AMA 11/21/2021

Opens the AMA broadcasting live from Colorado on a quiet pre Thanksgiving week for development.

Daedalus 4.5.1 ships and the team starts a major push on wallet UX enhancements based on collected user feedback.

2022 priorities shift toward Daedalus performance work: memory utilization, sync time and general application speed.

Mithril enables a light client mode as secure as the full client plus parallel epoch validation to scale with CPU cores.

Script compression, Plutus templates and read only UTXO proposals are under research while preserving determinism.

Lays out the three yearly hard fork combinator windows, February, June and October, and the surrounding release cadence.

Wants better open source governance and collaboration across the core entities as a 2022 emphasis.

The Plutus Application Backend integrates with testnet with launch partners, mainnet targeted for December or January.

Plenty of projects, like SpaceBudz and the Hydra head protocol, are already built without the PAB.

The February Babbage hard fork cleans up and optimizes what already shipped, pushing back on claims contracts arrive only in June.

Insists smart contracts are already live on mainnet, citing the community naming his office lobster through a live contract.

Premature optimization as the root of all evil and the engineering path toward pipelining and input endorsers.

Pipelining and input endorsers alone should unlock a 20 to 40x block size increase in 2022 alongside UTXO HD, Mithril and Hydra.

Twelve development teams work concurrently, and frustration boils over at claims the roadmap is sequential or stalled.

Vents about a misinformation campaign from trolls, venture capitalists and rival projects despite full transparency on GitHub.

Points to IOG's 125plus research papers, including the recursive SNARK work behind Mithril, as Cardano's theoretical foundation.

DApp developer collaborations with Meld and SundaeSwap are going well, and the certification program spans three levels.

Runtime Verification builds K semantics for Plutus under the Alpha Frontier program, citing 10.5 billion dollars lost to bad DeFi code.

Frames real DeFi as certified, math proven protocols, with Djed as the first reference implementation now commercialized by COTI.

Published a blog post on concurrent design patterns for building highly concurrent dApps with the extended UTXO model.

Milkomeda's full EVM interoperability with Cardano is imminent, expected on testnet within 60 to 90 days.

Mamba side chain specifications are underway, to be used by Djed, Catalyst and an EVM side chain running in Ouroboros BFT mode.

Walks through the CSL and CCL settlement and computation layer split from the original 2016 Cardano whitepaper.

The Ethereum Classic engineering team moved over to build Milkomeda, now heading into audits.

Pushes back on claims Cardano started as a gambling coin, tracing the smart contract roadmap back to unused 2013 to 2014 Ethereum plans.

Argues facts are verifiable in the open on GitHub while a healthy dApp ecosystem simply takes years to mature, as it did for Ethereum.

The cFund has returned 189 percent and Catalyst funded over 300 projects in 2021, projected toward roughly 2000 in 2022.

Dismisses VCs claiming no one pitches Cardano, questioning the credibility of firms with their own controversies.

Reflects on living in a post truth economy and believes objectivity will eventually return, with Cardano the last man standing.

Explores why Cardano attracts so many critics, tying the hostility to VC coin financial incentives.

Responds to a Twitter critic calling him a scammer, framing it as sour grapes from a badly timed buy.

The ranch's yearly bison hunt works, roughly 7500 bison roaming 11000 acres before processing.

Advises an aspiring builder to submit ideas through Catalyst IdeaScale to get started.

Plans two free education tracks, working in the Cardano ecosystem and building or integrating a business on Cardano.

Gives an update on his biotech venture, exploring exosomes, PEMF, photobiomodulation and hyperbaric treatments.

Shares thoughts on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, criticizing prosecutorial overreach and the politicization of the case.

Predicts an OJ Simpson style outcome and calls for society to ask macro level questions rather than assign symbolic meaning.

Zero knowledge crypto, MPC or trusted enclaves could enable private NFTs within the next 24 months.

Names the Shelley launch and the recent Goguen summit as his proudest moments since the Bermuda TED talk.

Reiterates that mainnet and smart contracts are already live, dismissing the claim otherwise as a common misconception.

On Michael Novogratz's Cardano criticism, says he is just talking his book like any billionaire with competing bets.

Compares it to Bitcoin critics like Hillary Clinton, framing pushback as the legacy financial and political class protecting itself.

Weighs in on rollups, zk sync and StarkWare, expecting rollups to arrive for free once the Milkomeda EVM side chain ships.

Cardano's own zk research, Sonic and Plonk with Galois, positions it well for a future Catalyst funded rollup or zk wave.

Outlines a proxy key design that separates cold spending keys from hot staking and voting keys for private delegation and voting.

Privacy features likely land in the second half of 2022 given open regulatory questions and the risk of protocol bloat.

Non programmers can help by joining the upcoming education tracks and getting involved through Catalyst.

Pushes back on demands for a fixed Hydra release date, explaining it ships iteratively starting with the head protocol.

Fires back at a heckler dismissing dApp progress, nation state partnerships, AMAs and development hours as worthless.

Cardano is consistently number one for GitHub commits, rejecting the idea that quality work means moving fast and breaking things.

Would welcome a Jordan Peterson podcast conversation about the philosophy of crypto in 2022.

The smaller than planned third 2021 hard fork, with deferred November items rolled into a bigger February Babbage release.

Quick pick, favorite Pink Floyd song is Wish You Were Here.

On a critic, Rebel Paul, who will not list Cardano as credible, says the person actually holds ADA and has been friendly in person.

Muses on the simulation hypothesis, saying he is increasingly open to the idea.

Traces the Cardano name back to Gerolamo Cardano, the Italian mathematician.

Quick joke, feeds his dogs the bones of his enemies.

Picks Vim over Neovim, though Emacs is unavoidable for racket and lisp programming.

Was an unpaid advisor to the Storm X crew years ago but has lost touch with the team since.

On smart contracts replacing lawyers, no, they instead help debug and test legal arrangements, pointing to Nick Szabo's writing.

Traces the King of the Rats nickname to Adam Back, and Ada's name to 19th century countess Ada Lovelace.

Recounts South Africa talks with Cyril Ramaphosa's son about blockchain based education in the DRC and South Africa.

The royal funeral photo on his Twitter profile as a metaphor for the social sinkhole of collapsing institutions.

Applies the social sinkhole metaphor to US dollar debasement, warning of a coming 2008 style reckoning.

Talks scotch, praising a 38 year old Gordon MacPhail bottle gifted for the Goguen launch, though 21 year old Hibiki remains his favorite.

Confirms IOG currently has no relationship with the US federal government.

Jokes that staking yields looking too good to be true is really just inflation, and the real printing comes from government, not stakers.

Clarifies Daniel Friedman took an advisor role at Ergo but remains an IOG employee.

He is not close friends with Vitalik Buterin, downplaying the media fueled rivalry narrative between them.

Confirms extended UTXO and the account model are isomorphic and complementary, citing the Chimeric Ledgers paper.

On JavaScript tooling for querying Cardano, points to Blockfrost and recommends more investment in a TypeScript SDK.

Has not seen the new Dune film yet but wants to.

Asks chat for metaverse startup ideas and finds nothing especially novel among the suggestions.

Quick pick, bison is his favorite meat to eat, naturally, as a bison rancher.

He knows little about Husky Coin despite community interest in it.

Addresses being called a cult leader, arguing critics need to explain Cardano's value if they insist it is a scam.

Turns the cult leader label back on projects that demand blind trust, contrasting it with Cardano's peer review and verification culture.

On veganism, calls it insanity but says he might try a vegetarian year given past health issues.

Names JavaScript, Python and Haskell as his three favorite programming languages, each suited to different tasks.

On the meaning of life, refers back to his answer on the Lex Fridman podcast.

Shows off Logan the Lobster, back at the office.

Jokes about the masks on his office wall being from wild parties, deflecting to his mom.

Does not believe quantum computing currently threatens cryptographic security.

Cardano is well prepared for DeFi regulation through DIDs, metadata standards and a decentralized fundraising model.

Catalyst's governance as a service, via the native multi asset standard, lets Cardano dApps skip Ethereum's DAO bootstrapping problem.

Quick pick, confirms he owns tractors, a Massey Ferguson and a few John Deeres.

Denies IOG struggles to hire, says headcount is growing toward 800 to 900 employees.

Coffee preference, hot, strong and black.

Rarely in touch with Gavin Wood beyond the occasional email.

IOG's business model, time and materials development services plus product subscriptions like Prism, profitable and growing.

Clarifies he has never coded Cardano's codebase himself, describing his role as architecture and product ownership.

On mixing non Haskell languages for smart contracts, explains the trade off is bulkheaded to side chains so it cannot cascade into the main network.

Side chains as separated systems that interact through an API like abstraction, bootstrapped by the base layer's root of trust.

Points builders wanting to help with documentation or SDKs toward Catalyst and Cardano Foundation funding, both holding over a billion dollars.

Plans a January trip to Zurich to push the Foundation on open source infrastructure spending, including bug bounties.

Points a mental health research team toward Catalyst and IdeaScale rather than direct outreach.

Exploring brain computer interfaces and a proof of human protocol to incentivize meditation and mindfulness.

Peer reviewed papers cannot be stolen if properly cited, and welcomes other chains implementing Cardano's research.

Details the mining with your mind concept, a BCI device, proof of human puzzle and meditation commitments hashed onto the chain, nicknamed Tranquil.

Quick pick, ribeye over sirloin, medium rare.

Shares his screen to introduce Pezesha, a Kenya based microfinance partner building a blockchain reputation system with Cardano.

Praises Pezesha CEO Hilda Moraa's background, a Google offer traded for Coca Cola Kenya, building a pan African microfinance product.

Envisions a peer to peer lending marketplace inside the light wallet using the Djed stablecoin for fast, low fee microloans.

Closes the stream praising Pezesha's pan African ambitions and thanking the audience.