2022-12-19 · timestamps by your name could be here

AMA 12/19/2022

89 entries

The year was brutal, with the market falling from 2.6 trillion to under 800 billion amid Luna, Celsius, and FTX.

Crypto Industry & Commentary bear market

People at the parties called Cardano a scam while praising FTX and Luna as safe, and now those face criminal charges.

Crypto Industry & Commentary reversal

The die hards kept building, shipping Vasil, writing papers, and assembling the Voltaire vision with CIP 1694 and the MBO.

Growth metrics look good even as reports claim Solana developer counts collapsed, since bear markets tell you who you really are.

Crypto Industry & Commentary developersSOL

It was the most stressful year, running what feels like five companies across a biotech firm, a clinic, bison, a restaurant, and a farm.

Personal & Off-topic stressventures

The company spans Lace, Prism, Midnight, crypto bison, and academic research, all at once.

Company & Team IdentusAtala PrismAtala

TVL shrank because ada's value fell over 73 percent even as the amount locked grew, which is why TVL is a terrible measurement.

Crypto Industry & Commentary metrictotal value locked

Just finished a two week fast, twelve days without eating, dropping from 242 to 225 pounds.

Personal & Off-topic fastinghealth

Some projects like Ardana and Orbis failed from mismanagement, announcing collapse over Twitter instead of seeking a bridge.

Ecosystem & Partnerships failure

2023 will be difficult because one political party got caught taking SBF money and now overreacts with talk of banning crypto.

Regulation & Legal banpoliticsSam Bankman-Fried +1

Institutions once relied upon are morally bankrupt, and the belief that these systems protect people from themselves is what keeps him going.

Vision & Philosophy

People are here to change the world, not for money, because money is just made up pieces of paper.

Vision & Philosophy purpose

The largest wealth transfer in US history just happened: wages fell 3.7 trillion while 3.9 trillion went to the top 500.

Vision & Philosophy inflation

Asking why Cardano is dumping while the whole market is down is a disingenuous, narrative driven question.

Community & Media price

Sidechain is a misnomer, and partner chains might be a better name so people do not feel they have to bend the knee.

Cardano Tech & Research sidechainsside chainside chains

Crypto is a protocol that gives everyone equal access, so you build one universal system rather than separate ones per constituency.

Vision & Philosophy

Ada is not already deflationary but it has a hard cap of 45 billion like Bitcoin, with a monotonically decreasing rate of growth.

Cardano Tech & Research supplydeflationBTC

The Lace wallet looks very likely to release in Q1 depending on the beta.

Roadmap & Product

Loaded questions carry a narrative that Cardano is failing, which is why they get pushback rather than a straight answer.

Community & Media

You have every right to set boundaries and fire toxic communities and people, even when they lash out and call you names.

Vision & Philosophy toxicity

Remove yourself when the other side has no desire to communicate, since arguing with them is like playing chess with a chicken.

Vision & Philosophy

On the immortality experiments, only one round of experimental exosomes so far, with peptides, hyperbarics, and stem cells in 2023.

Personal & Off-topic longevity

The fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility crushes a deuterium pellet with a laser battery to spark fusion.

Personal & Off-topic NIF

A million TPS is a vacuous target, and Hydra demos look modest because a single head is not the point.

Cardano Tech & Research transactions per second

Hydra lets a dapp batch off chain work, so a thousand such deployments give a thousandfold reduction and a synthetic high TPS.

Cardano Tech & Research batchingdecentralized applicationdApps +4

Cardano thinks in transactions per transaction, and input endorsers move throughput into a storage and network concern, not a consensus bottleneck.

Cardano Tech & Research TPT

There are two philosophies: naively do everything on chain and reach exabyte scale, or batch off chain with compressed on chain representations.

Cardano Tech & Research scalingphilosophyon-chain +3

The AMA is not a Cardano AMA, since IO works on Prism, Midnight, and the multi coin Lace wallet, and has never been here to shill Cardano.

IO has published 169 papers including proof of work ones, so anyone wanting a Cardano marketer should use the treasury to hire one.

Company & Team marketingInput OutputIOHK +2

Legends of Valor was a favorite childhood game, one of the first full 3D open worlds with crudely generative NPC dialogue.

Personal & Off-topic gaming

After playing for years not knowing the game shipped with no ending, he eventually bought the intellectual property to it.

Personal & Off-topic IPobsession

A remake is planned, using GPT-4 for generative dialogue and random NPCs, as a browser enhanced edition and a AAA Unreal Engine rebuild.

Personal & Off-topic

CIP 1694, the only CIP he co authored, puts an end to end on chain governance layer on Cardano with a tricameral model.

Governance & Catalyst on-chainonchainCIP-1694 +3

Everyone should read the CIP section by section and share pro and con views, ahead of a March workshop to fast track it.

On love, he is co designing a blockchain based dating app that uses AI to help people find a better match on the compatibility graph.

Personal & Off-topic block chainartificial intelligence

A meeting with Arctop explored mining cryptocurrency by meditating, turning mining pools into mind pools.

Personal & Off-topic

Elon Musk buying Twitter was a case of not thinking it through: he put 44 billion on the table, then tried to get out as markets fell.

Community & Media

Musk made rookie mistakes and ignored repeated outreach offering 40 papers on solving bots and identity.

Community & Media Elon MuskElon

The right play was to build a next generation social network with a protocol at its core first, then acquire Twitter and migrate users over a year.

Community & Media acquisition

Verification is a solved problem: give people decentralized identifiers, lock the name to a DID, allow aliasing, and sign every tweet with PGP.

Cardano Tech & Research decentraliseddecentralized identifierDIDs +1

Platforms need balanced moderation and algorithmic governance, since the protocols currently maximize clicks, division, and partisanship.

Vision & Philosophy

Avatar 2 is visually a masterpiece but the plot is an eco hippie Dances with Wolves where the humans are flat, evil space whalers.

Personal & Off-topic movies

A better version would give the humans real motivation, like an interstellar war for extinction, making the conflict genuinely ambiguous.

Personal & Off-topic storytellingAvatar

Where can you stake ada without any hesitation, even millions: your own Daedalus wallet.

Cardano Tech & Research staking

Warhammer 40K is a favorite universe, a grimdark future utterly incompatible with woke themes, which will make it hard for Hollywood.

Personal & Off-topic

Peter Diamandis predicting longevity escape velocity in 15 years is ambitious, but exponential growth in longevity research is a fair bet.

Personal & Off-topic

To the troll claiming no Cardano dapp exists after 18 months, there are 110 of them.

Lace is multi chain, which helps Cardano because it exposes users from other ecosystems to Cardano dapps in the dapp store.

Ben McKenzie testifying at a committee hearing with zero knowledge shows the whole thing was anti crypto theater, not problem solving.

Regulation & Legal ZK

Mithril could snapshot other blockchains, which fits the side chain setup and would be fun to expand.

Cardano Tech & Research snapshottingsidechainsidechains +1

Midnight is a confidentiality framework to preserve ada and promote data privacy.

Cardano Tech & Research

The claim that Cardano is not decentralized because it runs off AWS is a lie, since operators self host and could move hosts in a day.

Cardano Tech & Research decentralizationdecentralised

On the Dallas trip, the team visited the glowing plant company and Colossal, and founded a company with George Church.

Personal & Off-topic glowing plants

SBF apparently did not expect to be arrested, and Rikers would be hell on Earth for him.

Crypto Industry & Commentary Sam Bankman-FriedBankman

Kevin O'Leary said he would invest in SBF again, and Do Kwon did the Luna collapse too, apparently fine as long as you live in Serbia.

Crypto Industry & Commentary Sam Bankman-FriedBankman

The fast was 14 full days with no food, sharpening his senses so much he could smell a Chick-fil-A bag from 40 feet.

Personal & Off-topic

Fractals are part of non linear dynamics, popularized by Steven Strogatz, and are surprisingly useful for systems theory.

Personal & Off-topic

Fractals are a low information system, so you cannot encode arbitrary information into them for a perfect compute versus storage trade off.

Cardano Tech & Research information theorycompression

America's voting problem needs inclusive accountability, and zero knowledge lets you check your own vote without letting people sell it.

Governance & Catalyst ZK

Election integrity and participation should be a foundational bipartisan issue, like plentiful food and clean drinking water.

Vision & Philosophy

No amount of evidence converts someone who believes the whole institution is broken, which is the deeper post truth problem.

Vision & Philosophy burden of proof

Even a blockchain voting system would be dismissed as hacked when a candidate loses, in a post truth economy where facts do not land.

Vision & Philosophy block chain

The office lobster is named Logan by the community, and renaming it would break a social contract.

Personal & Off-topic

Kevin O'Leary fawned over FTX then got trounced on a panel, revealing shallow crypto knowledge from a transient paid spokesman.

Crypto Industry & Commentary

As a CZ anger translator: SBF lied to the House, since FTX was a Ponzi on the scale of Bernie Madoff, not a victim of Binance.

Crypto Industry & Commentary Sam Bankman-FriedBankmanChangpeng Zhao

On Star Wars versus Dune, he was the biggest Star Wars fan, knowing kyber crystals and reading the Darth Plagueis novel.

Personal & Off-topic

The Last Jedi killed his love of Star Wars with a pointless casino side quest and by turning Luke into a space hobo, then blaming the fans.

Personal & Off-topic

Diablo 3 had good gameplay but wasted its returning heroes, and a rewrite would use each as a McGuffin with a Zoltun Kulle redemption arc.

Personal & Off-topic

The mobile office runs on a favorite Luxtude power bank with a built in plug and three cables, bought a hundred at a time as gifts.

Personal & Off-topic

Argentina winning the World Cup was well earned, and the whole country basically took a day off to celebrate.

Personal & Off-topic

He and his assistant bonded on a week long meditation retreat, meditating ten hours a day and fasting in the winter cold.

Personal & Off-topic Shambhala

After an AI piece won the Colorado State Fair, the Centaur effect means a human paired with a computer beats the computer alone.

Vision & Philosophy AI artartificial intelligence

AI assisted art lets an artist start from a rich base and blend styles across eras and cultures, and will dominate within ten years.

Vision & Philosophy artificial intelligence

On Switzerland seeking a decentralized digital identity, if anyone will build it, the Cardano Foundation is the natural fit.

Ecosystem & Partnerships decentralisedCF

For university, start at community college augmented with Coursera and edX, get an associate's, then decide your path.

Vision & Philosophy education

Schools should teach life crafting, time management, and a second brain with Zettelkasten and note tools like Obsidian.

Vision & Philosophy

Legends of Valor inspired Todd Howard to make Elder Scrolls, and Morrowind remains the apex of open world high fantasy.

Personal & Off-topic

To stay relevant as a web3 developer, build things, learn Solidity or Plutus, read the top dapp repositories, and make contributions.

Credentials do not matter for hiring, since SBF went to MIT and Jane Street; a development portfolio and real contributions do.

Company & Team Sam Bankman-FriedBankman

Roadmap priorities to clear include CIP 1694, the side chain plan, Basho work, and Genesis.

Roadmap & Product sidechainsidechainsside chains +5

The Amazon series The Peripheral, based on William Gibson's novel, is excellent.

Personal & Off-topic

A generic side chain framework like Polkadot Substrate is coming, kept multi technology to include Cosmos, Fabric, and Scorex.

Cardano Tech & Research side chainssidechainsidechains

The trading sardines story, where a can passed hand to hand turns out rotten, captures the majority of the crypto space.

Crypto Industry & Commentary speculation

NFT use cases include deeds, water and mineral rights, and patents, plus a music master with licenses that pay out like a vending machine.

Ecosystem & Partnerships non-fungible tokenNFTsnon fungible token

NFTs also enable fractionalized ownership and stateful game characters that evolve and can be imported from game to game.

Ecosystem & Partnerships stateful NFTnon-fungible tokenNFT +1

Short selling should not be banned, since it is a necessary market signal, and options create floors and ceilings that add stability.

Crypto Industry & Commentary

Crypto has recovered from this cyclical bust seven times, with the scars to prove it.

Crypto Industry & Commentary cyclesrecovery

Midnight is the play for decentralized GDPR, a regulated domain of privacy that keeps data confidential behind disclosure regimes.

Cardano Tech & Research decentralised

Any transparent blockchain can be made GDPR non compliant for a hundred dollars, so a strict reading would ban all crypto in Europe.

Regulation & Legal complianceblock chain