AMA 02/16/2019

Open the AMA late at night in Colorado since fans around the world are in different timezones.

Gives an update on Ledger hardware wallet integration, built with Vacuum Labs and Yoroi, expected in March.

A hardware wallet's security depends on where private keys live, not which interface like Yoroi or Daedalus you use.

Lays out the three work buckets for Shelley: code, specifications, and staking, with Byron reaching end of life.

Release 1.5 deprecates the V0 API, so exchanges still on old node versions need to upgrade.

Stresses that complete specifications, independent of any client's code, let anyone build their own compatible implementation.

Recalls building an Ethereum Classic client from the Ethereum yellow paper alone, with no help from the Ethereum Foundation.

Points to Runtime Verification's KEVM project finding the Ethereum yellow paper incomplete as a lesson for how rigorous Cardano's specs need to be.

Lists remaining specification work: extended UTXO, multi asset accounting for native tokens, and a sidechains spec for light clients.

Staking begins on a testnet first so the community can help set parameters like stake pool counts and reward rates.

The Rust team's self organized Hong Kong codeathon, hosted by Emurgo, to finish testnet features.

The stake pool taskforce of over a thousand signups feeding a structured, translated Q&A process into a future FAQ.

Corrects the misconception that ADA is frozen while staking, unlike what Casper has proposed, since Cardano is unrelated to that protocol.

Partnering with Marcus and Robert, who ran the first Plutus training course, to turn Q&A answers into educational material.

Plans Byzantine stress tests on the Shelley testnet, like forcing half the participants malicious, to confirm the protocol's theoretical guarantees hold in practice.

Announces organizational moves: promote Bruno Paleo to director of engineering, shift Duncan Coutts into a lead technical architect role, and hire David Sier as product manager.

Staking will hit a Rust based testnet first, with three candidate network stack implementations, Rust, an enterprise Scala version, and Haskell, expected to converge.

Answers a Windows question by noting stake pool operators will likely run Linux servers on AWS or Azure, while consumer clients will support Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile.

Argues end of 2020 remains a reasonable deadline for the first generation roadmap now that the company is moving from heavy research into fast software delivery.

Explains why a decentralized treasury matters so ecosystem funding does not depend on a single gatekeeper deciding who gets grants.

Addresses slow Daedalus wallet downloads, expecting faster blockchain sync once the new peer to peer network stack ships.

Survey the light client research race, citing Algorand's Vault paper and MIT's UTreeXO alongside Cardano's own Merkle root and TSM signature approach for fast, low trust bootstrapping.

Reflects on lost keys and inheritance, arguing crypto needs a recovery model since real life has meatspace processes for lost or stolen funds that pure code is law does not.

Proposes voluntary, address level opt in recovery and value aligned smart contracts, comparing it to Sharia compliant or ethically screened investment funds.

Warns against pervasive reversible transaction governance like Tezos, arguing an unaccountable meta government is worse than consequences that keep systems honest, unlike bailed out Wall Street or broken healthcare.

Confirms a discount for IOHK Summit tickets paid in ADA, built through a custom Eventbrite payment bridge.

Defends the summit ticket price as a break even cost to fly out the whole company, pointing to competitor speakers, workshops, and a crypto puzzle hunt with an ADA prize.

Plans to fly out the trained Ethiopian class to present their results at the summit alongside the enterprise blockchain team.

Admits the hardest part of running a decentralized company is rarely seeing coworkers in person, last all together in Portugal in January 2018.

Breaks interoperability into moving value and moving verifiable information between chains, and pledge to pragmatically support whatever standards win, like VHS beat Betamax.

Stake pools can double as nodes for oracle services or Lightning Network bridges, alongside proof of stake sidechains and existing atomic swap DEXs like Komodo, for cross chain interoperability.

Argues metadata often matters more than the transaction itself and describe hashed, signed contingent settlement so agreements become auditable and even legally recognized, as Wyoming now allows.

Most Fortune 500 companies experimenting with blockchain still avoid cryptocurrency itself, pointing to JPMorgan building its own coin instead.

RINA, the ambitious clean slate networking research project, was scaled back after a ten million dollar, six hundred man month cost estimate, with a lighter Haskell team successor absorbing its best ideas.

Compares networking innovation to brain surgery, since protocols must be hardened against a legacy internet's flaws rather than redesigned cleanly, making scaling the network layer the next real bottleneck.

Brushes off delisting rumors as trolling, joking that Cardano is never getting delisted or going bankrupt.

Answers a question on crypto powered referendums by pointing to suppressed protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Hong Kong and Iran, as proof people need tools to express themselves without media distortion.

Insists a protocol designer must stay neutral like a judge, building accessible capabilities without picking sides in any particular movement.

Criticizes journalism's incentives as built for hype and entertainment rather than truth, praising intellectual dark web style long debates like Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris as a healthier model.

Describes systemic poverty, like Appalachian coal country, as a life sentence of debt and stagnant wages, and argue crypto exists precisely because the legacy financial system failed these people.

Calls out JPMorgan's hypocrisy for calling Bitcoin a scam for criminals in 2017 and then launching its own JPM Coin.

Pushes back on hype around Avalanche and Hashgraph replacing proof of work or proof of stake, arguing Bitcoin's ASIC mining wastes computation and future proof of work should do useful work like Primecoin or the Berkeley useful proof of work paper.

Shares that Marcus is running a stake pool on a seventy dollar RockPi board using four watts, meaning a thousand of them could run the entire network on the power of a few space heaters.

Contrasts proof of work as an exogenous meritocracy that favors whoever masters ASICs and cheap power with proof of stake's proportional influence, predicting stake will eventually weigh factors like bandwidth or storage contributed, not just tokens held.

Argues unaccountable platforms like Twitter and YouTube deplatforming people at will must die like kings and dictators did, and predicts decentralized public good infrastructure replaces them within a decade.

Muses about tokenized social penalties as a modern version of indulgences, comparing it to China's Social Credit System as both a hopeful and dangerous way to gamify accountability.

Jokes that his famously long, meandering answers have driven some viewers away while others love them.

Trades banter with a viewer from Turkey and jokes about a rival project's papayas.

Paint a future where scanning a QR code on a coffee cup reveals the full ethical story of its beans, letting consumers judge supply chains instead of relying on stereotypes or vague labels like organic or fair trade.

Details the three part Ethiopia playbook: partner with a ministry, train locals such as the 23 women in the current class from Ethiopia and Uganda, then hire the best graduates.

Walks through piloting the Ethiopia coffee supply chain end to end, from farmer to washing station to exchange, incentivizing data entry and scaling to all one and a half million coffee farmers through a revenue sharing subsidiary.

Frames giving one and a half million Ethiopians Cardano interoperable wallets as smarter strategy than fighting JPMorgan, Amazon, and Facebook for Western users on their rigged home turf.

Argues Africa and Asia are the better bet for crypto adoption since seventy percent of Ethiopians are under thirty, already mobile money savvy, and living in a fast growing economy that distrusts weak government currency.

The plan to build a massive user base first so Cardano can negotiate fair regulation from leverage rather than begging governments for goodwill, unlike Ripple's compliance first approach.

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.

Looks forward to facing Ethereum Denver's online trolls in person to see if they repeat their Twitter insults to his face.

Defends long research timelines against deadline critics using the Microsoft HoloLens analogy, pointing to 40 published papers and proof of stake and sidechains now proven rather than theoretical.

Lists concrete progress against critics: over 20 peer reviewed papers, growth from one exchange to 25 and a hundred thousand plus community members, a top 15 ranking since launch on a small budget, plus pivots like shipping Icarus, now Yoroi, and a Rust client after Haskell proved too slow.

Own being blunt running a 160 person, 16 country decentralized company through liars, competitor FUD, and the 2017 crash that Consensys answered with layoffs while Cardano kept hiring.

Takes pride that a fully remote team delivers formal methods rigor, Haskell, and model checking all the way into a consumer mobile product, something even big companies do not attempt.

Dismisses anonymous critics as people upset their price dropped after doing no work, comparing them to investors mad Amazon stock took eleven years to recover after the dot com peak.

Jokes about a dystopian ad filled HoloLens future and greets viewers watching from Vietnam.

Favor cross chain swap based decentralized exchanges like Kyber's approach, planning to prioritize Lightning support first before building a trusted hardware accelerated layer two DEX.

Vents that Japan's FSA has not approved a new exchange listed token since November 2017 due to an 85 page form and multi layer SRO approval process that bureaucrats can kill at any time.

Praises developing nations and small US states like Wyoming for passing pro crypto laws in months, crediting ranchers who distrust bankers for making Wyoming an easy political sell.