AMA 08/01/2020

Opens the August 1st livestream from Colorado, framing August as a month of post launch cleanup and optimization.

Shelley code is correct but not fully optimized yet, causing slow syncing for some users.

Expects at least two node updates during August to resolve performance and edge case issues.

Reviews the first post launch help desk report, mostly ISP and firewall related connectivity tickets.

Announces a patch shipping Monday, August 3rd 2020, to help exchanges finalize Shelley integration, expects most to go green the following week.

Yoroi's 3.0 release is Byron only for now, with Shelley delegation support to follow soon.

Confirms Shelley rewards begin moving on August 3rd as planned, with staking about to start and pools already registered.

IOG's own stake pool strategy, weighing full community delegation against the operational security of rotating pools.

Reports multisig is already supported at the node level from the Shelley hard fork but not yet exposed in the wallet backend or Daedalus.

Plans a fixed cost multisig routing server contract with Atix, to later be folded into the peer to peer network design.

Envisions PGP or DID based authentication for multisig key holders and hardware multisig support via Ledger or Trezor.

Plans for one to many delegation so a single wallet could split stake across multiple pools instead of one.

Wants Daedalus login and spending password protected by FIDO U2F security keys such as YubiKey.

Plans secure QR codes for Catalyst voting so users avoid entering recovery phrases, doubling as a mobile wallet restore method.

The Daedalus team is getting more resources including a dedicated business analyst, expects acceleration exiting August.

The hardware wallet center awaits a firmware update to support multiple hardware wallets in Daedalus.

Credits the project's polylithic architecture for finally letting new feature development happen in parallel.

Reports over 500 pools registered, with the d parameter set to start decrementing mid month toward full decentralization.

The peer to peer networking governor turns on in the back half of August, calling it a from scratch network design.

Expects full decentralization before Thanksgiving once d reaches zero and peer to peer networking stabilizes.

Previews Goguen's two components, native multi asset support and Plutus smart contracts, weighing a single release against two hard forks.

Wants native asset listing to be nearly a flag flip for exchanges and Daedalus once multi asset support ships.

Credits Vacuum Labs for hardware wallet work and Atix for infrastructure contracts like Rosetta support.

The Quantstamp security audit is underway, expecting the report with remediations in September.

Critics have gone quiet since Shelley shipped, recalling a bitcoin bet that it never would.

Responds to a prominent Haskell community member's private email branding the crypto industry as criminals.

Calls for the community, himself included, to stop personal attacks and insults even against harsh critics.

Argues cryptocurrency exists as a response to financial corruption and unfairness, tracing it to Bitcoin's genesis block message.

Criticizes government failure to protect citizens, citing pandemic era wealth concentration and money printing.

Argues real change comes through incentives and markets rather than elections, rejecting being called a criminal for that belief.

Frames crypto as the most regulated industry because its rules start from mathematics rather than centralized decree.

Uses a chess analogy to argue financial rules should apply equally to everyone regardless of circumstance.

Rejects the idea that blockchain is just a database, framing it as a solution to commercial friction between businesses.

Uses Walmart and Amazon supply chain examples to show blockchain reduces coordination friction between untrusting parties.

Envisions permissionless alternatives to government controlled identity and central banking, especially for the unbanked.

Explains why decentralized systems need tokens, warning of a tragedy of the commons without incentive alignment.

Cites Ukrainian employees who prefer being paid in crypto over local banks as proof of real utility, not a greater fool scheme.

Predicts transnational stablecoins for lending and insurance within a few years, free of reliance on any single banking jurisdiction.

Rebuts the ponzi scheme critique with a car versus horse breeder analogy for skepticism toward disruptive technology.

Defends token economics by comparing ICO failure rates to ordinary venture capital failure rates, noting his own 2017 ICO mania warning.

Highlights the company's investment in Haskell open source funding as a counterexample to the criminal industry claim.

Closes the rebuttal urging the community to ignore critics rather than demean them, and pledges to do better himself.

Confirms ongoing talks with Ben Goertzel and SingularityNET about a possible Cardano collaboration.

Blockchain identity and wallets could streamline government stimulus payments and restricted UBI distribution.

Clarifies that Yoroi, Emurgo, and IOHK are separate legal entities, and he holds no equity in Yoroi.

His streaming setup, a fiber connection and a Threadripper workstation with an RTX card.

Rebuts the claim that Cardano began as a Japanese gaming coin, insisting it was always designed as a financial operating system.

Argues Cardano's design shares nothing with Tezos, contrasting extended UTXO and Plutus against Tezos's account model and Michelson.

Points to Voltaire governance research funded by the European Union as evidence of Cardano's original design work.

Challenges the Tezos Foundation to publicly disavow the gaming coin narrative being pushed by parts of its community.

Contrasts the uneasy peace reached with the EOS and Ethereum communities to the ongoing hostility from Tezos.

Recalls Steve Jobs' 1997 truce with Microsoft as a model for how rival crypto communities could eventually collaborate.

Introduces Qeditas, Bill White's concept for a blockchain based marketplace for mathematical proof deduction.

Explains why mathematics has grown too specialized for reliable human peer review, citing the ABC conjecture verification saga.

Wants to crowdsource machine checkable proofs so mathematicians could work full time funded through a blockchain token.

Plans to form a 2021 prototype team to explore building Qeditas as a native asset on Cardano.

Wants browser based formal proof tools and open source, crowdsourced math textbooks funded through the same incentive model.

No one can stop anyone from listing a real cryptocurrency, but the Cardano Foundation helps professional exchanges integrate smoothly.

Confirms Voltaire is already launching in 2020, iterating every six to eight weeks toward a stable framework by Q1 2021.

Byron was written in Haskell not Rust, blaming early execution problems on inexperienced developers rather than the language.

NixOS is popular among the development and devops teams.

Confirms he is still taking lion's mane mushroom supplement and finds it helps memory and focus.

New data science work using Jupyter, Anaconda, and pandas for rapid Python prototyping.

Shares an anecdote about his geese Strings and Wings, including one that ate a pair of diamond earrings.

Jokes that sniper rifles and farms go hand in hand, praising armed farmers as the backbone of the food and defense chain.

He wants to look more into GPT-3, recalling his early hand coded neural network experiments in C++.

Confirms Twitter rejected a proposal he had pitched them.

Clarifies the widely cited limit of a thousand stake pools is only a soft cap, not a hard limit.

He has not written C++ code in over ten years, preferring Python and JavaScript for one off scripts.

Clarifies he personally does not write CSS or HTML, crediting the Daedalus team's React Polymorph framework for the interface.

Weighs in that the SCAR is a better assault rifle than the AR15, though both are solid guns.

Confirms a detailed Goguen roadmap is coming, similar to what was published ahead of Shelley.

Being featured in the book The Infinite Machine and speculates about a future movie on Ethereum's history.

Floats starting a Wyoming based video game studio, Frontier Studios, as a possible Hollywood adjacent side venture.

Gives an update on his Legends of Valor game, planning a free enhanced edition distributed the way Beamdog handled Baldur's Gate.

Reminds viewers that Yoroi Mobile already exists as Cardano's mobile wallet option.

Making ADA the exclusive currency for Legends of Valor microtransactions would be fun to build.

Confirms plans to rewrite Daedalus in TypeScript, but not to build a full Cardano node in TypeScript.

Retells the Ethereum Classic and DAO hack chain split, describing the philosophical rift between the two communities.

Recounts self funding the Mantis client with a million and a half dollars to keep Ethereum Classic development alive.

Proposing a treasury system and roadmap to Ethereum Classic that ETC Dev rejected with open hostility.

Reflects that building Mantis still paid off through deep Ethereum and Solidity expertise, despite the falling out with ETC.

He stopped a planned week long fast partway through for various reasons, plans to try again soon.

Recommends the memory science book Moonwalking with Einstein and denies ever being ADA's CEO.

Predicts Moderna is most likely to deliver the first COVID vaccine, with a best case timeline by winter.

Argues that once an effective vaccine exists, governments lose legitimacy if lockdowns and mandates continue regardless.

Cites Dr. Fauci's congressional testimony on vaccine timelines to back his own optimistic projection.

Argues regulatory red tape, not science, is why vaccines and drugs normally take years longer than necessary to reach market.

Closes with lighthearted jabs at Fauci and Gates conspiracy jokes, and gentle ribbing about Coinbase listing impatience.

Signs off asking for patience, framing Cardano as a product built to last decades to centuries.