.  Solana's efficient use hardware drives transaction fees into
-the ballpark of 1/1000th of a cent. The drop in fees in turn makes certain
-denial of service attacks cheaper. We discuss what these attacks look like and
-Solana's techniques to defend against them.
+tps on 40 gigabit. Furthermore, the architecture supports safe, concurrent
+execution of programs authored in general purpose programming languages such as
+C or Rust.
+
+# History of the Solana codebase
+
+In November of 2017 Anatoly Yakovenko published a whitepaper describing Proof
+of History, a technique for keeping time between computers that do not trust
+one another. From Anatoly's previous experience designing distributed systems
+at Qualcomm, Mesosphere and Dropbox, he knew that a reliable clock makes
+network synchronization very simple. When synchronization is simple the
+resulting network can be blazing fast, bound only by network bandwidth.
+
+Anatoly watched as blockchain systems without clocks, such as Bitcoin and
+Ethereum, struggled to scale beyond 15 transactions per second worldwide when
+centralized payment systems such as Visa required peaks of 65,000. Without a
+clock, it was clear they'd never graduate to being the global payment system or
+global supercomputer they had dreamed to be. When Anatoly solved the problem of
+getting computers that don’t trust each other to agree on time, he knew he had
+the key to bring 40 years of distributed systems research to the world of
+blockchain. The resulting cluster wouldn't be just 10 times faster, or a 100
+times, or a 1,000 times, but 10,000 times faster right out of the gate!
+
+Anatoly's implementation began in a private codebase and was implemented in the
+C programming language. Greg Fitzgerald, who had previously worked with Anatoly
+at semiconductor giant Qualcomm Incorporated, encouraged him to reimplement the
+project in the Rust programming language. Greg had worked on the LLVM compiler
+infrastructure, which underlies both the Clang C/C++ compiler as well as the
+Rust compiler. Greg claimed that the language's safety guarantees would improve
+software productivity and that its lack of a garbage collector would allow
+programs to perform as well as those written in C.  Anatoly gave it a shot and
+just two weeks later, had migrated his entire codebase to Rust. Sold.  With
+plans to weave all the world's transactions together on a single, scalable
+blockchain, Anatoly called the project Loom.
+
+On February 13th of 2018, Greg began prototyping the first open source
+implementation of Anatoly's whitepaper. The project was published to GitHub
+under the name Silk in the loomprotocol organization. On February 28th, Greg
+made his first release, demonstrating 10 thousand signed transactions could be
+verified and processed in just over half a second. Shortly after, another
+former Qualcomm cohort, Stephen Akridge, demonstrated throughput could be
+massively improved by offloading signature verification to graphics processors.
+Anatoly recruited Greg, Stephen and three others to co-found a company, then
+called Loom.
+
+Around the same time, Ethereum-based project Loom Network sprung up and many
+people were confused if they were the same project. The Loom team decided it
+would rebrand. They chose the name Solana, a nod to a small beach town North of
+San Diego called Solana Beach, where Anatoly, Greg and Stephen lived and surfed
+for three years when they worked for Qualcomm. On March 28th, the team created
+the Solana Labs GitHub organization and renamed Greg's prototype Silk to
+Solana.
+
+In June of 2018, Solana made its first three hires: former Qualcomm Senior
+Directors Michael Vines and Rob Walker, and Principal Engineer Pankaj Garg.
+The team scaled up the technology to run on cloud-based networks and on July
+19th, published a 50-node, permissioned, public testnet consistently supporting
+bursts of 250,000 transactions per second.
+
+Since then, the Solana team made four additional engineering hires and in its
+most recent release, v0.10 Pillbox, published a permissioned, public, testnet
+running 150 nodes on a gigabit network, and demonstrated soak tests processing
+an *average* of 200 thousand transactions per second with bursts over 500
+thousand.  The project was also extended to support on-chain programs written
+in the C programming language and run concurrently in a safe execution
+environment called BPF. Next step: going permissionless.
+
+# What is a Solana cluster and why would one use it?
+
+A cluster is a set of computers that work together and can be viewed from the
+outside as a single system. A Solana cluster is a set of independently owned
+computers working together (and sometimes against each other) to verify the
+output of untrusted, user-submitted programs. A Solana cluster can be utilized
+any time a user wants to preserve an immutable record of events in time or
+programmatic interpretations of those events. One use is to track which of the
+computers did meaningful work to keep the cluster running. Another use might be
+to track the possession of real-world assets. In each case, the cluster
+produces a record of events called the ledger. It will be preserved for the
+lifetime of the cluster. As long as someone somewhere in the world maintains a
+copy of the ledger, the output of its programs (which may contain a record of
+who possesses what) will forever be reproducible, independent of the
+organization that launched it.
+
+# What are sols?
 
+A sol is the name of Solana's native token, which can be passed to nodes in a
+solana cluster in exchange for running an on-chain program or validating its
+output. The Solana protocol defines that only 1 billion sols will ever exist,
+but that the system may perform micropayments of fractional sols and that a sol
+may be split as many as 34 times. The fractional sol is called a lamport in
+honor of Solana's biggest technical influence, [Leslie
+Lamport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport). A lamport has a value
+of approximately 0.0000000000582 sol (2^-34).