AMA 03/19/2020

Reflects on quarantine life on the farm and chasing runaway donkeys before starting this impromptu AMA.

Asks fans in Japan to send cherry blossom pictures since his usual spring trip there is cancelled.

Wishes Prince Albert II of Monaco well after his coronavirus diagnosis.

Oracles will likely arrive first through the blockchain explorer team before deeper integrations like Chainlink.

Jokes that his eight antenna Wi-Fi 6 Asus router is wasted on rural 4G internet.

Confirms Shelley's incentivized testnet shipped on schedule in December with 95 to 99 percent network stability and over a thousand registered stake pools.

The Haskell rewrite takes longer than the Rust prototype because of an evidence based development approach, with mainnet and reward rollover next.

Regrets missing the 2020 Antarctica trip due to global travel bans but vows to go in 2021 regardless.

Picks Mega Man X and Adventure Island as favorite SNES and NES games.

Pushes back on delay accusations, pointing to weekly releases across the wallet backend, node, ITN and the upcoming Byron reboot.

Worries about his doctor father and brother in Wyoming continuing to work through the pandemic.

Strained hospital capacity in his father's small Wyoming town versus the milder situation near his Colorado ranch.

Argues coronavirus's real tragedy will be the economic calamity for paycheck to paycheck workers rather than the death toll.

Criticizes travel and hospitality companies for stock buybacks and executive pay instead of building cash reserves like Microsoft or Apple.

The shift from stockpile to just in time supply chains, like Toyota's lean production, leaves the economy fragile to shocks.

He personally isn't worried about catching coronavirus given past illnesses but fears the broader economic damage.

The next Cardano Foundation update will land in late March, likely as a livestream with other product managers.

The Haskell Shelley testnet exists to migrate stake pool operators and verify reward transfers, not to be incentivized itself.

Pushes back on the claim nobody accepts ADA, citing his own travel purchases made with it.

Denies hiding in a bunker, describing his ranch life with donkeys, chickens, geese, horses and a vintage John Deere tractor.

Dismisses a hostile YouTuber, dubbed a molten tar monster, as a bad faith gadfly not worth engaging with.

Rejects conspiracy theories and out of context editing used against Cardano, comparing them to 5G coronavirus claims.

Recaps the ICO's DCC origins, noting the games and gambling pivot was never IOHK's own strategy, which was always Africa focused.

Dismisses a lawsuit and paid think tank reports attacking Cardano as baseless commercial disputes with no technical substance.

Advises ignoring critics and staying the course, noting the community has grown self sufficient and no longer needs constant intervention.

Reflects on Cardano's growing community of holders, developers and pool operators finding value regardless of opinions of him personally.

The Defense Production Act could theoretically compel IOHK but is unlikely since cryptography cannot cure a virus.

Compares Ouroboros to fast finality BFT protocols like Waves and Algorand, noting Hydra can add fast settlement on top.

Jormungandr's higher RAM use versus the leaner upcoming Haskell node, attributing spikes to rapid iteration and space leaks.

The tradeoff between fast weekly releases and having time for an independent QA cycle on the incentivized testnet.

The incentivized testnet met its goal of stress testing staking at scale with over a thousand pools and better than expected stability.

Jokes about touching his face during coronavirus since he hasn't left his sterilized ranch.

Names black as his favorite color.

Proof of stake lets pool operators stay pseudonymous since the resource is virtual, unlike proof of work's physical mining rigs.

Praises Haskell course graduates in Ethiopia, several of whom IOHK hired, including one now on the cybersecurity team.

Cardano is open to working with Chainlink once the foundational Oracle and stablecoin layers are built.

Argues blockchain voting is more secure and inclusive than manual paper ballots, especially with primaries being cancelled over coronavirus.

Homomorphic encryption based ballot privacy schemes being built into Cardano for anonymous but verifiable voting.

He doesn't believe the simulation hypothesis and doesn't think it would matter if it were true.

Duncan Coutts's departure as a mutual decision after struggles with expectation management, praising the current team's velocity.

Remembers Bitcoin Java client developer Mike Hearn as the person he misses most from the Bitcoin community.

Recalls growing up in Maui and a beloved local donut shop run by Filipino immigrants.

He only holds crypto and cash, avoiding stocks, bonds and gold because he distrusts Wall Street.

Speculates IOHK could eventually go public via a security token offering.

Criticizes DeFi's move fast and break things culture after the MakerDAO liquidation issue, contrasting it with Cardano's slower rigorous approach.

Argues building financial products for retail investors demands rigor and expectation management, not reckless experimentation.

Names Aparna Jue, Tim Harrison and others on the deep IOHK bench who could carry Cardano's vision forward if he were incapacitated.

GitHub is already decentralized enough to be layered onto a blockchain fairly easily.

Dismisses a US Senate bill to outlaw encryption as unenforceable as outlawing gravity.

Confirms ADA holders can freely enter and exit staking without any penalty.

Gives an update on his four dogs, especially Nollie who likes gazing at the Rockies.

Clarifies the background noise is his gas fireplace heater.

Confirms the Pink Floyd poster in frame is not an original.

He brushes his teeth once a day.

Jokes he may shave his head bald like Patrick Stewart once his hairline recedes further.

He won't sue a critic for defamation since litigation would take years and gain nothing while attacks continue.

Teases a virtual conference for the Shelley launch, possibly a VR experience with avatars.

Vacuumlabs will likely deliver Ledger hardware wallet integration with full staking and multi asset support around Shelley.

Brushes off criticism from Richard Heart and Simon Dixon as just part of being a public figure.

Reaffirms his often misquoted trillion dollar ADA market cap remark, pointing to a fuller explanation given in an earlier video.

Calls the New Balance supply chain pilot a successful proof of concept despite thin margins, with hopes to expand it.

Reassures stake pool operators they can run the ITN and new testnet in parallel without shutting either down.

Calls out a persistent hostile commenter as a troll with nothing to gain from constant negativity.

Lists gardening, art collecting and watchmaking among his hobbies, though CEO duties leave little time for them.

Mocks a fabricated quote claiming Coinbase and CZ called ADA a scam.

A thousand pool saturation parameter K is a reasonable mainnet starting point, adjustable later through updates or on chain voting.

Jokes about trying scalp micropigmentation.

Cardano can scale to 50,000 TPS once the definition of a transaction itself is reimagined.

Doubts Ethereum has any secret breakthrough left, criticizing ETH2's difficulty and its lack of on chain governance or treasury.

Recounts meeting William Shatner in Mexico and their conversation about horses and a Star Trek pun.

Gaming partners are already building alongside Goguen for smart contract launch applications.

Wishes Trump would embrace universal basic income as a political win, doubting Democrats would know how to respond.

He secures his own crypto with multisig cold storage and insured safety deposit boxes.

Muses about eventually returning to academia for a PhD in analytic number theory or homotopy type theory.

IOHK's research output already amounts to roughly ten PhD dissertations worth of published work.

Argues opponents of blockchain treasuries misunderstand that inflation can fund system maintenance just as it funds security.

A cryptocurrency isn't truly decentralized if a central entity can shut it down.

Teases a legal domain specific language project aimed at transforming the legal industry.

Recommends Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Camus's Sisyphus essay as philosophy reading for hard times.

A critic, Crypto Crow, as physically imposing despite the insult about his website, calling him scary in person.

His lion's mane mushroom growing hobby, sourced from Paul Stamets, which he plans to cultivate in Colorado.

Traces his economics reading list from Graeber's Debt to Ferguson's Ascent of Money and Austrian economists like Mises and Hayek.

Argues complexity theory will become the bedrock of economic analysis, modeling economies like ecosystems from simple interacting rules.

Challenges gold's special status as money, noting anything scarce and useful, like tea bricks or prison camp cigarettes, has served as money.

Dismisses Warren Buffett's dismissal of crypto, arguing aging masters of the old system rarely grasp disruptive new ones.

Argues silver is a better industrial and antibacterial metal than gold yet remains comparatively undervalued.

Population growth naturally drives some inflation and questions whether that really matters.

Thanks Brazilian fans for a show of coronavirus solidarity, flying an American flag on a local statue.

Names the White Russian as his favorite cocktail, referencing The Big Lebowski.

He owns 100 percent of IOHK, so there is no scenario where he could be fired.

Picks There Will Be Blood and The Fountain among his favorite films.

Laughs off a joke about Mexico wanting Trump to hurry up and finish the border wall.

He has two barn cats for mousing but prefers dogs since cats don't come when called.

Recalls Raven Shore, an old Colorado corporation he set up named after a Might and Magic town.

Godel's incompleteness theorem and how Hilbert's quest for complete formal mathematics accidentally founded computer science.

Confirms IOHK's Wyoming entity is legally Input Output Global, though a rebrand hasn't happened yet.

Reminisces about Heroes of Might and Magic 3, lamenting New World Computing ran out of money before finishing part 4.

Math can't be proven wrong since it's just derivation from self consistent axioms, only debated as useful or not.

Praises a YouTube mathematician's Babylonian base 60 numeral system videos, though he can't recall the name.

He'll fly to the Shelley release celebration in Kyoto if travel restrictions allow.

Admires Rachmaninoff as a composer blending Chopin's emotion with Liszt's virtuosity.

Defines an axiom as something assumed true without proof.

Picks Into the Great Wide Open as his favorite Tom Petty song.

Calls quantum resistance overrated for now, comparing the fear to Y2K since practical algorithms can be swapped in later.

A 3D printed molten tar monster statue now exists in three fan made variants.

Asks for a favorite Beethoven tune to close out, riffing on Neil deGrasse Tyson banter.

His paused wingsuit flying training due to the pandemic and hopes to attempt a BASE jump eventually.

Defends Dan Larimer as dogged but not dishonest despite past disagreements, distinguishing him from bad faith critics.

Names Yellowstone as his favorite National Park.

Flying cobras terrify him most and mentions he replaced his Pink Floyd wall hanging.

A recurring pack of hostile commenters who show unusual dedication to attacking every video he posts.

Can't recall which mathematician was being asked about.

Greets a viewer from Romania and jokes about the local cheese.

Georg Cantor formalizing infinity and the unresolved continuum hypothesis.

Thanatos Holdings was an old holding company for some intellectual property he owned.

Names favorite mathematicians by category: elegance from Halmos and Grothendieck, creativity from Poincare, and rigor from Hilbert.

Warns against believing overhyped claims that chloroquine is 100 percent effective against coronavirus.

He actually contracted malaria in the past while discussing chloroquine as an old malaria drug.

Reiterates no medicine is ever 100 percent effective and warns again against unfounded chloroquine hype.

His next venture after Cardano would center on freedom of association, commerce and expression.

Confirms IOHK hasn't made a code commit to Ethereum Classic in some time.

Praises Dogecoin's Ross Nicoll and Saga's Lars Seier Christensen as legitimate people he hopes succeed.

Signs off wishing viewers well through the pandemic before returning to business as usual.