I'm Back

Returns on November 9 2024 from a week off during his birthday and the election at a 40 Years of Zen retreat combining biofeedback, neurofeedback, group therapy, and four ketamine trips in five days.

Success makes you think mental-health rules do not apply, and that a decade of public criticism, capped by people calling him a cancer for Cardano, accumulated into a heavy toll.

Notes a poll on whether he is wanted was closing at 51 percent yes and 49 percent no, and admits his tenure has been imperfect and at times abrasive, prompting reflection on his own behavior.

Recalls being in Bitcoin longer than 99 percent of the ecosystem, from building a company with Dan Larimer and Satoshi to the Block Wars and Mt. Gox, the Bitcoin Education Project, and the Bitcoin Foundation with Peter Vessenes.

He got brittle responding to harsh Bitcoin maximalists but they no more speak for Bitcoin than the poll speaks for Cardano, and apologizes to the Bitcoin community, calling it the most principled ecosystem whose rivers everyone drinks from.

Bitcoin OS lets Bitcoin stay as it is while enjoying the industry's magic, and reflects that his statements toward the XRP community escalated into a stalemate despite many XRP holders being Cardano fans.

Apologizes to the XRP community, saying it never deserved the overzealous regulator's lawsuits, and proposes collaboration through Midnight interoperability and even Ripple's stablecoin.

Apologizes to the Cardano community for being defensive and calling people liars, acknowledging that most users lack the daily briefings he gets as a CEO, so he should not assume their context matches his.

He built Cardano to leave a safe space for the world's economic, political, and social systems to flourish, moving from don't-be-evil to can't-be-evil by design so people can trust each other again.

Cardano made huge technological strides but not equivalent growth and adoption, so 2025 must focus on becoming Bitcoin's DeFi layer and using the budget process to fund vital ecosystem entities.

A large part of 2025 will be spent in Washington with lawmakers and the administration, since a likely Republican sweep is the best-ever chance to get clarity and remove the SEC's sword of Damocles.

No one asked BlackRock to dictate US crypto policy, which should be written by the American crypto industry, so IO will open and staff a policy office by January.

Wants to hybridize proposals like FIT21 and the Lummis bill into a bipartisan law clarifying securities versus commodities and navigating DeFi, stressing the industry asks only to be left alone to build.

Personal friendships with lawmakers and incoming Trump administration members, and believes younger Democrats want crypto policy bipartisan, evidenced by FIT21 passing the House with over 60 Democrat votes.

Addresses stressed Americans who felt the wrong candidate won, saying that as fellow Americans wanting the country to succeed there is common ground, like the enthusiasm he saw for Robert Kennedy on health policy.

Four ketamine trips over a gram gave him deeper perspective and reignited his love of teaching, so 2025 will bring more whiteboard videos and explainers to help people understand why the movement is special.

The thousand-plus messages of support after the poll deepened his appreciation for the community bond built through AMAs and conferences, which he wants to strengthen in healthy ways despite social media's divisive algorithms.

Praises the 2,500 people who joined 63 uncompensated constitutional workshops in 50 countries plus the CIP 1694 workshops, saying better tools to reset communication will prove decentralized governance is superior.

The ecosystem must prove its governance works through Intersect, the constitutional process, and an annual budget, or it does not deserve to run the world's systems, and the goodwill shown reignited his passion.

The age of Voltaire is a new world to explore, governance being the hardest human endeavor, and vows to stop reacting to harsh criticism and focus on where the ecosystem wants to go.

Cardano is also a web3 protocol needing exchange listings and custodians, and that Midnight will ease the CNT friction, since no one else claimed accountability for those missing integration pieces.

He cannot understand why Circle is still not on Cardano, has never been briefed by the Foundation, and is skeptical it launches in 2024, so the ecosystem should move on with USDM paired with USDC and atomic cross-chain swaps.

Questions whether one private company should hold kingmaker power over decentralized infrastructure, and says a federation of blockchains like Ripple's, plus asset-backed stablecoins like USDM and Jed's algorithmic research, can solve liquidity.

Clarifies Intersect is a community-elected Wyoming 501c4, not an IO extension, with under six months of runway, whose survival the budget will decide as a referendum, and that Pragma remains closed to IO for now.

Proposes Intersect maintain the current Haskell 1.x client while Leios reaches an end-to-end prototype, then deploy Leios on a fresh clean-slate polyglot, event-based, microservices node rather than retrofitting the monolith.

The new node keeps formal methods, Agda, the hard fork combinator, and Mithril while a coalition of TxPipe, dcSpark, Harmonic Labs, and Anastasia builds it, with Pragma as the likely home and IO participating.

The 1.x and new nodes run in parallel like IBM's Hyperledger Fabric versions before the old one is deprecated, and asks developers to voice their past issues constructively as business requirements.

He invited zkFold, Hydra with Midgard, and Gummiworm into the Peras innovation process to accelerate scaling beyond Leios, and is exploring Rust extraction from literate Agda for formal services.

2025 will be a joyful hardness unlike 2024's frustration and betrayals, and apologizes to Solana, cancelling his Solana Nintendo joke and pledging to build a Solana-to-Midnight bridge secured by Cardano.

Urges everyone to treat mental health as seriously as physical health, admitting he is overweight and will restore his fitness, and shares scoring poorly on David Shapiro's 240-question burnout quiz.

Ketamine, which should only be administered by professionals, gave him powerful trips including 20 minutes in the body of a wolf, and previews a week-long dark-room retreat and a dangerous undisclosed April adventure with a video crew.

Closes that excellence comes from loving each day rather than a destination, having relearned to notice Washington's changing leaves, and says 2025 will be the year they look back on as when they got it done.