Topic timeline
Crypto Industry & Commentary over time
1,464 entries across all AMAs, in chronological order, showing the first 150.
2:55 The topic is third generation blockchain, striking given how young the space still is.
3:37 The first generation, roughly 2009 to 2013, solved one problem: a decentralized money with value that nobody controls.
4:20 When Bitcoin jumped from a dollar to about 250 during the Cyprus crisis, people started taking it seriously and wanting to build on it.
4:41 Bitcoin not being good enough was an invitation for augmentation, bringing altcoins, colored coins, and Mastercoin.
6:02 After BitShares, the recurring pain was that a deployed cryptocurrency is hard to change, so a scripting language would help.
6:22 Vitalik, stuck upgrading colored coins and Mastercoin, wanted a programming language for a blockchain the way JavaScript came to the browser.
6:42 The smart contract idea traces back to Nick Szabo in the eighties and nineties and to Sergio Lerner's turing complete scripting.
7:23 The second generation wants transactions that are eventful, stateful, rich, and programmable, not just decentralized money.
7:45 A smart contract can encode arbitrary business logic, like a board requiring three of five signatures dropping to two of three during vacations.
8:50 Smart contracts do not yet work for billions of people, and CryptoKitties congesting Ethereum proved they do not work at scale.
9:11 There are thousands of cryptocurrencies and most of them are blind, deaf, and dumb to each other, an interoperability failure.
10:14 The block size debate, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum Classic are the visible fractures of failed governance.
10:56 The ICO is a Rube Goldberg machine for venture capital: issue an ERC20 token, run a crowdsale, and raise money with no strings.
27:31 Ethereum's smart contracts were a misstep: the virtual machine was rushed and Solidity was poorly designed.
38:29 Competitors specialize: IOTA and EOS on scalability, Dash and Tezos on governance, Ripple and Aeternity on interoperability, while Cardano does a bit of each.
48:35 Asked why IOHK still supports Ethereum Classic: it is like asking which of your children you love more.
48:55 Ethereum's code is law social contract meant a better Bitcoin, while Vitalik wanted a world computer, two different visions.
49:15 After the DAO fork, being in the minority meant hiring a Scala team and building the Mantis client as a donation.
49:36 There is room for digital commodities: Bitcoin as digital gold, Ethereum Classic as digital silver with more utility.
1:09:37 Ripple putting Ben Lawsky on its board felt sickening, a necessary step for their IPO but a betrayal of the philosophy.
13:12 Justify continuing to fund Ethereum Classic development to prove that a promised ledger cannot be retroactively rewritten.
17:10 Ethereum Classic's governance and funding gaps versus Bitcoin style leaderless development, and preview the September summit.
33:47 Predicts Bitcoin will decouple from altcoins over time as the market matures, similar to tech sector clustering.
37:42 Recounts advising Lisk early on, resigning over slow execution, and wishing Max Kordek well.
41:16 Argues the crypto space has more in common than conflict, citing friendly relations with Charlie Lee and other project leads.
42:22 Recommending Mantis to Justin Sun for Tron over the insecure Ethereum-Java codebase.
43:47 Cites Waves forking Scorex as a healthy example of open source reuse in the space.
44:53 Recalls entering Bitcoin in 2011 and the cypherpunk versus libertarian gold-bug origins of the community.
47:55 Realizing Bitcoin needed richer transaction types, leading to the founding of Ethereum.
49:14 Criticizes Bitcoin maximalism for driving away talent and blocking innovations like Simplicity, MAST and Lightning.
51:18 Cites a Cornell study showing fewer than 20 nodes control most Bitcoin hash power to rebut maximalist decentralization claims.
52:34 Warns that Bitcoin's slow governance and history of contentious hard forks will erode its market dominance.
1:30:19 Rebuts Jackson Palmer's fluff critique of the Cardano whitepapers by detailing the peer reviewed Ouroboros research process.
1:56:12 Criticizes Tezos for structuring its foundation like an engineering diagram, sidelining people and governance in favor of raising huge capital.
1:58:25 Argues Tezos, EOS and similar projects raised far more money than needed, unlike Bitcoin's dreamed-not-funded origin.
2:05:16 Praises Vitalik Buterin's humility and leadership despite disagreeing over the DAO fork.
2:30 Recaps the origin of the Ouroboros versus Casper rebuttal, describing how a Reddit debate with Vitalik Buterin turned into a formal scientific comparison.
3:41 Responds to Vitalik calling the rebuttal pathetic and a hit piece, defends the peer reviewed process behind it.
9:58 Breaks down what it takes to become the top cryptocurrency, liquidity, utility and community, and where Cardano stands on each.
22:00 Reflects that Ethereum Classic feels like early Bitcoin, more focused on philosophy and vision than on ICOs and quick riches.
23:06 Weighs in on Bitcoin's price volatility, arguing short term panic ignores the extraordinary multi year gains and calling short term trading a rigged game.
25:40 Argues real institutional money will only flow into crypto once custodial risk, insurance and ratings agencies are in place, citing Coinbase, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock.
36:22 Gives his take on Bitcoin maximalism, arguing altcoins bring net new people into crypto rather than cannibalizing Bitcoin's market cap.
49:05 Contrasts Cardano's openness with Bitcoin Core's closed development club, citing how its Dandelion contribution and formal UTXO wallet spec were largely ignored.
1:08:12 Reflects on ADA's crash from over a dollar to eleven cents, comparing it to past Bitcoin corrections and warning against blaming leadership for market cycles.
1:25:36 Argues the peer review pipeline let Cardano catch up to and likely beat Ethereum's Casper to a production proof of stake system despite starting later.
1:27:32 Credits academic rivals like Algorand, Thunderella and Avalanche for keeping Cardano's research honest and pushing the field forward.
1:30:10 Challenges Vitalik to submit Casper through the same peer review process Ouroboros went through, framing the dispute as a philosophical difference over scientific rigor.
1:53 Israel has more cryptographers per capita than anywhere and produced foundational work like SNARKs and Aviv Zohar's DAG research.
5:33 Sustainability is the who pays and who decides question: the first ICO, Mastercoin, raised $500,000, the market later raised six billion, but that money is finite and runs out by year ten or fifteen.
12:01 Exchanges like Bitstamp and Coinbase make little sense on the main network, since a private ledger gives them more mitigation options after a hack.
19:25 On SegWit, Lightning and Bitcoin's energy use: running a poker game off chain is fine because only the final settlement needs to be on the ledger.
21:43 Proof of work is an ecological nightmare because efficient ASICs just raise difficulty, and alternatives like Algorand, Snow White, Ouroboros and Tendermint show a shovel is not more moral than a backhoe.
23:05 Nothing at stake and long range attacks have been addressed, so burning Ireland's worth of electricity is no longer justified, and mining always centralizes around ten players with subsidized power and hardware access.
23:59 Proof of work research continues with useful work, proof of storage and DAG designs, including Israeli papers on GHOST, SPECTRE and PHANTOM by Yonatan Sompolinsky and Aviv Zohar.
13:52 Claims the Ouroboros and Plutus teams are moving faster than competitors and ahead of Ethereum's Casper.
15:04 The market crash is just a return to rationality after an unsustainable run up, not a sign the fundamentals changed.
15:41 Compares the shakeout to the dot com collapse, where believers keep building and short term speculators disappear.
16:18 Praises the protocol work coming out of Avalanche, the Stellar Consensus Protocol, Tendermint, and Snow White.
28:50 Holochain is not really a Cardano competitor, describing it as more of an IoT focused framework of frameworks.
31:50 He doesn't sweat daily price swings, distinguishing fundamentals driven long term investing from day trading.
33:01 Criticizes the ICO era's copycat projects and dubious fundraising, calling for stricter exchange listing standards.
44:28 Rejects the idea that blockchain has hit a ceiling, recapping the early altcoin fork era of Litecoin and Feathercoin through NXT and Ethereum.
48:31 Fires back at Vitalik Buterin's claim that the space has peaked, saying billions of unbanked people remain unsolved problems.
50:49 He disagrees that crypto's best days are over, pointing to research ideas seeded in 2013 and 2014 only now maturing.
1:42:47 Cites Hal Finney's careful advance planning for his Bitcoin before his death as a rare example of getting succession right.
1:47:01 Recalls a hacked Reuters Twitter account's fake Obama injury tweet triggering an algorithmic flash crash within seconds.
7:49 Weighs whether the Lightning Network and Liquid lead to centralization, comparing them to Bitcoin's concentrated mining power.
1:06:00 Argues EOS's four billion dollar raise is no guarantee of success, comparing it to Microsoft outspending Google without winning market share.
1:10:55 Praises Dfinity and Dominic Williams for funding peer reviewed research even where they compete with Cardano.
1:35:20 EOS could technically attach itself to Cardano's computation layer and flags the Mad Max paper exposing flaws in Ethereum's gas pricing model.
23:17 Gives his take on the Bitcoin Cash fork, siding with neither camp but citing block size propagation research from Decker and Wattenhofer.
24:12 Recounts an unpleasant encounter with Craig Wright in Rwanda and calls him a sociopath and a fraud for claiming to be Satoshi.
37:19 He isn't worried about big tech blockchain protocols like Microsoft's, arguing enterprise blockchain and cryptocurrency are different games, praising Hyperledger Fabric.
40:54 Dismisses worry about Ethereum's proof of stake, arguing it overthinks finality and underthinks long range attacks that KES and the Genesis assumption already solve.
59:02 He rarely talks to Vitalik Buterin beyond birthday wishes and hellos at conferences.
59:55 Fields a question about ERC-20 tokens ranked above ADA, working out the answer is Tether.
21:26 Rebuts a claim circulating in the EOS community that Japanese ADA buyers remain locked out of their tokens, pointing to Genesis block data and repeated redemptions as proof of full liquidity.
22:44 Calls the locked ADA claim bizarre and criticizes the EOS community for repeating provably false statements even after being shown on chain evidence.
26:50 Revisits the origin of Ethereum Classic as an unplanned protest chain born from the DAO hard fork and the code is law philosophy.
32:19 ETC Dev, which opposed the treasury proposal, is now reportedly shutting down for lack of funds, just as predicted.
37:09 Calls 2017 crypto's hype driven kids year and 2018 the adult year that separated real projects from copycats amid collapsing teams and dried up funding.
34:40 Recounts the frustrating history of investing in Ethereum Classic, from a rejected treasury proposal to accusations that IOHK was solving a problem no one had.
37:37 Calls the Mantis client the best Ethereum Classic client ever built despite the community calling it unnecessary as IOHK pulls back funding.
1:29:52 Fires back at critics who claim Cardano has no smart contracts, pointing to three live testnets already running Plutus, EVM, and Yella contracts.
1:32:03 Contrasts Cardano's peer-reviewed specifications with competitors who just forked Ethereum or bought companies to fake legitimacy.
39:06 Projects Cardano's stake pool model could be 50 to 100 times more decentralized than Bitcoin mining pools or EOS's 21 delegates, citing a forthcoming paper on proof of stake fairness.
54:16 Most Fortune 500 companies experimenting with blockchain still avoid cryptocurrency itself, pointing to JPMorgan building its own coin instead.
1:07:56 Calls out JPMorgan's hypocrisy for calling Bitcoin a scam for criminals in 2017 and then launching its own JPM Coin.
1:39:29 Recounts an awkward Rwanda summit panel with Craig Wright bragging about his wealth backstage, and walking out of the room when Wright took the stage.
8:33 Client diversity was the lesson from Ethereum with Geth plus the C++ and Python clients: it avoids a monoculture and prevents groupthink.
41:19 You do not need a token to be interoperable, which puzzles him about Wanchain, Aion and Icon, since interoperability is moving value and information one way or via atomic cross chain swaps, with firewalling and minimal state to check double spends.
53:08 In 2018 everything was an ICO, and in 2019 uncertainty and the SEC pushed everyone toward STOs in the hope of a safer bet.
1:02:50 Admits a bias toward Cardano, but if Vitalik wants to come play in Ethiopia, IOHK would happily connect people to Ethereum as well.
1:05:36 The experience layer has mammoth financial incentives so it will get solved, and if not, Google, Apple or Microsoft will simply add a cryptocurrency wallet to Windows, just as Siri came from the DARPA CALO project in 2003.
16:00 Comments on the Ergo project from IOHK research fellow Alexander Chepurnoy, built on Sigma protocols.
36:42 Comments on Enigma's MPC based private smart contracts out of MIT Media Lab, notes SGX acceleration and IOHK's own MPC research line.
49:03 Predicts stablecoins will play a prominent role in crypto's future.
1:09:57 He is unconcerned about Justin Sun forking Cardano's code, noting Tron never even forked the open source Mantis client.
11:59 On EOS, says it feels like centralization with no differentiation from Amazon except higher unpredictable cost and lower quality, with no recovery mode when things go wrong.
12:45 Applying 1980s technology to blockchain like Fabric gets 3 to 5 thousand TPS but is not innovation, sacrificing transaction validation and Byzantine resistance for a vanity project.
15:06 Good code is already used by Daedalus, Yoroi, and Infinito, and on engaging Tone Vays says you must talk to people who disagree without being disagreeable.
16:36 Contrasts honest critics like Tone Vays, who shares opinions truthfully, with propagandists like Chico Crypto, who stitch slander into a narrative to provoke a fight for ratings and money.
18:10 Rebuts the shady-ICO claim: they did KYC and AML, a recovery and voucher system, and paid-for helpdesk tours over three years, alongside more than 40 research papers, and the sale was low-pressure with no cash changing hands and demographic data proving real participants.
19:43 Laments that critics dismiss all the code, science, Daedalus, Yoroi, Tangem, Plutus, Marlowe, the Blockchain Technology Lab at Edinburgh, and the Ethiopia training as a scam.
20:30 Says the scam label comes only because Dan Larimer and Chico Crypto dislike him, calls for empathy, and refuses to reward that behavior for viewers' entertainment.
33:32 Recounts a Hong Kong event by a VC named Mr. Chen that invited him, Justin Sun, and Vitalik, who no-showed, and a cordial macroeconomics chat with a polite and smart Justin Sun.
39:07 On using the MaidSafe network, says he knows David Irvine but after 12 years without success MaidSafe needs better project management and scientific realism.
45:44 Reaffirms proof of stake is mathematically proven and others may use Ouroboros, and praises the Endor predictive-analytics project by Alex Pentland's MIT students, which he advises for privacy-preserving data markets.
8:13 Declines to comment on a possible Coinbase listing, calling it off limits.
1:01:47 Calls Justin Sun a product of China's copy first, legitimize later business culture and stays neutral on a Tron partnership.
1:24:00 Quips that Cardano is what Ethereum would have become had he stayed.
1:26:30 Doubts Vitalik Buterin would do well on Joe Rogan's show, saying some people are not built for that format.
1:27:30 Calls Tezos more complementary than competitive, praising Michelson while criticizing how its foundation handled its raise.
52:33 Details a proposal to fund Ethereum Classic development via Mantis, or hand the project fully to the community if it isn't funded.
1:11:39 Criticizes EOS for claiming decentralization while running mostly on Amazon hosted servers among a small set of block producers.
1:13:03 Confirms Satoshi Nakamoto once got frustrated with Dan Larimer, and reaffirms his belief staking and smart contracts land before end of 2020.
1:16:31 Distinguishes Tone Vays style Bitcoin maximalist criticism from Craig Wright, who he says has never proven he is Satoshi.
1:19:37 Predicts cryptographers will eventually break Satoshi's 1024 bit PGP key, ending the mystery and any cult of personality around him.
1:23:25 Argues Ethereum is only a temporary home for tokens, like an app hosted on Amazon, and expects a wave of security tokens to move on.
1:25:22 Praises Nick Szabo as a smart, deep thinking cryptographer who avoids falling in love with his own ideas.
1:27:03 Names people he respects in crypto, praising Greg Maxwell's technical brilliance and Charlie Shrem's resilience after prison.
1:28:33 Praises Charlie Lee for sticking to his principles despite years of criticism.
1:28:51 Roger Ver's early Bitcoin evangelism turning more controversial over time, and Erik Voorhees' shift toward pragmatism at ShapeShift.
1:35:30 Declines to repeat his comments on Justin Sun's Tron promotion tactics, pointing back to a prior AMA.
4:44 No plans to chase a listing after being ignored by that exchange back in 2017.
15:31 Pushes back on a rival developer calling proof of stake insecure, demanding concrete proof over assertions.
17:22 Explains why ADA still tracks the wider market despite having no ties to Bitfinex or Tether.
30:25 Jokes that Satoshi is dead and everyone should move on.
41:13 Shares experience with Brave and BAT tokens while still preferring Chrome.
44:23 Updates on Ethereum Classic: a funding proposal submitted, with the client development at risk if it's unfunded.
45:00 Questions whether the ETC ecosystem is viable if the community won't fund the infrastructure work it wants.
1:31:01 Dismisses the idea that ADA's price weakness reflects a moral failing tied to Tether or Bitfinex.
1:31:43 Crypto's wild price swings aren't correlated to progress, citing Bitcoin's run from 10k to 20k.
1:34:35 Credits Tesla with forcing real, industry wide battery technology improvements, unlike pure speculation.
1:36:02 Recounts asking a rival project's founders where token demand actually came from, exposing a purely speculative loop.
1:41:56 Denies rumors the lifestyle is funded by ADA sales, pointing to publicly verifiable Bitcoin holdings.
1:48:04 Jokes about eventually cracking Satoshi's PGP key just to declare him dead and end the speculation.
1:50:41 Calls a well known Ripple executive a pragmatic, nice guy.
7:58 The same people who praised Enterprise Ethereum now attack Atala, yet Enterprise Ethereum does not use ether and is a completely different codebase.
0:13 Attends his first Consensus since 2017, finding it about half the size with enterprise booths from Microsoft, IBM, and Deloitte replacing much of the crypto crowd, and feels like an old-timer among thousands of new faces while mostly hanging out with the Polymath team.
3:11 Wasn't officially invited among the 450 speakers but still found ways to speak three times, remains unsure if he'll return in 2020, and prefers the industry's pivot toward conferences in Asia along with smaller events like Bruce's, Satoshi Circle, Pavel's gatherings, and the Bitcoin Incredible party in Ukraine.
5:06 Concludes these conferences rarely justify their cost unless the ticket is free, noting nothing major was announced in 2019.
17:04 Brushes off a viewer's complaint about project delays with a sarcastic jab to go buy Tron, then credits Justin Sun's relentless marketing hustle.
14:25 Sees Polymesh as better suited to traditional securities markets, while Cardano stays focused on the emerging market verticals it already operates in.
17:23 Argues the only way rivals can compete with Cardano is to become like it by adopting peer review, formal methods, and higher software quality, framing the race as win win rather than a fight with Vitalik.
41:36 Jokes that Craig Wright is not Satoshi, expecting to get sued for saying so.
43:30 Dismisses Hedera Hashgraph as no threat, arguing any patented system is centralized and therefore not a real cryptocurrency by definition.
44:16 He has no idea what Dfinity is building, noting they unsuccessfully tried to poach staff and no longer talk to him despite Dominic Williams' early rapport.
4:25 Most top 15 projects play a zero sum game, telling developers to abandon Ethereum for something like Tron, which just moves existing users around.