AMA 03/14/2022

Opens the AMA broadcasting live from Colorado and reminds viewers AMAs can cover anything, not just Cardano.

Shows off a new dry EEG plus photobiomodulation headset bought at CES, working with Aspen Neural Science to benchmark it against a wet EEG.

Digs into his growing fascination with cognitive science, memory, learning, and flow states as he gets older.

Research combining EEG or fNIRS with meditation and psychedelic-like states, working with Jeffrey Tarrant at the Neural Meditation Institute and eyeing a future collaboration with Kernel.

A longevity venture with his dad and brother, framing personal growth as a mix of wisdom and time efficiency.

Argues Cardano's real health should be judged by TVL, chain population, transaction volume, and developer growth rather than price.

Previews a busy travel year including Consensus and other community events as the world reopens.

Compares David Sinclair to Aubrey de Grey in longevity science, covering resveratrol, NAD, and metformin research.

Gives a sidechain status update: Milkomeda already live, and Mamba, the BFT Ethereum sidechain, still on track for a testnet in March 2022.

Ouroboros BFT bootstraps sidechains from the main chain's stake pool set, letting operators earn sidechain tokens alongside ADA.

Cardano TVL has grown from 2 million to over 250 million, with most dapps holding launches until the Vasil hard fork for pipelining and Plutus improvements.

The Vasil hard fork is named after Vasil Dabov, a friend and community member who passed away.

Weighs in on the EU's proposed proof of work ban, arguing bitcoin's energy story gets treated inconsistently compared to other industries.

Pushes back on bitcoin maximalists who dismiss proof of stake as illegitimate while bitcoin itself runs a large energy deficit.

An EU proof of work ban is premature but useful for forcing debate about decentralization metrics and whether a useful proof of work could exist.

Argues proof of stake governance is more open than both central banking and patented ASIC supply chains, since anyone can buy in and gain a say.

Recalls mining bitcoin on CPUs and GPUs in the early days versus today's ASIC scarcity and chip shortages.

Pushes back on critics who quote his line that Cardano is not his out of context, stressing it belongs to the community.

Reads out and reacts to a hostile, trolling question live on stream.

Answers a question about his COVID vaccination status, noting the Pfizer CEO still calls him unvaccinated despite two shots and two infections.

Personal attacks spiked once he questioned COVID policy, comparing his experience to Joe Rogan's.

Declines to weigh in on Hedera since he hasn't yet read its whitepaper.

Addresses current Cardano network congestion, saying more parameter updates are coming before the June hard fork delivers an order of magnitude performance jump.

Cardano is handling real adversarial load, DDoS attempts, and mempool saturation exactly as lab simulations predicted.

Input endorsers and pipelining, which shift Cardano's bottleneck from consensus to the network stack, previewing the upcoming Ouroboros Leios paper.

Points to the Babel fees blog post as part of the economic updates needed to fully exploit the extended UTXO model.

He wants to write a governance book first, and memoirs later in retirement.

Reflects on the gap between the public Charles persona attacked online and the person he actually is, and how he lets criticism roll off him.

A book only has value if it carries real wisdom and productive lessons, not just feelings or gossip.

Keeping a journal to capture decisions and observations in case they later prove historically significant, citing his time in the Ethiopian civil war.

Speculates Cardano could grow into a trillion dollar network of a billion people, potentially becoming infrastructure for national ID and e-voting systems.

Argues smartphone platforms aren't truly open since Apple and Google act as gatekeepers even over largely open source stacks like Android.

He hates cryptocurrency projects that patent their technology, since it hands one group legal control that hurts Fortune 500 and government adoption.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft's curated app ecosystems drove mass smartphone adoption but concentrated power, and wishes an open phone like Librem or Copperhead OS would catch on.

Warns that Cardano running on proprietary curated infrastructure creates a cat and mouse dynamic, pointing to MetaMask's recent restrictive decisions.

The clinical research behind psilocybin for PTSD and depression, citing Johns Hopkins studies and Michael Pollan's book.

EEG guided meditation research suggests it may reset the brain's default mode network similarly to psilocybin, without needing the drug.

Fields an internship question from a Wyoming PhD student formalizing elliptic curve cryptography, asking for supervisor details and naming frameworks like Jasmine and EasyCrypt.

Recommends supersingular isogeny based elliptic curve cryptography, David Jao's work, as a promising post-quantum research direction.

Sizes formal verification of elliptic curve cryptography as a multi-year, PhD-scale effort, comparing it to the decade-long seL4 microkernel verification project.

The PhD student to have his advisor reach out directly to arrange the internship.

Gives a quick shoutout to a fan named Crypto Buff.

He'd love to keep doing IOG interviews and is building a home podcast studio.

Recaps a ranch gathering of 34 guests discussing algorithmically generated music built for competitive, audience facing gameplay.

Sees Cardano becoming a hub for music NFTs, IP, microtransactions, and rap battle style PvP competitions to drive mass adoption.

Despite being a FOSS advocate he uses every major OS, including Qubes OS for high security work.

Recalls relying heavily on Linux for Sage and LaTeX work, but says he now uses tablets like Android and iOS more than desktop for daily productivity.

Names his favorite cigar, the Arturo Fuente Hemingway.

Pulls up citation counts and the exact title of David Jao's post-quantum supersingular isogeny signature paper for the PhD student.

Hasn't yet read Ray Dalio's Changing World Order, noting he finds it a bit pro-China leaning.

Admits a backlog of over 60 books and wishes accelerated learning could let him read several a week.

Worries Apple's M1 chip's tight hardware integration could make it much harder to run Linux or other open operating systems on future Macs.

Walks through the M1's system on chip design, folding CPU, GPU, memory, and radios into one package for big efficiency gains over the older northbridge era.

Confirms WebAssembly support for the Cardano stack is being explored as a good long term strategy.

A chain agnostic language like Reach, which he used on Algorand, could plausibly be bridged to Cardano via a compiler.

Confirms, in a quick aside, that the fireplace behind him is electric.

Confirms February's Cardano update already shipped as a major update, not a hard fork, since no ledger rules changed.

Admits he's tired, worn down, and a bit disappointed today, but okay.

Names Iron Man and Doctor Strange as his favorite MCU characters.

Jokes about needing a literary agent himself when asked if he knows any good ones.

Picks favorite firearms by category: the Glock 19 pistol, Benelli M4 shotgun, and Scar 17S rifle.

Shows off a prop rifle and the Longmire coat he bought at Overland Expo.

He's hiring a security detail of law enforcement and military veterans given rising personal threats, and points to open job listings.

Explains he doesn't personally fly his Black Hawk, relying on three pilots including one currently deployed in a war, and notes learning to fly it himself would take years.

He bought the Black Hawk, upgraded with a Lima engine, for ranch transport and wildfire response after six major fires in 2021, and is still navigating FAA restricted category rules.

Recommends Python as the best beginner programming language given the abundance of free courses, with JavaScript a close second.

Building ranch infrastructure himself, blasting a mountain road and trenching fiber for gigabit internet via a microwave tower.

On wildfire risk, says sprinklers help a little, but losing the ranch's forests would be the real loss, not just structures.

Confirms the ranch's grass-fed bison graze year round on the property, correcting its size to 11,000 acres.

JavaScript developers not to jump straight to Plutus, suggesting they learn Solidity and build on the Mamba sidechain instead, since Plutus targets high assurance, high performance main chain work.

Confirms he made a large personal donation to a Boulder area cause honoring an old friend.

Wraps the AMA, thanking everyone for a fun hour before heading to another engagement.

Previews Consensus in June and a future Cardano360 update as the next major community touchpoints.