AMA 09/08/2020

Opens broadcasting live from Colorado, joking about a 90 degree day followed by a surprise snowstorm that forced him to cover the tomato garden.

It is September 8th 2020 and reflects on a chaotic year with major Cardano progress alongside ETC and political turmoil.

Mocks media coverage projecting 260,000 coronavirus cases from the Sturgis motorcycle rally despite only 260 confirmed cases.

Applies the same epidemiological models used for Sturgis to BLM protests, arguing the media ignores the implied case count there.

Complains that political disagreement gets him told to shut up by parts of his own community despite the numbers being consistent.

Gives a Cardano progress update, promising more detail on Goguen at the upcoming product update and pushing every team to accelerate delivery.

He is personally accelerating Daedalus development and parallelizing workstreams while tendering contracts for new features.

Reports Voltaire ballots slipped past the tentative September 7th date and promises an exact date after talking with Dor in early September 2020.

Targets an October voting season to wake the DC Fund, praising IdeaScale as a partner and citing Gitcoin as a model being studied for Catalyst.

Praises Rick McCracken's grassroots community roadmap effort as proof of the wisdom of crowds when the community self organizes.

Plans to help add structure to the community roadmap conversation and connect it with Dor's team and IdeaScale's project management tools.

Promises an open letter to the Cardano Foundation demanding a line by line response to every item on the finished community roadmap.

Introduces new marketing director Lisa and floats bringing her onto The Cardano Effect to explain her strategy and background.

Outlines Lisa's first priority as product and comparison marketing before later expanding into campaign marketing for specific demographics.

Updates on ETC work: a checkpointing presentation delivered, talks with Sergio Lerner at RSK, and outreach to VeraBlock for similar presentations.

Plans a hash algorithm comparison presentation from Roman Oleynikov, a treasury system meeting, and a status update on Mantis development.

Confirms negotiations with Runtime Verification to resurrect IELE, calling it a seven figure project with a firm that has grown quickly.

Announces a $125,000 donation to the newly forming Haskell Foundation to unify the fragmented Haskell community, citing talks with Simon Peyton Jones.

Answers whether a $10 ADA price and mass selling would hurt security, arguing higher prices make holders more careful about delegation and harder to attack.

Regrets not being able to travel for Cardano's third anniversary due to coronavirus but floats a special virtual community event instead.

Responds to a rant about holacracy by clarifying that IOG is not the only driver of Cardano since Emurgo and the Cardano Foundation both have real roles.

Distinguishes genuine adoption focused marketing from Tron style pump marketing, citing Stellar's token burn collapse as a cautionary tale.

Argues now is the right time to turn up marketing since stake pools, Goguen and Voltaire are close, framing IOG's job as documentation and product marketing.

Defines campaign marketing as tailoring outreach to narrow demographics like specific developer profiles, distinct from broad product marketing.

Assigns campaign marketing toward stake pool operators, exchanges and regulators to the Cardano Foundation, with Emurgo focused on Asian markets.

Frames the bottom up community roadmap as a discovered superpower the ecosystem can reuse to tackle its broader backlog of challenges.

Addresses a hacked Italian YouTube channel running an impersonation giveaway scam and asks victims' audiences to stop blaming and harassing him.

Fields a question on preventing illegal content like child pornography from ever landing on the Cardano blockchain.

Proposes replacing offending on chain content with a hash so integrity is preserved while nodes can choose not to propagate it.

Breaks pruning into offensive, cost driven and economic categories and commits to making protocol level pruning a 2021 research priority.

Denies laying off Ben or Casey, says he was not consulted on their departure and has even offered Ben a job.

Lisa's professional background will be covered once she appears on a future Cardano Effect episode.

The updated security video is still delayed while he reviews generous community feedback.

Names his current headphones as the Sony WH-1000XM4, Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 2 earbuds, and AirPods Pro for calls.

Clarifies Cardano has no formal relationship with Kadena beyond both being active in the new Haskell Foundation.

Predicts Cardano can surpass Ethereum and Polkadot by pursuing whole country deals like Georgia and Ethiopia instead of staying a small niche chain.

Warns against first mover complacency, comparing Ethereum's early dominance to Ruby on Rails' faded popularity.

On ETC's SHA-3 proof of work debate, says he is agnostic and calls the fight boring compared to building a real treasury system.

Argues 51 percent attack resistance comes from real utility and economic cost, not from lobbying regulators for protection.

Explains why he pushes Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash improvement proposals rather than Bitcoin ones, since Bitcoin governance is far too slow.

Calls Bitcoin a cult devoted to Satoshi's original design and says his own mission is solving problems with principles, not chasing moon boy riches.

Briefly comments on Peter Gazi's Proof of Space Time research at IOHK as an interesting idea.

Opens a long AI answer recommending Norvig and Russell's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach and Russell's Human Compatible as essential reading.

Splits AI into superhuman narrow capability versus general intelligence, noting deepfakes went from an impossible dissertation topic to a Facebook toy.

Compares AGI research to unsolved math problems that wreck academic careers, explaining why wealthy outsiders like Elon Musk end up funding it instead.

Warns narrow AI carries no built in ethics, using target painting drone software as an example of capability without moral judgment.

Cites Max Tegmark's Life 3.0 on the wisdom gap between invention and safety, calling AI the second extinction level technology after nuclear weapons.

References Francois Chollet's work on defining intelligence while arguing an evolving AGI's values may diverge sharply from human values.

Predicts a newly sentient AGI could surpass all of human achievement within hours and reason its way to removing humanity for its own preservation.

Compares the lack of AI regulation to pandemic preparedness failures, since prevention never gets credit until disaster already happened.

Suggests blockchain governance may eventually need an AI or AGI interpreter to act like a supreme court for constitutional disputes and hard forks.

Reacts calmly to his depiction in Camila Russo's The Infinite Machine, calling it one valid perspective among many on Ethereum's history.

Argues Ethereum's rise involved as much luck as skill, running through counterfactuals like NXT and Dan Larimer's path to make the point.

Defines his success as economic identity for the unbanked, invoking the largely unknown Norman Borlaug as a model of impact without fame.

On Russia banning crypto staking and trading, predicts Russians will simply route activity through companies incorporated abroad.

Uneven stake pool block production as a natural Pareto principle effect that will gradually spread out over time.

Addresses the AMD Ryzen firmware bug that produced weak random numbers, noting a compensating patch was added for unpatched processors.

Uses a beach sand grain analogy to explain how a broken random number generator drastically raises the odds of a wallet seed collision.

Jokingly blames AMD for the Ryzen bug given how much money the company makes, then jabs at Lisa for asking the question.

Grumbles that the RTX 3080 launched right after he bought a 2080 Ti, but decides not to upgrade since he no longer games.

Explains why bridging ETC into Cardano benefits ADA holders, since any external chain consuming Cardano resources has to pay for it.

Admits he has never heard of Flare's Spark token when asked about it directly.

Shares fond memories of visiting Prague while greeting a viewer from the Czech Republic.

Delegation portfolios, not manual pool picking, are the right way to help small IoT and community stake pools get more delegation.

Confirms he will attend the Wyoming blockchain hackathon in person in 2020.

Distinguishes his personal C Fund venture capital, which he alone directs, from the community controlled DC Fund treasury grants.

Greets a viewer from South Africa and reiterates DC Fund stands for the decentralized Cardano fund.

Confirms the DC Fund is separate from Emurgo's own investment fund, then jokes that the promised new IOG website still is not ready.

Responds to a comparison with Carl Sagan and Jacque Fresco by insisting his vision is achievable rather than utopian if people believe in it.

Explains why the Cardano Foundation cannot speak as openly as he does, citing his personal legal exposure and choice to lead transparently anyway.

Tangents into incentive theory, using anti war rhetoric on both political sides and Bill Gates' philanthropy to argue incentives explain behavior better than stated values.

Gives a Bittrex update, saying a newly committed speed patch may resolve their wallet sync issue in early September 2020 with follow up statements planned.

Proposes delegation portfolios as the answer for auto delegation, letting curated lists reflect preferences instead of picking individual pools.

Frames delegation as a trust relationship, with portfolios letting institutional or values driven investors like Sharia compliant funds delegate safely.

Epoch length could change under full Voltaire governance if there is ever a theoretical reason to adjust that parameter.

No PhD or even a high school diploma is required to work at IOHK, since merit and capability matter more than credentials.

Frames credentials as a risk mitigation tool for cautious institutions rather than proof of talent, contrasting credentialed orgs with risk taking ones.

Confirms his upcoming computer science course, taught in JavaScript and drawing on Eric Elliott's Composing Software, will prepare students to approach Plutus.

Confirms paper wallets will support staking through a QR code once the new paper wallet design ships.

Greets a viewer from Abu Dhabi and, asked where else he would live, names the US's regional diversity plus Switzerland, Japan and Rwanda.

Claims Jeffrey Epstein was killed rather than dying by suicide, speculating Ghislaine Maxwell will stay silent out of fear.

Speculates ex US presidents keep secret service protection for life to remind them they are being watched into silence.

Cites Reagan, LBJ and Eisenhower as examples of presidents who were quietly sequestered or died shortly after leaving office.

Confirms a Joe Rogan podcast appearance is coming and jokes that Trump will suffer a health collapse shortly after leaving office.

Predicts Biden will be removed via the 25th Amendment within two years of taking office, installing Kamala Harris as president.

Jokes that this very livestream already functions as his podcast when asked if he would ever start one.

Confirms a Cardano stablecoin collateralized by locked up ADA is actively in development, led internally by Bruno.

Predicts blockchain based identity systems will eventually replace social security numbers within the next 25 to 50 years as identity theft worsens.

Sides with Stephen Wolfram over Eric Weinstein, criticizing Weinstein's dismissive attitude toward explaining his own theory of everything.

Argues universities are where creativity goes to die, since their rule bound optimization only rewards conformity until late career prestige.

Reveals Harvard Extension School as an open enrollment backdoor into the Harvard brand, calling elite school scarcity mostly manufactured elitism.

Jabs that Harvard's $35 billion endowment undercuts any claim that elite universities are resource constrained.

Argues peer review does not require universities since many domain expert reviewers already work in industry, citing Simon Peyton Jones at Microsoft.

Predicts removing academic subsidies would shrink output like gender studies papers while boosting applied engineering, physics and math research.

Closes the university discussion by questioning whether research institutes must stay vertically integrated with their host universities.

Realizes the stream reconnected after YouTube kicked him off with no rejoin option, apologizes, and wraps the AMA short of his usual two hour mark.