Price and Value

Opens March 29th 2021 from Colorado on price and value, saying his best days were 2015 and 2016 before Cardano launched, doing science and engineering before the price tension arrived.

New people judge success only by ADA's price, congratulating him for hitting a dollar while ignoring 102 papers, the metadata standard live since December, BeefChain cows on-chain, and over 10000 assets issued.

Dislikes YouTubers predicting 3, 5, or 10 dollars as the most destructive thing for the project, noting he has been in Bitcoin since it was a dollar and watched it swing without knowing why.

Price prediction belongs to rich hedge fund traders who buy the New York Mets, not him, since his job is figuring out how to run a nation on Cardano, authenticate Rolexes, or do Lamborghini NFTs.

Markets are unpredictable and contextual to the macro, since US regulation could hit Bitcoin into a bear market while the Fed putting 10 percent of its balance sheet in Bitcoin would lift even a copy of a copy to a billion dollars via Satoshi rising-tide logic.

Asks never to be interviewed about price appreciation, flipping Ethereum's market cap, or matching Polkadot, reminding ADA holders they bought into responsibilities in the world financial operating system and its governance.

Catalyst has over 16000 participants and he wants 100000, and in two days 100 percent of blocks will be made by community-chosen stake pool operators, so he will advise on governance and pools but never on investment.

Calls himself the least qualified to speculate, having given away all 293000 ether he was entitled to, worth over half a billion at the peak, to his secretary, and keeping an Xbox 360 he bought for cheap Bitcoin on Bitnet now worth millions.

Nothing they announce is tied to price cycles, and the Coinbase listing excited a community that had asked about it in AMAs for two years, especially since Coinbase had a strong opinion on the right way to list and custody via the Rosetta spec.

Ethiopia is imminent with one hurdle left, keeping an Ethiopian national bird on his desk as a reminder, since IO Global staff lived there for months training 23 people and John O'Connor's primary residence is Ethiopia.

John O'Connor is a friend he loves like a brother, once arrested at the airport leaving Ethiopia because he carried too much local paper currency under capital controls, enduring days of uncertainty before a pardon.

A beachhead deal at the scale of millions is game-changing, a foundation for economic identity on which credit, reputation, insurance, and payments can be built over years, though it will not make ADA magically worth 10 or 15.

The biggest problem with crypto is the obsession with getting rich fast, turning a dollar into a hundred through no work, when in every such industry only a few get lucky and everyone else loses.

Compares it to the 1840s and 1850s gold prospectors to Colorado and California, saying if avarice is your goal Cardano is the worst bet since they think in years to decades toward a dominant financial operating system like TCP/IP by 2050 to 2100.

Calls myopia unhealthy and predominant, noting Bitcoin's trillion-dollar cap the size of Australia is impressive but provides little utility, with no easy identity, no tokens, and weak smart contracts.

Asks why a nation state running governance-as-a-service would choose a slow, high-fee platform like Bitcoin, since they built a better engine going from the forest-decimating steam engine of proof of work to nuclear power with proof of stake, backed by 102 peer-reviewed papers.

The Bitcoin space rejects proof of stake on trust not merit, citing Andrew Miller's paper, like refusing to understand a nuclear reactor while defending a steam engine, so token price wrongly confers legitimacy it should not.

Ergo, Algorand, and Avalanche outside the top ten bring far more to the table in vision, team, and capabilities, and over a long arc may be more useful than several current top-ten projects.

The ecosystem is decentralized with over 2000 stake pool operators and 16000 Catalyst voters shaping k, a0, minimum fees, and resource consumption as Catalyst consumes the governance stack, with tools improved via the EU Horizon 2020 grant with IBM and Guardtime, Governance Alive, and accelerators.

There is no mandate to get ADA to 2 to 5 dollars, and shady marketing firms emailing to pump Telegram groups get a concise vaffanculo, while emails about NFT marketplaces, oracles, DEXes, or stablecoins are real infrastructure, as with the Artano business model canvas meeting.

He will keep building until the community decides the 2025 roadmap, with agreement on full peer-to-peer, full smart contracts, a sensible side-chain model, and community voting on all parameters and hard forks, all likely done in 2021.

His job is keeping the social dynamics, tools, and quality of conversation high so the community can decide, since the best thing Satoshi did was leave, otherwise you get Reddit shitposting and a Cardano Classic or Cardano Cash split like the Bitcoin Cash big-block debate.

Over 2023 to 2025 they will do more work but a smaller relative role, since even Microsoft, Google, and Apple together cannot speak for the internet or replace TCP, as Google's Dart showed with little progress.

Success is the ecosystem reaching public-utility level, and price matters in one dimension since proof of stake is plutocratic so a higher price means more security, costing over 17 billion dollars to attack Cardano.

An adversary starting at zero must accumulate a resource, measured as hash cost in proof of work or simply token price in proof of stake, a nice armchair security metric of maybe 50 percent or less of capitalization.

The 2025 agenda diversifies the security base to include merit beyond a plutocratic mechanism, a proof of stake 2.0, and stays ecologically sound using 1.6 million times less power than systems consuming more electricity than Switzerland.

Newcomers nothing here is new and, after a surge of podcasts explaining the DCF, smart contracts, third-generation crypto, and Catalyst, says he will become far more selective going forward.

He will decline podcasts that predominantly discuss trading and price and accept those about use, utility, and adoption, even if it means losing shows of people he enjoys.

Plutus turns on in a few months after four years of effort inventing a new accounting model and new languages, and that collective innovation, like the flashlight app Apple later built into the OS, will let thousands build amazing things.

With a large subscriber base and Twitter feed he will become the podcast, interviewing Cardano and Catalyst projects like People of IOG so builders can share their passion with an audience.

Holding ADA is a responsibility that gives you a voice unlike holding Bitcoin, and anyone who sees it only as speculation should consider going elsewhere, to the Trons of the world.

Warns the road ahead is rough, using the ocean strategy with Yella where LLVM support is just the beginning, still needing standard libraries, semantics-based compilation, and K semantics over maybe 5 to 10 years.

At 33 he is young and will still discuss this in his 80s, like his hero Ron Paul who says the same things in his 80s as in his 30s, since economic identity is the arc and meaning of his life.

Almost everything worth fighting for, from global warming to clean water, involves money and the transfer of value, so money is a tool like why the NSF and DARPA exist, and Cardano can be an engine for dreams and passions.