UPD 09/04/2021

Broadcasts from Colorado ahead of a Wyoming football game and previews a whiteboard talk answering Alonzo testnet builders' questions about access control, concurrency and throughput.

Uses a bubble sort analogy to explain balancing fast delivery to market against giving tooling and community pedagogy time to mature.

Argues competitive pressure from faster moving protocols justifies shortening the long, safe testnet burn in period.

Revisits his 2016 Why Cardano paper and its original idea of a settlement layer paired with computation layers.

No single computing model satisfies every use case, cost profile or concurrency requirement, motivating multiple computation layers.

Compares UTXO accounting to Ethereum's account model, likening the split to functional versus imperative programming.

Introduces the three computation layers covered in the talk: Plutus extended UTXO, an EVM side chain, and Yellow, plus Catalyst as a governance chain.

Catalyst is built directly into its own chain because its complex voting protocols would be too costly as ordinary smart contracts.

The EVM computation layer as a familiar environment for Ethereum developers, with their existing web3 tools and libraries.

Contrasts the EVM's need for global state knowledge with UTXO's local concerns, noting why this makes sharding harder for account based systems.

Details Yellow as a register based virtual machine built on LLVM and the K framework, aiming at universality and eventual C and C++ support.

The settlement layer's core design goal as interoperability between the settlement layer and computation layers for assets, information and users.

Side chain computation results flow back to the main chain on a steady, block by block heartbeat.

Lists efficiency techniques for that heartbeat, including batching, compressed representations and NFTs for access control, alongside distributing load across many UTXOs.

Frames the methodical block heartbeat as a fundamental constraint shared by Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cardano, with Hydra's off chain channels as one way around it.

Argues extended UTXO and Plutus were designed for layer two solutions from the start, unlike Bitcoin Script, which has limited the Lightning Network.

Walks through Cardano's development spiral: Byron transactions, metadata payloads, native assets, and now on chain Plutus smart contracts.

Points to metadata payloads as what enabled the Ethiopia education deal and other supply chain use cases before smart contracts existed.

Plutus smart contracts unlock interoperability bridges, letting assets and users move between centralized and decentralized side chains.

Richer spending policies enable complex tokens like the Djed algorithmic stablecoin and Marlowe financial contracts.

Addresses concurrency questions around decentralized exchanges, citing Occam.fi's two articles moving from raising the challenge to solving it.

Insists off chain batching is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation, and says Cardano achieved programmable smart contracts on a UTXO model, solving a problem Bitcoin left unsolved for over a decade.

Every on chain versus off chain design decision ultimately comes down to concurrency and security trade-offs, using oracles as the example.

Compares fully on chain deterministic oracle designs against off chain federated or bonded trust models, and applies the same logic to DEX batching and matching.

Emergent interactions once computation layers connect, such as an EVM style contract calling into a Plutus contract.

Explains why an expensive to establish root of trust, like Bitcoin's proof of work, lets a network build efficient light infrastructure on top of it.

Ethereum's move to proof of stake is converging toward a Cardano style architecture, and lays out the Ouroboros roadmap of Praos now, a Genesis upgrade in 2021, building toward a faster OBFT mode.

OBFT with stake pools as a trusted quorum could reach thousand plus TPS, citing the RapidChain sharding paper, and introduces Mamba, a side chain project for Ethereum and ELA support.

Cardano acting as a side chain to itself and cites the Parallel Chains and Prism research papers on block parallelism.

Stake pool operators gain new revenue streams by running additional parallel chain infrastructure.

Lists parallel R&D tracks running concurrently: Mamba side chains, Hydra, on chain optimizations, and blue ocean research like concurrent state machines.

Eight development companies are building DEX and oracle demos with live code walkthroughs for the September conference.

A feedback loop where Plutus Pioneers and partner companies surface new feature ideas, like Ergo's read only UTXO concept.

Estimates six to twelve months, roughly two to four hard fork combinator events, for canonical development patterns to solidify, pushing back on claims Cardano will not be useful in the meantime.

Cites internal benchmarking showing Cardano running about two orders of magnitude cheaper than Ethereum.

Positions Cardano as a platform for lending, insurance and bond issuance via Marlowe, not for millions of concurrent interactive users.

Explains why rich, high concurrency consumer experiences need bespoke domains rather than the base settlement layer, and introduces encapsulation so a failing domain cannot cascade back to the main chain.

Side chains can mint alternative fuel tokens with their own economics, like demurrage or inflation, without ever risking ADA.

Mass scale smart contract usage will require off chain processing like Hydra, optimistic rollups and state channels, just as Ethereum needs them.

Runs through block size math showing why unlimited on chain scaling to millions of transactions per second is not sustainable long term.

Recaps six years of design work drawing on 35 years of functional programming research to reach resource determinism and local processing.

The September 12 hard fork turns on the core on chain Plutus smart contract feature alongside the Plutus Application Backend.

Explains why a phased hard fork rollout was chosen over a long testnet period that would have delayed stablecoins and interoperability.

The development stack matures over time through abstraction, templates, off chain services like Infura, and emerging standards.

Developers are already using NFTs as unique access control identifiers inside Plutus contracts.

Announces four vendors will present formal verification of smart contracts at the conference, and outlines one more hard fork combinator event in 2021 before EVM, Yellow and Catalyst side chains, including a complex DEX, turn on in 2022.

New capabilities create new engineering demands, citing the proxy keys and partial delegation work that followed Shelley, and criticizes an industry habit of citing vanity metrics like raw block size instead of understanding the interconnected system.

Argues establishing a root of trust is the hardest and most valuable thing a blockchain can do, calling Cardano the largest proof of stake system, a goal set out in his 2016 Why Cardano paper, with a Mithril update coming.

Credits the stable foundation for letting different, even competing, development teams work in parallel by design, and dismisses Reddit, Telegram and Twitter noise as FUD.

Reflects on how extraordinarily hard it is to build a scalable, decentralized, Byzantine fault tolerant, programmable system, something Bitcoin's community has wrestled with for over a decade.

Choosing a Haskell based functional language to connect Plutus to the formal methods and high assurance world, with concurrency achieved through off chain interaction, state channels and clever UTXO load balancing with NFTs.

Points to independent development firms and the Cardano Stack Exchange delivering solutions within months, noting anyone unhappy with the model is free to build an alternative on cheaper OBFT instead of proof of work.

Summarizes what ships on the 12th: full programmability, spending policy, interoperability, stablecoins and Marlowe contracts, with DEXes, oracles and bespoke high compute domains maturing over time.

Argues you build infrastructure, tools and abstractions to teach struggling developers rather than discard prior blockchain innovations, framing blockchain as a service as a new stake pool revenue stream.

Lists benefits of careful design: babel fees, predictable fees, resource determinism and local processing, paving an easier path to sharding experiments with Plutus and parallel chains.

Emphasizes zero regressions: security, upgrade ability, and asset and metadata standards are all preserved, calling the roadmap a marathon, not a sprint.

Rebuts the idea that a system must do everything today to compete, noting nothing from voting to central bank currencies truly runs on blockchain yet and real adoption takes years to decades.

The industry has no real standards yet since even Ethereum is radically redesigning itself, predicting competition will commoditize around cost and product market fit.

Concurrency tutorials with live code from partner companies are coming at the conference, alongside a third Plutus Pioneers cohort with the beta Plutus Application Backend and interoperable side chains from partners like DC Spark.

Reiterates there is no Cardano 2.0 rewrite planned, just a continuous spiral built on intellectual honesty about Bitcoin's UTXO strengths, with the CSL and CCL diversity concept dating back to his 2016 paper.

Calls September 12 a major day like Mary and Shelley before it, part of a quarterly hard fork combinator cadence balancing safety with continuous improvements to wallets and light clients.

Reflects that the hardest achievement was the development flow itself, high assurance code and predictable releases, likening Cardano's backward compatibility commitment to Wolfram Language's decades long track record.

Prefers workshops, training, the 3000 graduate Plutus Pioneer program, hackathons and the Cardano Stack Exchange over social media, since cynics dismiss announcements regardless of substance.

Shows off a gift, a flip toy reading happy octopus one way and sad octopus the other, as a reminder not to take things too seriously.

Reflects that Cardano's goal is to endure for 50 to 100 years as the most balanced hybridization of Bitcoin's and Ethereum's innovations, achieving third generation scale, governance and interoperability.

Shares team numbers: over 500 people at the company, 200 plus full time on Cardano, 12 partner development companies, and a still growing billion dollar Catalyst fund, with Cardano360 and the September 25 conference as the next checkpoints.

He will never succumb to cynicism given the delicate balance of pushing innovation in a hundred billion dollar ecosystem, and defends Cardano's number one GitHub commit ranking against critics who call it gamed.

Argues Cardano is outpacing competitors since Ethereum is still building its own proof of stake root of trust, and defends the programming model's occasional inflexibility as deliberate, built for interoperability and resource determinism.

Calls these some of the hardest engineering problems in the world, explaining why Bitcoin still lacks Ethereum or Cardano style smart contracts despite serious efforts like Taproot and Simplicity given the trillion dollars at stake.

Cardano moves faster than Bitcoin's cautious, one shot pace while preserving value, evolving inclusively through Catalyst with universities and app developers shaping the system.

Calls the collective wisdom of a crowd of millions of like minded people, committed emotionally, philosophically and financially, the true heart and source of Cardano's value.

Credits peer review, formal methods and the hard fork combinator working together for a systematic, methodical pace of innovation built into the protocol's layered design from the start.

Calls the imminent Alonzo launch, eight days away, the ecosystem's most exciting event, expecting thousands of new developers to force faster tooling evolution with no regressions along the way.

Invites skeptics to attend the conference or hackathons, or take six months away and judge the ecosystem's progress on return, calling this an adult, professional project with real careers and capital at stake.

Restates the founding mission of a financial operating system for unbanked countries, tracing back to his 2014 TED talk in Bermuda, with an October trip to Kenya to discuss microfinance on a blockchain for the first time.

Contrasts people who just consume Reddit and Twitter opinions with those actually building, referencing Mike Novogratz's weird cult comment and the Paul Harvey method of telling people what you will do, doing it, then telling them what you did.

Signs off heading to the Wyoming versus Montana State game, noting his father's ties to Montana State as an alum before medical school.