AMA 05/17/2020

Opens the AMA from Colorado testing his new Yeti X microphone on a Sunday livestream during quarantine.

Recaps week one of the Pioneer testnet: onboarding stake pool operators, establishing a bug reporting flow, and preparing for block production the following week.

Lays out the path after Pioneer completes: opening the testnet to the public, wiring up the Shelley Daedalus wallet, then running balance checks to verify exchange balances and the hard fork combinator.

Calls May the Pioneer month and June the month Shelley mainnet goes live for users, teasing a big product update at the virtual summit.

Marvels that Shelley's pieces are integrating smoothly despite the risk of poor fit when combining components built separately over years, unlike Boeing's 787 delays.

Declares Shelley is looking really good and expresses excitement about hitting dates as planned.

Mocks trolls and rival projects who dismiss Cardano as just a wallet with no releases, framing it as the market mispricing ADA.

Calls out a Telegraph proof of stake roundup for omitting Cardano entirely, framing it as media censorship or ignorance.

Previews the virtual summit as a chance to prove Cardano deserves a seat at the table, inviting media and doing a marketing reset alongside a new Cardano.org website.

Cites the incentivized testnet as crypto's most successful ever, with about 19,000 validating nodes and over 1,200 registered stake pools despite rough alpha software.

Argues Cardano's research has reshaped the industry, pointing to Ethereum's new interest in formal methods and a Vitalik tweet describing what sounds like Cardano's design without naming it.

Compares the media's silence on Cardano to the media ignoring the bipartisan push to audit the Federal Reserve, calling both examples of willful blindness.

Answers a garden question: six raised beds planted with peppers, though an unexpected Colorado hailstorm damaged the first wave of plants.

Encourages a fan writing a Cardano book to reach out to Rod Alexander at IOHK for help and information.

Confirms staking begins at the Shelley hard fork, roughly four weeks after the mainnet client launch, timed to give exchanges time to upgrade without getting delisted.

Stronger hardware speeds up sync and wallet restoration time for stake pool operators, though even a Raspberry Pi class device can make blocks.

Gives a simplified explanation of proof of stake versus older BFT consensus, describing how pending transactions bundle into blocks and how block makers get selected and checked.

Contrasts the proof of work lottery, where hash power buys tickets and orphaned blocks are discarded, with proof of stake's synthetic lottery based on ADA held and delegated.

Proof of stake needs only about ten kilowatts network wide versus Bitcoin's growing energy appetite, since mining costs rise with Bitcoin's price while staking does not.

The endogenous versus exogenous resource distinction: ADA's security is tied directly to the system's own value, unlike mining hardware that can be pointed at any compatible coin.

Shared hash power lets proof of work miners profitably attack and short a forked chain like Bitcoin versus Bitcoin Cash, a collusion risk proof of stake avoids.

He barely interacts with Vitalik Buterin, who criticizes Cardano's papers publicly but never engages in a scientific venue, and wishes him well anyway.

Predicts a high probability of economic depression from lockdowns, arguing the original goal of flattening the curve has been replaced by shifting, unreachable goalposts.

Warns that the quarantine itself is a second crisis, curbing constitutional rights, enabling phone tracking, and arbitrarily deciding which businesses count as essential.

Cites rising suicide and untreated illness statistics tied to unemployment and delayed medical care as hidden costs of the shutdown.

Projects that global economic collapse from lockdowns could push 265 million people into acute hunger and cause millions of starvation deaths within a year.

Mocks inconsistent lockdown rules, like being barred from a sunny park while indoor transmission drives most New York cases, calling it insanity that will not eliminate the virus.

Rebuts comparisons of Sweden's no lockdown approach to Italy, arguing population adjusted deaths favor Sweden and that its nursing home failures, not the lack of lockdown, drove its toll.

Warns that ceded civil liberties and government power from the quarantine will not automatically return once it ends, drawing a parallel to Soviet era central planning and famine.

Contrasts his own comfortable, unaffected farm life with the devastation quarantine has caused small business owners and the homeless, rejecting universal basic income as a substitute for dignified work.

Recommends simply reopening with common sense measures like masks and social distancing, treating the virus as an ongoing seasonal illness rather than something curable.

Small testnet pool operators unable to meet the pledge threshold will be able to merge into consolidated pools, with Duncan and the team detailing the pledge mechanism the following week.

Expresses high confidence in completing the full 2020 roadmap across Shelley, Goguen, Basho and Voltaire, with the Treasury funding whatever comes next.

Runs through the differences between ADA and Tezos: distinct consensus algorithms, an extended UTXO accounting model versus Ethereum style accounts, and a more modular offchain governance approach.

Clarifies Cardano is not currently quantum resistant, explaining how quantum computers use algorithms like Shor's to break the hard math problems public key crypto relies on.

Quantum resistant primitives like hash based and lattice based crypto already exist and could be added anytime, but carry performance and key size trade-offs not worth it yet.

Distinguishes post quantum crypto from quantum crypto itself, citing IOHK's one shot signatures research as an example of using quantum physics for new capabilities, planned for the coming Basho renewal.

IOHK never pursues patents on things like its VRF, comparing it to Algorand's and Chainlink's own VRF implementations, since the goal is security and performance not novelty claims.

Explains why there was no CTO for years, then describes hiring Romain, who has taken over day to day technical leadership and made a big early impact.

Confirms Prism, the identity project, will be open source.

Digs into why the W3C DID standard is not naturally portable to blockchain, since its cryptographic assets sit in the DID document, which contains PII unsuitable for onchain storage, and lacks native aliasing.

Rules out BMW and Mercedes, professing a preference for Cadillac and GM over German cars, while describing his Lamborghini Huracan Spyder as an expensive but fun exception.

Confirms Ledger cold staking support and firmware updates land with Shelley, with multisig support coming via Vacuumlabs.

Plans to use YubiKey and FIDO U2F devices for Daedalus access control and as a physical spending password instead of typed passwords.

Envisions storing the wallet recovery phrase on a YubiKey, recoverable with just a short PIN code instead of memorizing twelve or more recovery words.

Suggests safer ways to back up a recovery phrase in the meantime, like a printable paper wallet template or an encrypted PGP copy emailed to yourself.

Losing a YubiKey does not expose funds since keys are shielded on device, but does require restoring the wallet from the written recovery phrase or a backup key.

Security models like CIA and CIANA always trade some usability for stronger guarantees, and biometrics plus two factor apps like Authy have narrowed that gap somewhat.

The Ledger Nano X could work the same way as a YubiKey for access control if it turns out to be FIDO compliant.

Launching with Praos rather than Genesis: Praos was mature enough to ship, and the bootstrap cradle from the hybrid BFT phase already gives similar bootstrapping security in practice.

Later research combining Genesis, Kronos and Spikes ideas will round out Ouroboros before year end, hardening it against dishonest majority attacks.

Reports the Byron and Shelley ledger audits are complete and public in the forum, with the foundation negotiating the next wave of audits.

Gives a planning update on the virtual summit: software is chosen, five or six work streams are running, and speakers are preparing content.

Praises Caitlin Long's fight to launch Avanti, her crypto bank, through Wyoming law changes and a standoff with the Federal Reserve, calling her one of the best entrepreneurs in the space.

Teases a surprise virtual summit guest more impactful than Jack Dorsey or Steve Wozniak, without revealing who.

Argues Adam Back fits the Satoshi Nakamoto profile best among candidates, citing his education, programming style and role at Blockstream, though says it does not really matter who Satoshi is.

IOHK's relationship with IBM Research through a Horizon 2020 grant on software updates, plus plans to join Hyperledger.

Reflects that he never got to meet Steve Jobs before he died, wishing he had lived to lead Apple's next wave of innovation.

Declines to confirm any Coinbase listing plans.

Argues staking rewards should not be treated as securities by the SEC since payment requires active useful work, not a passive legal right like interest or dividends.

Vents about Wikipedia editors rejecting Cardano's page updates, dismissing Bloomberg and Forbes as illegitimate sources while a 1992 video game keeps its own Wikipedia page.

IOHK is waiting to become a full US company before joining the W3C, and plans to bring the Cardano Foundation into Hyperledger and the W3C's payments and interledger committees too.

He is not a big Formula One fan but admires the engineering, and has taken his Lamborghini up to 184 miles per hour on track.

There is no Stellar collaboration but plenty of mutual respect, name checking Jed McCaleb and David Mazieres, and reflecting that most rival founders get along fine in person despite public maximalism.

Recalls owning a Ducati Monster motorcycle and crashing it four times.

Hydra should avoid Lightning Network style routing problems since Cardano's known, bonded stake pool set makes routing candidates explicit rather than an open unknown graph.

Confirms Michael Peyton Jones is still leading Plutus development, with a big update coming at the virtual summit.

Dismisses a troll's demand for an MMA fight, saying the person squandered his one shot at relevance.

Justin Sun has always been personally pleasant despite forking Ethereum's code onto a Java client instead of Mantis, describing Tron as following a Chinese acquire and iterate model of innovation.

Argues disagreement should not require being disagreeable, drawing on his Ron Paul campaign days working alongside exhausted but respectful rivals from opposing campaigns.

Distinguishes real scams like BigCoin and OneCoin, where intent to deceive is provable, from good faith competitors like Dan Larimer, EOS or Ethereum, whom he criticizes but does not consider criminals.

Predicts that by 2030 the more likely digital currency winner is the US Federal Reserve's digital dollar rather than either Ethereum or a competing rival.

Broadcasts from Arvada, Colorado, recalling childhood pottery classes at the Arvada Art Center.

The ledger bloat problem: unbounded chain growth eventually breaks inclusive accountability, the ability for anyone to independently verify the full history, a lesson from Bitcoin's block size debate.

Outlines treating base layer resources as precious and pushing high frequency, low value transactions to layer two solutions like Hydra instead of bloating the main chain.

Recursive SNARKs, as pursued by the Coda protocol and Zcash's Halo research, letting proofs stay tiny and constant size no matter how large the underlying state grows.

The ledger must move from a fully replicated model to a sharded, distributed one where nodes hold only pieces of history reconstructable on demand.

Flags economic garbage collection, pruning stale or low priority chain data, as a controversial but necessary piece left for the community to design over the next five years.

Zero knowledge proofs alone cannot satisfy the need to recall full transaction history on demand for regulatory or compliance purposes, especially for security tokens.

Explains why the K semantics framework was shelved: it fell short on three targets, full compilation automation, product ready maturity, and competitive performance, forcing a budget reallocation.

Grigore Rosu will keep developing K independently through his own academic funding regardless of IOHK's involvement, leaving room to reintroduce it into Cardano later.

Defends K's underlying science as sound despite missing its deadline, comparing the delay to the iPhone shipping without an app store or 3G, features added once feasible.

Reflects on the deep philosophical divide between functional, imperative and object oriented programming camps, crediting Manuel Chakravarty and Grigore Rosu for patiently bridging them in Plutus.

Calls Neuralink one of history's great inventions, comparing the brain's limited sensory bandwidth to plugging a powerful graphics card into a slow USB port.

Neuralink's near term path from medical therapeutic use in paraplegics and epileptics toward eventual low cost recreational brain implants people upgrade like phones.

Imagines future Neuralink capabilities like thinking text onto a page, controlling smart home devices with your mind, and transmitting complex ideas or emotions directly between people.

Warns Neuralink carries serious security and privacy risks society is not ready for, comparing it to how CRISPR lowered the barrier to bioweapon creation.

He played Guild Wars, calling it one of the first great free to play MMORPGs.

Jokes he is a futurist telling everyone it all gets better, while sipping a non alcoholic Virgil's cream soda during his current dry year.

Confirms he mains Protoss in StarCraft, calling the Wings of Liberty campaign the best of the trilogy and mocking the Zerg as a knockoff of Warhammer's Tyranids.

Teases a secret project beyond Cardano without revealing details.

Recalls playing EverQuest years ago and argues games are society's most undervalued storytelling medium because they hold total audience attention, unlike distracted moviegoers on their phones.

Praises esports and multiplayer games for letting anyone, regardless of skill, play the same game as pros or even celebrities like Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

His dry year, wet year drinking pattern is a deliberate check against the heavy social drinking pressure of CEO travel and industry events.

Legacy privacy addresses are not in this iteration, but vanity Bech32 address prefixes for different asset issuers are being discussed.

Gives a noncommittal answer when asked about acquiring a centralized exchange.

Deliberately adding discomfort to his routine, from a bed of nails mat to cryotherapy and liquid nitrogen cold plunges, before quarantine closed his usual supplier.

Praises AMD's Lisa Su for smart manufacturing and architecture bets that turned Ryzen into the top laptop processor, reviving the company's competitive position.

Intel remains a strong, well led company that has clawed back from behind before, recalling AMD's earlier Athlon FX era lead before Intel's Core architecture caught up.

Recommends aspiring Cardano developers start with a Haskell book to learn the functional paradigm, with more programming resources coming at the virtual summit.

Calls John McAfee one of crypto's most charismatic and unpredictable figures, comparing him to Willy Wonka for his constant, chaotic showmanship.

Invokes Kerckhoffs's principle to criticize McAfee style claims of secret proprietary crypto, arguing trustworthy cryptography must be open and peer reviewed, not hidden.

Sets a high bar for privacy coin claims, noting real anonymity guarantees need rigorous, scrutinized definitions the way Monero and Zcash approach it differently but both defensibly.

Applies the same accountability standard to respected cryptographers David Chaum and Silvio Micali, saying Chaum's Elixxir project still needs a clearer, peer reviewed explanation.

Closes the AMA thanking viewers, noting the Pioneer testnet is going exactly as expected and should get smoother the week of May 24, 2020.