AMA 11/02/2019

Broadcasts live from Colorado fresh back from Vegas, recapping Coin Agenda, the Litecoin Foundation Summit, and meeting old and new faces in the crypto space.

Opens with a November roadmap update: the Jormungandr Incentivized Testnet has been live for a month with 20 plus releases, heavy bug fixing, and lessons learned about the Poldercast gossip protocol.

Looks ahead to the January Shelley Haskell testnet and hopes to blend the best of the Rust and Haskell networking approaches into one scalable, DDoS resistant gossip design.

Highlights community engagement around the testnet: nearly 3000 people in the channel, 500 plus daily messages, and over 1000 issues reported.

An ecosystem forming around stake pool operations, including a 3D printed Raspberry Pi case built by a community member and internal work on a stake pool dashboard GUI.

The plan to branch the testnet into a stable long term network for the airdrop snapshot and a separate fast moving experimental network, alongside the near ready Cardano Explorer in basic and advanced versions.

The Haskell wallet backend is maturing enough to be bundled with Jormungandr in place of its own wallet code, finally letting Daedalus connect for the snapshot benchmark.

Walks through why the team chose a two snapshot dry run approach over a single cutoff, so users can first verify their wallets restore correctly before anything real is at stake.

Tentatively targets around November 12 for the first dry run snapshot, where users install a separate test net Daedalus to confirm their recovery phrase actually restores their wallet.

Clarifies that after the dry run the real network shuts down and the actual Incentivized Testnet launches, with whoever controls the private keys at snapshot time receiving the airdropped ADA.

Warns that ADA left on an exchange at snapshot time will not receive test net ADA unless the exchange opts in, urging users to move funds into a personal Daedalus or Yoroi wallet beforehand.

Stresses that recovery phrases must never be shared with anyone and that users should verify their words are correct and restorable well before the real snapshot.

All of this guidance will be turned into YouTube videos, blog posts and documentation published on the test net website and IOHK's official channels.

Addresses Ledger hardware wallet support, noting Ledger's 24 word phrases differ from Cardano's own scheme, and that only Daedalus wallets will restore at the initial test net launch.

Emurgo is working to add test net restore support to Yoroi using the same key derivation and address structure as Daedalus, though the announcement is Emurgo's to make.

Expresses pride in the team's pace of at least three releases a week and commits roughly every 30 minutes, plus the nearly 3000 community members testing alongside them.

Gives a Haskell side status update: Cardano 1.7 has shipped, Daedalus 15 was well received, and the Haskell wallet backend is close to fully replacing the old Cardano SL code.

Announces a security audit of the core and relay nodes with Root9B, a vendor staffed largely by former NSA and CIA specialists, with findings published after remediation around January.

Previews the next release as a fully rewritten Byron node in Haskell with a new network protocol and explorer, ahead of a Shelley Haskell testnet that lets the community compare it against the Rust implementation before the designs merge.

After the dry run a second snapshot date follows, at which point real ADA staking begins with stake pools and commercial relationships forming.

Pushes back on a rumor that the Incentivized Testnet slipped out of November, saying the plan is unchanged despite people misreading his comments online.

Answers why bother with the first dry run snapshot at all, saying it is the only way to verify your wallet and keywords actually work before anything real is on the line.

Dismisses worry about Microsoft owning GitHub, since Cardano's code and IP are open source and community owned and could migrate hosts easily if needed.

On Haskell versus the Rust Jormungandr codebase, says neither becomes obsolete outright, calling the choice of which leads into Shelley a commercial, velocity based decision rather than a race.

He is not afraid of a US government shutdown like Liberty Reserve faced, since Cardano has no central custodian or company that can be attacked to stop it.

The dry run also acts as a safety valve in case the software fails to install properly, giving people time to file bug reports before real staking revenue is on the line.

Welcomes forks and copying of Cardano's code as a sign of success, comparing it to how often Bitcoin has been cloned without denting its growth.

Weighs in on Google's claimed quantum supremacy, calling it a major engineering milestone though still far from breaking real world cryptography.

Argues Haskell was the right call over C++, calling C++ a dreary language to work with, though admits Scala or F# might have offered faster early velocity.

Breaks down blockchain interoperability models: a master slave coordination chain versus firewalled chains linked by non interactive proofs like NIPoPoWs, with a nod to Lightning Network's momentum.

Weighs in on Ross Ulbricht's Silk Road sentencing, calling two life sentences for a non violent crime unjust and saying he deserves clemency.

Extends the criticism to civil asset forfeiture and broader US judicial reform, calling the treatment of Ulbricht emblematic of a broken system.

Responds to why Dan Larimer called him untrustworthy, saying people fall out sometimes and challenging anyone to name what he actually stole.

Expectations for Incentivized Testnet participation and how the number of registered stake pools will shape decisions ahead of March.

Details the technical mechanics of redemption: rotating legacy Byron addresses to new stakeable addresses via a many to one transaction that can be watched live from the Genesis block.

Cites the stoic motto make haste slowly from Marcus Aurelius as the philosophy behind Cardano's careful, functional first engineering pace.

Gives a dev update: an rc4 release went out over the weekend ahead of the Genesis block bifurcation into two networks, now under QA stress testing.

Rebuts the claim that Cardano was originally conceived as a gambling platform, saying any gambling flavored multi party computation research was incidental to its design as an open financial operating system.

Shares his favorite whiskeys, naming Jameson 18, Macallan 21, Glenmorangie Signet and Hibiki among the standouts.

Names Hemingway cigars as a favorite, joking about their anti communist branding.

Reacts to the El Camino Breaking Bad movie, praising how well Jesse's story and the wider franchise were wrapped up.

His roughly 50 acre Colorado property as more of a hay farm than a proper ranch.

Having tried peyote at a Kachina dance in New Mexico, teasing a fuller story for another time.

He enjoys gangster movies and is looking forward to Scorsese's The Irishman.

Admits he hasn't had time to watch Joker because he's still working late on Saturdays.

He reads 50 to 60 books a year on top of audiobooks and YouTube summaries.

Picks the Battle of Pharsalus and the fall of the Roman Republic as his favorite era to have witnessed, from Caesar's dictatorship to Augustus's rise.

Argues today is still the best time to be alive, predicting cybernetic augmentation, genetic enhancement and a possible AI ascension will transform humanity by 2050.

Calls Elon Musk a canonical polymath and confirms IOHK hires economists and game theorists for its research challenges.

Trying to buy the neighboring 5400 acre English Ranch in Montana.

Gives an update on the Ethiopia deal, now past signed commitments and in a feasibility study heading toward a pilot running through June 2020 before commercialization talks begin.

Criticizes Andrew Yang style universal basic income as socialism, arguing inflation from deficit spending, not a lack of handouts, is what erodes the middle class.

He mostly reads nonfiction these days, recommending the book Surveillance Capitalism.

Calls Japan his second favorite country after the US, naming Nara and Osaka as his favorite cities there.

Dabbling in team roping and wanting to get a Friesian horse.

Calls Seoul one of a kind but complains its airport is too far from the city.

Addresses whether the NSA helped create XRP, noting David Schwartz's NSA background and that intelligence agencies funded much of crypto's underlying research decades ago.

He is not worried about the SEC, expecting ADA to be treated as a commodity similar to Ether.

Confirms Daedalus will provide the GUI for the Incentivized Testnet and jokes that there is some evidence for alien life.

Reflects at length on Stephen Wolfram and the Wolfram Language after meeting him at the IOHK Summit, praising its natural language approach to computation while criticizing Wolfram's closed, controlling style.

He always enjoys hanging out with Charlie Shrem and his wife.

Comments on BitMEX exposing customer emails, suggesting exchanges should move toward transactional models that avoid holding sensitive customer data.

Takes on a heckler in the live chat accusing him of running a scam, challenging them to specify exactly what the scam is.

Turns the exchange into a broader point about entrepreneurship, citing Halo Neuroscience's transcranial stimulation research as an example of people risking failure to build something new.

Lays out his five part framework for any transaction, assets, actors, metadata, contractual relationships and regulatory environment, that the crypto industry gets to reimagine.

Rival founders like Dan Larimer, Vitalik Buterin, Ripple's team and Justin Sun all wake up believing just as strongly in their own projects.

Criticizes crypto community culture for turning disagreement into moral condemnation, calling it counterproductive and alienating.

Explains why he loves working in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, envisioning a future where the next Apple could come from Addis Ababa.

Closes with a recap of the Incentivized Testnet plan, the tentative November 12 first snapshot, and upcoming Haskell and Shelley testnet progress in the new year.

Signs off thanking the audience for another AMA, trolls included.