Surprise AMA October 8th, 2023

Opens Sunday October 8th 2023 with another impromptu surprise AMA from warm sunny Colorado, in the office to work on the constitution among other things.

Sets the state of Cardano: nft XLV, Rare Evo, and SanchoNet at version 8.5, near full command-line implementation of the CIP before productization, integration, and testing.

Calls 2024 the year of side chains and Mithril from an IO perspective, with Ouroboros Leios and input endorsers as the research thread, Well-Typed going into heavy modeling.

The never-stopping third thread of Plutus and developer-experience work, noting the Hydra team prototyped in Aiken and cross-compared it to Plutus script, plus getting Mithril into the node.

Peer-to-peer is already live, and Genesis is underway with a fixed-cost contract out to Tweag, hopefully realized in the first half of 2024.

Mithril v1 gives a 20-minute full-node bootstrap and v2 is almost done, after Leonid Reyzin from Boston University spent a semester at Edinburgh bringing compact-certificate ideas he co-developed with Aggelos.

Teases Minotaur and side-chain announcements and a Twitter space the next day with Eran on Midnight.

RealFi, John O'Connor's company, grew out of the African operations he ran, including the Ethiopia Ministry of Education deal that survived two ministers and a war.

African crypto curiosity dried up after FTX, but Nigeria still has over 20 percent of its 200 million people owning or knowing a crypto owner, and RealFi is based in Kenya.

The former IO chief product officer now works at RealFi with John, and that technology is the least limiting factor, forcing a pivot from B2B and B2G to a direct B2C strategy.

Prism is going open source with hopes of becoming a Hyperledger project alongside Indy, under CEO David Harding, and that Lace is looking great.

Praises Lace's monthly release cadence, working with Mike Ward's team, and lists the backlog: delegation portfolios, hardware multisig, a paper wallet generator, security key integration, and CIP-95.

Wants Lace to become the industry standard for a safe wallet with premium features, and admits launching a product and getting user feedback is always scary.

Addresses a loud but small minority in the community who claim people dumped or that IO controls the network unilaterally, saying at some point you let them burn out.

Blames the times and social media for the inability to converse, using the Broncos rivalry with the Raiders, Chiefs, and Chargers to show that jabbing does not mean hatred.

All cryptocurrencies share the same foes in CBDCs, central banks, and totalitarian regimes, and that an Ethereum and a Cardano believer are 98 percent aligned but the 2 percent delta breeds tribalism.

Insists the genesis keys are not hidden: a 3-2-2 split among IOG, Emurgo, and the CF, with an offchain and implicit onchain governance structure and no hard fork until 70 percent of SPOs upgrade.

The keys are hardcoded into the Genesis block and CIP 1694 has been discussed since 2021 to replace them: a constitutional committee, a dynamic voted quorum, Plutus, an onchain constitution, and a shift from unicameral to tricameral adding DReps and SPOs.

Points to over 50 workshops in 2023 and SanchoNet as the whole reason for the effort, learning from the Catalyst experiment, Polkadot's OpenGov, and Tezos governance.

Calls it disingenuous to claim the goal of 1694 is to preserve the very thing it replaces, given tens of millions spent, and warns generative AI will make disinformation worse.

A post-truth world where people invent a fantasy, ignore counter-evidence, build a group with purity tests, and call anyone who disagrees a liar.

IO funded a lab at the University of Edinburgh to objectively measure decentralization, starting with Bitcoin and working down the list so no one can argue with the metric.

Defends the peer-review process of conferences and referees in computer science, arguing 200 papers over seven years is not marketing and that they predicted Ethereum's Casper problems years early.

Reflects that the more you accomplish the more enemies and strawmen you produce, until you can no longer have a conversation.

CIP 1694 and Intersect exist because it is easy to attack one guy but hard to attack a movement, as Satoshi foresaw by leaving and as Vitalik is enduring now.

The point of blockchain is to acknowledge that humans are flawed and will let you down, so you build systems that do not lie and objectively enforce a reality.

Uses football scoring as a constructed reality that everyone agrees to, and says blockchain puts such constructed realities on steroids as a basis for consent, truth, and money with objective metrics.

Calls Elon Musk the greatest example of an unhinged person who seems to believe the world is a simulation, spending 45 billion dollars to buy Twitter and rename it X.

Argues blockchains give you a grounding with no agenda that does not care about geopolitics, like the laws of physics, letting you build lasting institutions.

Economists unhooked money from the gold standard, causing inflation heading toward hyperinflation, recalling his grandfather's 1952 lineman salary that supported seven kids, a home, and two cars.

Crypto creates digital scarcity and grounding, which is why the US government has to take it down before people wake up to how worthless money really is.

Imagines grounding elections, property rights, contracts, and your data, the oil of the 21st century, in reality, reflecting he could have been a doctor in his ten years here.

The real fight of 2024 is the budget of Cardano, since after 1694 ratification people will want to spend the treasury, which must be done in a structured way with a pie chart of priorities.

Contrasts a disciplined 5-percent-across-the-board budget cut with US politics that can never give anything up, framing disciplined decentralized budgeting as the 2024 fight.

He is not ignoring India, recalling a former Emurgo chief investment officer who built infrastructure there, and that the Indian government flip-flops on crypto despite the largest remittance culture in the world.

Plans to visit India in 2024 after a June 2020 trip was cancelled by COVID, and says a Cardano budget could fund an India marketing and education program with Indian DReps.

Answers whether every project should be a side chain: no, most should be dapps or native assets, since side chains suit a different execution model, consensus, and data needs, like World Mobile's global hardware network versus a CBDC.

Side chains let multiple models coexist and create mutual network value, whereas a DEX just wants to run where the liquidity is to efficiently transfer value.

Reports the Hoskinson Health and Wellness clinic has over 4,000 patients and multiple providers, with a full pharmacy, hyperbarics, imaging, and lab coming in 2024 and a large expansion under way.

Gives a ranch update: over 500 bison running around with big elk herds that hang out together, near the end of hunting season.

The Cardano ambassador program is a CF program that should be deprecated and moved to a voted onchain process with a slice of the Cardano budget funding it each year.

Argues the blockchain should broker the discovery of ambassadors so people vote their local clusters, giving democratic consent behind each ambassador's status.

Insists Hydra is not flawed, with over 12 releases a year, community participation, and real problems like large NFT drops in its road map, the only question being how fast it evolves.

A CEO looks at the state of all tools differently than an engineer in the weeds, choosing processes so builders have the best toolset of any group in a few years, informed by a members-based organization's direct feedback.

People took Hydra outside IO as a marketing weapon to kill Ethereum with a million transactions per second, building a giant expectation that missed that throughput is one narrow dimension of a much broader war.

Cardano has no 500-dollar fees or six-hour dapp waits, so peak throughput need not be the top priority, and calls for following the process instead.

Says when Hydra did not meet those narrow expectations people called it a scam, while Mithril 2 already succeeds Mithril 1 with ambitions to embed it in the block header for smart contracts.

Confirms RealFi is a direct extension of the Africa work, getting its own company and leadership to drive continental adoption and utility into Cardano and Lace.

Jokes that Dan Larimer is probably retired living off the 4 billion dollars EOS raised before he walked away.

In 2024 Cardano marketing and brand will simply have to be community-funded, since it is not a core developer's place to be marketers, and onchain government should prioritize it.

Predicts the Ethereum community will be happier once 1694 passes because they can say Cardano fired Charles, then embrace it, and that decentralization gives an anchor to be in the club.

Explains why a Ripple settlement would have been catastrophic: settling implies XRP was a security and emboldens the SEC, while Ripple's court win says secondary-market sales are not Howey investment contracts, helping the whole industry.

Contrasts a localized settlement like EOS and Block.one with an industry-wide precedent, saying losing that bedrock would have harmed Coinbase and the industry's core developers.

Attacks regulation-through-enforcement: the SEC let Coinbase do an IPO with an S1 in 2021 then sued it for the same business model, so come-in-and-register really means telling the SEC where to sue you.

Waves off a troll question about Israel using nukes, noting Gaza contains Israeli citizens too.

Recommends Lex Fridman's interviews with Netanyahu, Yuval Harari, and a Palestinian poet for perspective on Israel and Palestine, citing progress from the Abraham Accords amid the Hamas flareup.

Answers why crypto never counterattacked the SEC: money was spent but incentives are not aligned, and in 2022 SBF was trying to build a nepotistic regulatory structure to shut everyone else out.

Regulated bank-like businesses welcome laws that wipe out startups, while Bitcoin maximalists insist anything not Bitcoin is a scam.

Recounts that Senator Lummis's Financial Innovation Act office consulted Coinbase, Kraken, and former CFTC regulators broadly, but the Bitcoin people's only recommendation was to put in the bill that anything but Bitcoin is a security.

Complains a maximalist he runs into at Miami only tweets about his physical looks, and says Bitcoin lost good spokesmen like Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, replaced by Max Keiser who launched his own coin.

Yonatan Sompolinsky's GHOST and inspector protocols were good for their time and started the single-chain-to-DAG conversation with SPECTRE, PHANTOM, and IOTA's tangle, alongside Aviv Zohar, though chain versus DAG is immaterial to scaling today.

Likes Vivek Ramaswamy but says he cannot win Trump's primary with Trump above 60 percent, so he is really running for VP or a cabinet seat.

It is very hard to become president in your mid-30s, that Obama showed names and backgrounds no longer matter, and that you have to build a track record over time.

Recounts that Reagan ran in 1968 and 1976 before winning in 1980, starting with Barry Goldwater in 1964, a 16-year climb comparable to Trump from 2000 to 2016.

Trump studied with Rush Limbaugh, Steve Bannon, and Roger Stone, blending Michael Savage's borders-language-culture framework with Bannon's nationalism into a populist candidacy.

You cannot out-Trump Trump, and that DeSantis is a crude simulacrum betting Trump lands in a prison cell, an organization he has still botched.

Calls RFK Jr a real American with an amazing life story whose father and uncle were assassinated, thrown away by his own party for inconvenient statements.

He would love to do an X space with Vivek Ramaswamy about crypto, DeFi, web3, NFTs, and large language models, and would Joe Rogan the hell out of it.

Argues every American has some wonky beliefs, like the lady at the crystal store, so you judge people on integrity, empathy, and whether they can learn, not ideological perfection.

Midnight will deploy Minotaur multi-resource consensus, bootstrapping from the SPO set then adding multiple consensus algorithms, aiming eventually for proof of useful work with recursive snarks.

Minotaur can chain BFT, proof of stake, and proof of work dynamically so a side chain can become a layer one and back, and repeats his offer for Algorand to fix its incentives on the Cardano side.

Prism is integrating into Lace as an identity center, the first consumer app for Prism, with the Prism 2 rewrite near done bringing multi-tenancy, revocation, and AnonCreds.

Lists what an identity center in the wallet enables: estate planning, account recovery, device syncing, and Bitwarden-style access control, all self-sovereign identity you own rather than a cloud provider.

A Lace phone app is on the road map but built browser-first, and he is less bullish on phone apps because Apple and Google control the road map and the app store.

Amazon cannot sell Kindle books in its iOS app over Apple and Google's cut, so if a company that size cannot fight the gatekeepers, a wallet like Lace cannot either.

The desktop and browser are the purest form because IO controls what goes in, and rails against gatekeepers, centralization, and middlemen who tell you your business without helping.

Recalls attending CU Boulder under coach Dan Hawkins and says the program is now killing it under new leadership, like USC in the Pete Carroll, Matt Leinart, and Reggie Bush days.

Bans a spam heckler and wonders aloud why people sit in the channel all day on a Sunday morning calling him a scammer instead of reading a book or going to the park.

Answers an MBA question by saying the credential has been diluted and is worth little unless from an elite network like Harvard or Stanford, and that he values engineers over MBAs.

Cites Lisa Su with a PhD from MIT running AMD and Satya Nadella's computer science masters, and recommends MIT's dual MBA and masters-in-engineering program, or CMU's masters in product management, over a plain MBA.

Reflect does game development with a Wasteland and Earthworm Jim creator who was Interplay employee number eight, having bought the Descent IP, and he will personally direct Legends of Valor.

Admits a DEXA scan put him at 37 percent body fat, describes anti-aging work with mesenchymal stem cells via apheresis and bioreactors, but says diet, sleep, and exercise get you 20 good years.

A Ghana ambassador to know the protocol and people, get involved in SanchoNet and CIP 1694, and become a delegate representing the world.

Endorses baseline cardio, stretching, and yoga with breathing as hugely beneficial, and acknowledges some people in the chat would relish it if he died.

The Alfred Nobel story: his brother's obituary was mistakenly published as his own, showing him as the dynamite guy, so he created the Nobel Prize to repair his reputation.

Confirms he will return to Kenya, where RealFi and John O'Connor are based in Nairobi.

Jason Cohen is shooting a documentary about him for Avi, likely out in 2024.

Donating 300 million ADA to the treasury would earn one like on Twitter and then hate the next day, like Stellar burning its supply, and urges people to keep their principles rather than play to the crowd.

Calls the US border a national tragedy and lays out three fixes, starting with reforming birthright citizenship rooted in the 1890s Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision via an executive order.

Proposes a guest worker program plus walls, electronic fences, and drone surveillance, then holding Mexico and Central America accountable for the cartels through sanctions and arrest warrants.

Neither party wants to solve immigration: Democrats hope a crisis yields blanket citizenship that turns Texas blue, and Republicans are addicted to cheap labor, a cynical uniparty stalemate.

He is excited about Midnight with security tokens and regulated value transfer, to be detailed at the Cardano Summit, with Abu Dhabi and Dubai as the ideal jurisdiction for a blockchain shadow financial market for Africa.

Argues privacy is a requirement of regulation, since more identity requires more privacy for the disclosure regime tied to regulated assets.

Calls the whole visa system broken, with only the EB5 rich-people visa working, and notes illegal migrants pay taxes through stolen identities at the highest rate while collecting no benefits.

People independent of two-party groupthink, like Joe Rogan, are hard to box, being liberal on universal healthcare and free education but conservative on other issues.

Cites The Last of Us survivalist episode as the ultimate mind-bender that broke both left and right stereotypes, and says you are a free-thinking person, not a brand or an NPC.

Finds it interesting that Hollywood attacked Sound of Freedom, a successful film based on a true story about child sex trafficking.

He was not surprised the room-temperature superconductor turned out fake, since everyone was skeptical and it carries bad career implications for the authors.

DCSpark working with others is good interoperability, and a members-based organization can grow from other people's ideas rather than pretending IO always has the best ones.

Praises Reflect and its team, and says he owns a surveillance drone for LiDAR mapping the ranch and is excited about semi-autonomous hover-bike eVTOLs like Jetson, though they need hydrogen for energy density.

Admires Snoop Dogg's business acumen and discipline, telling a story of Snoop running an afterparty until 2am in Colorado Springs with Warren G and T-Pain after driving in from Casper.

Snoop Dogg cares about the next generation, rethinking intellectual property and non-predatory record labels, a compassionate business machine who inspires love and loyalty in his crew.

He has no problem with weed if it does not interfere with life, and blasts Nixon's war on drugs for weaponizing vice squads while the opioid and tobacco industries kill hundreds of thousands.

Recalls Colorado governors opposing marijuana legalization and predicting society would unravel, which it did not, arguing sometimes you have to take your freedoms back.

Gavin Newsom vetoing psychedelic decriminalization is political theater because big pharma cannot allow substances that get people off SSRIs and cure conditions they profit from.

Governments let you buy guns, smoke, mine uranium, and go to war but say you cannot decide how to regulate a substance, which he calls a consequence of corporatism that must be removed.

The US never was and never will be a Christian nation, and that what made it special is that you are free to be a Christian, with freedom of religion as a bedrock negative right.

Reframes ETHgate as two separate things, the first being people using relationships and money to get the SEC to go easy on Ethereum, which probably happens the way T-Mobile lobbied to buy Sprint.

The second thing, the one he called a grand conspiracy, is that Ethereum people bribed the SEC to attack XRP, for which there is no evidence and which would blow back onto Ethereum.

Argues the bribe claim fails as litigation strategy: if Ethereum is only not a security because of a bribe then it is a security, hurting XRP's case, whereas its merits could be used as an analogous argument.

The Hinman emails show unequal application, which is favoritism not corruption, and that he cannot fix internet discourse now, having tweeted for peace and community.

Recommends Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for learning computer science and says he loves Scala 3 and functional programming.

People keep linking the two ETHgate claims and overreacting, proving his point that they cannot separate them, while he still likes Brad Garlinghouse and CTO David Schwartz.

All chains should be public, but you can merge consensus so part of it is a federated quorum, the point of Midnight, as R3 and Hyperledger Fabric eventually learned that public wins.

He wants to keep anti-aging biotech in Lawrence Lessig's free-culture framework as much as possible, and complains an AI-generated article calls every tweet an unhinged rant within 30 minutes.

He got two Pfizer shots with lingering injection-site pain, took no boosters, caught COVID four times, and that the vaccines did not work.

Says if free will escapes deterministic systems then Gregory Chaitin's Omega makes it undecidable, and that Roger Penrose's Emperor's New Mind argues you need a different unit of computation to express it.

Revives the end-of-AMA tradition of funding a loan, logging into his Kiva account with 1,018 dollars available and 155,000 dollars lent over time, built with John's company.

Funds a woman in Jordan buying blankets to sell, and hopes microlending can move onto a blockchain to strip out the middlemen charging 35 to 85 percent interest so billions in capital flow.

Closes to get lunch, thanking everyone, saying they laughed, cried, learned about the Amish, and talked about XRP, and that it is good to be back.