UPD 02/17/2023

Open the video from Colorado and announce the second edition of Cardano for the Masses, John Green's community written manual, now covering the Voltaire proposals.

Walks through the book's table of contents, from proof of stake and Shelley through Goguen, Plutus, Marlowe, Basho, Voltaire and a full chapter on RealFi.

Read John's preface describing how he discovered Cardano in 2018, gave up on earlier drafts, and designed the book with clickable explainers instead of disruptive footnotes.

Recalls how the long promised Mastering Cardano book stalled when the professor writing it got sick, so the team waited for protocol stability before revisiting a manual, leaving John to write this one instead.

Asks the community to send John Green notes and corrections while reading, from fixing mistakes to improving the cover art, so the book can become the definitive Cardano reference.

Looks back on seven years of boom and bust cycles, crediting the community's tireless effort for pushing new capabilities like Mary's native assets and Goguen's extended UTXO into reality.

Every genuinely new capability, from the staking model to Plutus and Marlowe, takes the community real effort to learn before people build something creative with it.

Warns that leaving the comfort of the current road map means nearly everything ahead, like the still undecided input endorsers design, now becomes a community debate rather than his call.

Details an aggressive theoretical paper on the input endorser security harness that will break into CIPs, alongside Genesis peer to peer networking and CIP 1694 as the last major road map items due in 2023.

Hopes to build the right governance tools and venues for dialogue, acknowledging not everyone will debate fairly or treat each other's contributions with respect.

Calls the age of Voltaire the hardest and least certain part of the road map, hoping community ideas surface at the late February 2023 workshop.

Previews the in person Colorado workshop where community members will dig into the nuances of CIP 1694 with him and other engineers.

A positive workshop outcome is just one gate condition among many, with any eventual rollout likely following the pioneer program model used for the ITN and Plutus.

Proposes DRep pioneer pools echoing the old testnet staking pioneers, since DReps filter chaotic community opinion into a manageable, representative set of voices.

The community has matured now that plenty of people dislike him personally yet still back Cardano, pointing to the contingent staking debate and tomorrow's Twitter Space as examples.

Frames the DRep system, together with the planned MBO, as letting people delegate their voice and reach fact based, objective conversations instead of chaos.

Argues institutions exist to filter complexity into an objective executive summary, since modern democracies mostly talk past each other into name calling and misrepresentation.

Traces Cardano's founding purpose as a financial operating system for those without one, explaining why the company spent years pursuing hard won adoption across Africa's toughest markets.

Reiterates that the three million strong community, not him, ultimately decides whether Cardano evolves toward that original mission.

Admits never writing a Cardano constitution was his own oversight, drawing a parallel to the failed Articles of Confederation before the two centuries long evolution of the US Constitution.

Argues Cardano needs its own debate over implicit and explicit rules, hoping the age of Voltaire converges on them once CIP 1694 and the MBO are finished.

Predicts many draft constitutions and fights ahead before the community codifies what holding Ada actually means, calling the whole effort a lifelong endeavor.

Worries the last century has eroded society's ability to debate constructively, with rampant conspiracy thinking and vanishing benefit of the doubt, and insists avoiding those failures takes deliberately built checks and balances rather than assumed natural virtue.

Reveals the irony of naming the era after Voltaire, a critic of democracy who favored enlightened monarchy, hoping Cardano can prove him wrong.

Calls the past year his most frustrating since leaving Ethereum in 2014, as the industry's near miss at political legitimacy was undone by centralized failures.

Blames Do Kwon and Sam Bankman Fried for doing more damage to crypto's trust and political standing than every other bad actor combined.

Hostile politicians exploiting the FTX crisis of opportunity, quoting Rahm Emanuel, with more congressional hearings expected as 2023 becomes a reset year.

Pushes back on blaming crypto broadly for FTX, arguing a centralized, opaque actor caused the fraud that transparent DeFi and dApps would have made impossible.

Argues politics only reflects the people who elect it, so the industry has no standing to criticize misrepresentation if its own debates behave the same way.

Hopes the age of Voltaire teaches good debate and decision making despite inevitable hiccups, having deliberately saved Cardano's hardest road map item for last.

Warns that failure would reduce crypto's achievements to a footnote as the world drifts toward CBDCs and permissioned systems, likening the moment to the French and American Revolutions and how past reform movements got co-opted once their founders retired, crediting cryptocurrency with replacing don't be evil with can't be evil.

Clarifies this is not a libertarian utopia of absolute individual freedom, using a rancher polluting a shared river to show why unchecked freedom harms others downstream.

Argues society still needs rules and basic rights, with blockchain tools meant to stop power shifting from individual to collective from being abused.

Acknowledges that convenience, speed and lower cost will always require trusting something, whether a centralized actor or a federated group like OpenSea or Infura.

Contrasts fully trustless Daedalus with lighter, faster clients, noting Mithril narrows but never erases those trade offs as the system's capabilities grow.

Rebuts slippery slope fears about new features, since Plutus and the extended UTXO model can already implement almost any regulatory regime someone might worry about.

Traces Bitcoin core developers' minimalist philosophy of limiting script expressiveness precisely so a capability can never be compelled into a mandate.

Insists that no government, from the US to Russia to China, gets any say over Cardano if 1694 is built correctly, since only Ada holders should decide.

Admits past design choices need honest revisiting, reopening the debate over adding non determinism at the base layer that core developers resist but many dApp developers want.

Weighs reserving features for layer two or a side chain against input endorsers, which would boost throughput exponentially while changing consensus and carrying real security risk.

Flags the layer one versus layer two pub sub debate as another case where nothing is free, urging humility since Cardano is infrastructure built to last human lifetimes.

Compares Cardano's potential impact, if it succeeds, to ChatGPT, the iPhone and the internet, previewing tomorrow's Twitter Space as just one of many debates still to come.

Hopes for a CIP 1694 testnet soon so DRep pioneers can effectively run for office, with hundreds or thousands of DReps eventually forming Cardano's government.

Closes by urging everyone to read, comment on and help improve Cardano for the Masses, calling Cardano the financial operating system that returns agency to humanity.