AMA 05/19/2021

Broadcasting from Colorado on a bloody Wednesday: ADA fell from about 2.40 to a dollar three and rebounded to 1.60, while Bitcoin is down 35 percent and Ethereum 45 percent.

The AMA is raw and uncensored, and fans sent in a beautiful NFT piece and a metal plate while the team consults with NFT marketplaces.

Alonzo will be released in color coded stages, Alonzo Blue and then Alonzo White, and what each stage means gets explained at the Cardano360 event in eight days.

Week seven of the Plutus Pioneer Program is underway, with about 500 of the 1500 people in the developer Discord extremely active and eight development companies retained to build on Cardano.

Really want to see a Uniswap clone and AgeUSD deployed on Cardano, but will not name DeFi projects because that is an unfair competitive advantage.

The date and venue for the Goguen Summit get announced at the end of the month, for those lucky enough to attend in person.

On the bloodbath: you cannot take 900 percent gains without expecting pullbacks, crypto is a volatile frontier market.

Reconstructing society is worth trillions, but just as nobody reading the Whole Earth Catalog could have picked Google or Facebook in 1992, markets cannot price innovation and swing from over enthusiasm to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

China has enormous influence over Bitcoin through hash rate, BTC ownership and capital control evasion, so every move it makes hurts Bitcoin, while the third generation chains are decoupling.

Will be in Miami in June for a community event, a venue that fits only about 300 people, with a speech, drinks and free swag.

Never actually met Michael Saylor: the old guard rarely talks and is usually condescending, and a bar in Wyoming beats a boardroom in New York.

The Lex Fridman interview records June 11 and release is up to him, Tether swinging between 89 cents and a dollar ten is surprising for a pegged asset, and Toronto's lockdown is not necessary.

Elon Musk never called back even after friends texted him the video, and the point of it was that enormous work goes into a competitive cryptocurrency, even small caps like Harmony and Solana, while Doge is a copy of a copy built on an old Litecoin code base.

A good engineering team could deliver that Doge roadmap in one to two years, but just increasing block size or throughput does not work and that was settled back in 2011 and 2012 by people like Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn.

Being the CEO of PayPal qualifies you to speak on crypto about as much as being CEO of Western Union does, and the real disappointment is that he is not serious about improving Doge.

It would be amazing to get SpaceX and Tesla engineers working part time on a cryptocurrency, but this is about placating ego and vanity and the people following the pied piper are the ones who pay.

On Mark Cuban's shark tank jab: probably richer than him at a much younger age with fewer responsibilities, and the exchange drew over 200,000 YouTube views, about 20,000 new followers and press coverage in the Independent.

Inviting somebody to your home is not a red flag: the governor of Wyoming and plenty of billionaires have petted the donkeys over the years, and it was a sign of respect for a new entrant.

Crypto is nuanced, with sexy up and coming things like snark technology and roads to nowhere like Nakamoto proof of work, and that conversation over whiskey was never a pitch to buy ADA.

Farm animals and an AeroGarden with nine herb pods keep you grounded no matter how big you get, because the things people do do not define them, how they act and what they do for others does.

The move from IOHK to IOG means a rebrand, a redesign and a new website and domain, with heavy personal involvement in June; favorite philosophers are Bertrand Russell, Saul Kripke and Alfred Tarski.

The Mithril paper is being submitted on April 27th and the Hydra update lands in April 2021, with a Hydra section in the Cardano360 episode and a recording on Mithril too.

Not moving to Puerto Rico: Bitcoin maximalists expect royal treatment in Wyoming without having created jobs or the 24 new laws, then run to Puerto Rico to evade taxes.

Paying taxes is fine as long as they are used responsibly, and the counterproposal to fleeing is to just make more money; people leave California and New York over crime, homelessness, infrastructure and traffic, not tax rates.

Leibniz beat Newton to calculus but Newton published first, and like Newton he was an occultist though he never played with mercury; 50 Cent was shot nine times, hence the nine millimeter.

Lagos is a beautiful city and worth seeing more of Nigeria, and there is an office in Buenos Aires through sister company Atix Labs, led by Alan Verbner and part of the Cardano family for five years.

Jim Caldwell has signed up and received a grant for a Mastering Cardano book as a project of the University of Wyoming Blockchain Technology Lab, with a first draft due late in 2021.

Met government officials in the Philippines about a special economic zone near Freeport in Bataan, with Joseph Garcia and the governor, and offered to create jobs there.

The Illuminati obviously do not exist, Greece and the Aegean are worth the trip, and the Cardano logo is not misaligned, that is your lazy eye.

The video game company will be based in Wheatland, Wyoming and probably start in 2022, after Hoskinson Biotechnologies, already incorporated with his dad and brother.

Would love to redo the Gold Box engine behind Pool of Radiance, Pool of Darkness and Gateway to the Savage Frontier with beautiful graphics and a title every six to twelve months, and also owns the Legends of Valor IP for a triple A game.

The third idea is licensing the Warhammer 40k universe from Games Workshop for an RTS continuing what Dawn of War started, plus a first person shooter that has never been done right.

The engine would be open sourced for game development pedagogy and a world can be filled out as sequels the way Bethesda did with The Elder Scrolls, and generative dialogue games in the line of Zork and Event 0 are about to get good with GPT-3.

Hyperbolic and non-Euclidean geometry engines, alternative physics and hyperdimensional spaces are cool theoretical game mechanics, and soundtracks could be algorithmically generated with Euterpea from the Haskell community, backed by a symphony in Wheatland.

There is no fountain of youth in children: real anti-aging means a hyperbaric chamber, exosomes, intermittent fasting or caloric restriction and NAD, and the QAnon adrenochrome crowd cannot connect to reality.

Something big is brewing around 5G and Cardano, and people are going to be pleasantly surprised.

The Ethiopia contract is signed and executed and now in execution mode, hiring toward 40 or 50 staff by the end of 2021, with updates at Cardano360 as the brand broadens into IO360.

No consensus algorithm is Turing complete, that question is about the programming language: Plutus is quasi Turing complete because it is gas metered, which amounts to the same thing.

His dad is from Montana, growing up in Miles City and Big Timber where his grandfather had a ranch, and those memories are why he bought a ranch of his own.

Ergo will only be huge if the community wants it to be.

His CU Boulder email is no longer maintained, and anyone who lived through the Dan Hawkins era has very different feelings about the Colorado Buffaloes.

CU Boulder let students name the cafeteria and they picked the Alfred Packer Grill after a known cannibal, tagline to serve humanity, and the campus has wonderful mathematicians like David Grant, Peter Elliott and Don Monk, the last person he knew connected to Tarski.

Mark Cuban has an open invitation to the ranch, and thoughts on the Horizen project stay private, though Rob is a good man who just finished his finance PhD.

Proof of work dramatically consumes more energy and is significantly slower than proof of stake, and AgeUSD matters because people like value stability.

For smooth drinking whiskey it is Chivas Regal 25 or Hibiki Harmony, and for an angry whiskey that kicks you in the face an older Macallan at 21 or 25 years.

The chat with Sophia is scheduled for the Cardano360 episode, and the plan is to trip her up with a liar paradox unless she has a Tarski module.

Kasparov would beat Bobby Fischer because he has the benefit of modern chess theory, and the favorite Avenger is Iron Man followed by Doctor Strange.

Norman Borlaug was super humble and saved a billion lives, one person saving a billion people.

Will be up in Laramie soon after talking with University of Wyoming President Seidel about collaborations, and a big check is going to the university.

The ask at Wyoming is a smart contract engineering institute alongside the chip project and a high performance computing group, because funding research centers is the day job and has produced 105 papers accepted at venues like Crypto and Eurocrypt.

The moral failure line about Mark Cuban was simple: you can politely decline an invitation into someone's home, but do not insult them, and there was never a request for money.

Tim Tebow coming back is smart business, a hometown hero fills the stadium for the Jaguars whether he plays tight end or one snap, and the NFL's hatred of him is irrational given his hospital in the Philippines and his charity work.

Fan service is good business, like Darth Vader appearing in Rogue One or Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian, and the Jaguars are satisfying their fan base.

Still loves hockey and was a huge Colorado Avalanche fan.

Has known Peter Schiff since 2007 from the Ron Paul movement alongside Tom Woods, back when he was called Doctor Doom, and Euro Pacific Capital has been selling the same buy gold story ever since.

Schiff's claim that Bitcoin can be replicated infinitely is materially false: there will only ever be 21 million, and value comes from users, markets, use and utility, not from the code being copyable.

Bitcoin has every property you love about gold with none of the downsides, infinitely divisible, teleportable, almost free to store and programmable, and a fund manager paid to be the smart guy should not be stuck in 1933.

To the regenerative medicine and tissue engineering PhD looking for a job: the first task is to find his email address, then send the resume.

Staying level headed with crypto drama is easy for personal attacks, including the 4chan threads about his looks, weight and voice, because those people only know the public persona.

The Max Keiser attack came out of left field after dinners, panels and a friendly rapport, and being compared to Epstein for ratings makes you question your own judgment about people.

Calling Cardano a ghost chain as a major publication is criminally incompetent given the community, more than nine billion dollars of daily transaction volume and smart contracts being imminent.

A friend dismissing the five million person Ethiopia deal as just a press release hurt, because it took years of trust and relationship building to negotiate.

Charles the person is allowed to get upset, Charles the CEO is not: you work with people who have lied about you for the good of the company and the ecosystem, because you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.

Feeling out of your depth in your first year at university is normal, and the fix is to not overload your course load even if graduating takes longer.

Read 50 to 100 books a year, take a diverse set of courses including a drawing class, and his biggest regrets are never learning to paint and quitting the piano at 16.

If you do not know what you want, chase experiences first: be a paramedic for a year before committing to medicine and you learn early whether you can handle it.

Meeting the Apollo Neuro team about their heart rate variability band as a first biotech meeting with his dad and brother, the Air Force has some of the best medical programs, and the Dune saga is among the best science fiction ever written.

Getting into the aquaponics business and installing a koi pond, and each koi is getting a name.

Negotiating with Farmbox Foods, a Colorado startup, for a gourmet mushroom farm and a vertical hydroponic farm that can be bought with ADA, two modules in 2021 scaling to ten, powered by 250 kilowatts of solar.

Georgia Boys is the barbecue recommendation in Colorado, and the wall carving is Odin fighting Fenrir at Ragnarok with Gungnir and his two ravens, next to a da Vinci drawing and painting.

On proof of history: storage protocols like Permacoin are familiar territory, where you must preserve randomly picked leaves of a Merkle tree so participating in every round requires holding the history, and the hard part is incentivizing data relay, not just preservation.

Metallica is a good band but not as good as Megadeth.

A blockchain file can be as big as you want it to be, blockchains can run into the exabytes.

The greatest accomplishment is curating this community and watching it grow, including a letter from a 70 year old Berkeley alumna who volunteered for a non-existent presidential campaign.

Goguen's release matters not as a milestone but as the foundation that unlocks community creativity, hundreds of DeFi protocols and tokens nobody could have designed, and being a first mover is like founding an academic field and coming back 50 years later.

About 200 people work directly on Cardano across a few different companies, with IOG taking the lion's share at over a hundred.

Thinks highly of Alex and Ergo for three reasons: he is smart and disciplined, a really good engineer, and in eight years he has never lied or taken advantage of a situation.

Cardano is named after the mathematician Gerolamo Cardano, and the day usually starts around 6am, sometimes 5.

Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica needs two volumes before it finally proves that one plus one equals two, and yes he is a Scorpio.

Joe Rogan will happen at some point, but Lex Fridman comes first and probably Tim Pool after that.

The favorite Star Trek series is Deep Space Nine and the favorite character is Garak, a phenomenally written character.

An institute for formal mathematics is being set up at Carnegie Mellon under Jeremy Avigad, and Lean is likely where the future work gets written, with resource aware ML worth a look while you are there.

Android over Apple, whiskey over beer, and Lord of the Rings over Star Wars.

Doge can absolutely be ported: issue a Cardano native asset called Doge and airdrop it to the existing distribution, and the Elon Musk video should have ended with the line that you could just use Cardano.

Deals with self doubt and anxiety all the time as a very neurotic person, loves fast cars, and Game of Thrones only counts up to season six.

Picked Wolfram over Chainlink because Steve is a good friend and Wolfram does not have an army of trolls attacking him online, and a layer two application should work with every chain.

His birthday is the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes Day, which is why he is a revolutionary and a Ron Paul fanatic; peanut butter and honey is a no-no and the donkeys are named Prince and Piper.

Religion gives people hope, guidance and strength when they need it, a very useful mental crutch.

Macho Man Randy Savage over Hulk Hogan, and lately the favorite villain of all time is Thanos.

The biggest challenge in his life has been building IO Global.

It took about three years from starting his first cryptocurrency company to becoming a millionaire, a billionaire very briefly in 2017 and again in 2021, and wealth mostly changes whether you still budget for groceries and gas.

At that level you can isolate yourself completely and become delusional about how special you are, or stay integrated, keep going to work and to the restaurant, and mostly fade in.

As a billionaire you leave a 500 dollar tip without thinking, hire people because you want to create jobs, and can become a custodian of things you love, founding a society to keep ancient artifacts from being looted or destroyed.

The surreal part is who reaches out: Jillian Michaels from The Biggest Loser, Justin Roiland of Rick and Morty as an ADA fan, and musicians who will play a private party.

There is no one left to say no to you at that point so self discipline is everything, and otherwise nothing changes, you still wake up with a gout attack and animals to feed.

Human beings are tribal creatures addicted to status, titles and artificial hierarchies because those things got them food and survival, and the most enlightened people escape that and chase higher pursuits.

Getting fired from Ethereum was one of the best things that ever happened, partly because those relationships would not have worked and diversity of approach creates more innovation.

The second lesson is that whatever you think you are can be taken from you overnight, like a surgeon who develops Parkinson's and has to let his identity go for the good of his patients.

Wealth lets you change laws, empower people or destroy them, and when the scales get balanced the question is what you did with what you were given and who you did it for.

The favorite part of the show is lending through Kiva, a microfinance site that lets you give loans worldwide, like Anxhela in an Albanian village who needs 2,950 dollars to buy a cow.

The chat picks Haiti, where Gary needs 1,425 dollars to restock his grocery store with rice, millet, sugar, milk and maize, so he gets the full loan through PayPal.

The portfolio now holds eight loans, in Togo, the Philippines, Mexico, Peru, Kenya, Cambodia and Senegal, about 4,675 dollars lent with most already repaying.

The goal is peer to peer microfinance on Cardano paying lenders 5 to 10 percent, cutting out the middleman with sovereign guarantees and repayment rates above 90 percent, putting billions into the developing world.

Regions like Ethiopia and Afghanistan are zoned off from lending not for lack of borrowers but because of infrastructure problems and capital controls, which truly peer to peer lending would ignore.