AMA 06/20/2020

A policy of permanently blocking anyone on Twitter who threatens a lawsuit or an SEC report.

Insists the Incentivized Testnet's fate after the ITN social contract ends is a community decision, not something imposed top down.

Lays out plans for a hard fork and an ADA holder vote on whether to keep compensating stake pool operators running the ITN at a loss.

Frames decentralization as power to the edges, pointing to a 52 country world tour urging people to think for themselves.

Compares the ITN backlash to Ethereum's early Miami friendliness curdling into the DAO hack split, hopeful Cardano avoids that fate.

Localizing Daedalus and documentation into Russian, Korean, Chinese and Spanish once the treasury opens.

Rebuts a Twitter user accusing him of secretly planning a second coin and lying to ADA holders about the ITN fork.

Clarifies a hypothetical ITN successor asset would not dilute ADA value any more than any other native asset already does.

Laments that people form snap judgments from a thin sliver of information and never revise them, feeding modern tribalism.

Frames the whole point of the technology as putting people fully in charge of their identity, vote and money despite the new cognitive burden.

Draws a parallel between crypto's leap of faith and the American founders' bet on self government over the divine right of kings.

Gives a summit attendee update, around 4000 so far against a 10000 goal, and plans a podcast push to get there.

Cross chain interoperability research and impossibility results, with stake pools acting as trust minimized bridges between chains.

Walks through ADA's emission curve, half the 45 billion supply issued in the first seven years like an oil well's long tail, before fees take over.

Previews that Plutus updates will be covered extensively at the virtual summit.

Byron will not get an external security audit beyond the internal team, preferring testnets and formal methods, though he wants a deeper network audit.

Wants to consolidate scattered transparency reports and audits onto a single page on the new site.

He would not hire Nick Szabo directly but admires his pioneering smart contract work and wet code and dry code framing.

Commits to an aggressive push to recruit Haskell developers into the ecosystem.

The deprioritized IELE and K framework virtual machine built with Runtime Verification and hope to revive it with their help.

Defends ADA's marketing and top ten ranking while admitting the use and utility story still needs better explaining.

The Goguen era name traces back to Grigore Rosu's academic circle at UCSD.

Dismisses Crypto.com's own coin as not a real cryptocurrency, just another project token.

Rules out ever running for political office, describing the personal toll and vitriol of public life.

Questions why a competing chain would chase a proof of work algorithm like Prague if it plans to move to proof of stake anyway.

Shares his long running Legends of Valor remake design thinking, from permanent death and injury mechanics to Vancian magic systems.

Riffs on deformable terrain as a game mechanic, from Minecraft to old third person shooters, and the harsh survival difficulty of the original game.

Floats blockchain integration for the Legends of Valor remake, from license and royalty tokens to players unknowingly relaying the Cardano network.

Reveals he now owns the original Legends of Valor and has open sourced it for free download.

Reminisces about the Ultima series and confirm Legends of Valor inspired Bethesda's Elder Scrolls Arena.

Serious wealth would not change his lifestyle, he will keep doing AMAs, and likens his low political profile to Joe Rogan's.

Declines to remaster Command and Conquer Generals, calling it a cash grab.

Happiness comes from within, not women or possessions.

Confirms he will go on Joe Rogan again once the timing and setup are right.

Swap childhood arcade nostalgia, Gauntlet and a Maui arcade he still visits.

Recalls trips to Romania and Bulgaria, noting Grigore Rosu is Romanian.

An amicable, occasional relationship with Ripple's David Schwartz.

Praises Caitlin Long as crypto's best advocate and her work making Wyoming crypto friendly.

Reacts to news the SEC chairman is leaving, calls the succession uncertain, and notes Trump's hostility to crypto despite his gold standard sympathies.

Yes, he would move IOG headquarters to Wyoming.

An interest in computational social choice theory and social physics for modeling complex systems.

Banters about Max Keiser, his dogs as home security, and staying dry all year.

Names Macallan, Glenmorangie, Yamazaki and Hibiki as favorite whiskies while on and off keto.

Plans a Norway pilgrimage to ancestral sites and describes his love of trout and catfishing.

Considers creating a critical thinking course, plus content on Python and data science.

Reflects on symbolic mob toppling of monuments like the Lincoln Memorial as a moment of societal catharsis.

Defends Ulysses S. Grant's legacy against statue removal, citing his fight to protect freed slaves from the KKK.

Argues the protests have morphed into a movement seeking to dismantle American institutions rather than address specific grievances.

Argues the real institutional problem is police militarization and lack of accountability, not race, citing a fatal swatting case.

Warns radical movements hijack emotional tragedies to smuggle in changes most people never voted for, invoking Castro style tactics.

Calls out Max Keiser for criticizing altcoins after creating his own, Maxcoin.

Himself as a neo Austrian economics thinker blending it with complexity theory.

Developing nations like India ban crypto to protect entrenched power structures from disruption.

Agrees the literal gold standard is unnecessary but argue monetary policy needs consistency instead of unchecked money printing.

Floats using the ITN for stablecoin experimentation, leaving the decision to a community vote in July.

He would rather go to jail than accept a US ban on Cardano, framing it as a loss of government legitimacy.

Recounts his mask mandate breaking point when epidemiologists exempted BLM protests from their own coronavirus warnings.

Vow to never forget or forgive the officials who signed that double standard protest letter.

Compares losing property without rule of law to Russian oligarchs purged by Putin.

Laments a war on objectivity in academia and draws a parallel to Soviet economists afraid to report the truth.

Frames cryptocurrency as a necessary response to eroding trust in institutions.

He will never abandon or expatriate from America no matter how bad politics gets.

Recommends horse breeds for a viewer's daughter, praising Friesians and Mongolian ponies.

Follow up on an earlier AMA promise, upgrading a young community member's mining rig from a Raspberry Pi to an Intel NUC.

Swap travel stories, from Brazil to Mongolia's brutal traffic near Ulaanbaatar.

Clarifies he is not fixated on the Middle East specifically, just fascinated by Mesopotamian history broadly.

Gives an update on Polymath, having completed his consulting role as they build out Polymesh.

Clarifies his degree is in mathematics, not history, though he loves history as a hobby.

Confirms plans to support permissioned ownership for security tokens.

Gives a cautiously positive but undecided take on Elrond, citing good people but no deep dive yet.

Contrasts Elrond with Zilliqa's community, which he says spams him claiming to have already solved every problem.

Jokes about why ADA's total supply is 45 billion rather than a rounder number.

His method for deciding which competing projects deserve a deep dive, citing Avalanche's Emin Gun Sirer and the Zencash community.

Confirms Daedalus mainnet wallet will support staking and delegation directly.

Muses that arrogance sometimes accompanies success but never causes it, flagging survivorship bias in founders.

Recommends Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Katz and Lindell as the best crypto primer.

Confirms developer documentation updates are scheduled around the 30th.

A conceptual anti poaching token model paying communities to keep endangered animals like rhinos alive.

Check the top ten market cap once or twice a day, mainly to catch macro news events.

Confirms the Coti team is coming to present at the virtual summit.

Answers what is the meaning of life by quoting Jordan Peterson on finding something worth any suffering.

Doubts blockchain alone solves the Millennium Prize math problems, though a strong incentive program could attract people to try.

Confirms Ledger hardware wallet holders will be able to stake directly from Daedalus.

Criticizes corporate CEOs hiding behind hollow, politically correct language instead of standing for real values.

A hardware wallet demo slipped due to Ledger firmware device ID issues, with a workaround expected in June 2020.

Predicts mainstream media will mine his old AMAs for out of context soundbites once Cardano gets big, and argue against building a cult of personality.

Muses that a factual AI like the one imagined in Life 3.0 would be pretty cool.

Confirms IOG already builds hardware products.

He lives in Colorado, not Puerto Rico, and does not structure his life around Act 20 or 22 tax breaks.

Confirms a still unnamed project as big as Cardano is in the works.

Confirms Stephen Wolfram is attending the virtual summit to present.

He does not like Trump, calling him a symptom of how broken the US political system has become.

Criticizes Trump's business record of stiffing contractors and the Trump University scam, likening it to crypto grifters.

Argues Trump's support reflects a protest vote against a broken two party system rather than approval of him.

Warns against get rich quick YouTube gurus promising wealth without work.

Explains why Haskell was chosen over Go for building a high assurance concurrent system.

Names Imhotep as his favorite architect.

Calls for constitutional term limits in Congress and the Senate.

Moving formal specs beyond LaTeX toward tools enabling code extraction and model checking, crediting the formal methods team led by Philipp Kant.

Trump should be allowed his Tulsa rally if protests are allowed, calling selective outrage the woke virus.

Defends Haskell's complexity as necessary since code is read far more often than it is written.

He will vote libertarian since his vote in blue Colorado never swings the outcome either way.

Confirms no delay to the mainnet launch.

Points to Marvin Minsky's talks for a real answer on consciousness.

Brushes off being called woke, says he feels pretty calm.

Corrects the record on Switzerland, describing its cantonal confederacy rather than a true direct democracy.

Jabs at Justin Trudeau over politics.

Riffs on the Hitler fled to Argentina conspiracy, doubting it given how thoroughly Nazi hunters searched.

Riffs on Canadian stereotypes with his Canadian chief of staff after a Trudeau conspiracy question.

Praises Neuralink's potential, imagining brain interfaces eventually enabling direct thought transfer.

Praises William Shatner's crypto knowledge after meeting him for dinner.

Coronavirus paused his usual one to two million dollar a year consulting income, with plans to resume in 2021.

Recalls his first job at 17 upgrading counterfeit Rolexes with real Swiss movements for a client from Senegal.

Names favorite watch brands, Jaeger LeCoultre, Vacheron Constantin and Piaget's Altiplano.

Recalls a KFC and Taco Bell job where a fryer explosion nearly injured him.

Jokes about Jack Ma's exaggerated rags to riches story and his own glasses.

He would move to Switzerland and renounce citizenship if he were a Chinese billionaire, fearing state seizure.

Recalls meeting Peter Thiel and share favorite cigars, including Hemingway Short Story.

Recalls seeing Jacque Fresco speak about the Venus Project's resource based economy before his death.

Confirms ADA is already Binance's top trading pair.

Reiterates the ITN token has no real trading market yet, so dilution concerns are premature.

SingularityNET's Ben Goertzel speaks highly of Cardano and will attend the virtual summit for a one on one, hoping to bring SingularityNET onto Cardano.

Jokes about Pluto's planetary status, refusing to reopen the debate.

Jokes that no biography exists yet, riffing on a fake Robin Williams gag.

Calls George Orwell mandatory reading, and recall meeting Phil Zimmermann with hopes to collaborate on a new PGP standard.

Reveals he has turned down two reality TV show offers, preferring AMAs.

Confirms some of the Ethiopian government team will attend the virtual summit.

Shares family background, an older brother who is also a doctor and a mother who served in the Army.

Recalls trips to Nigeria and South Africa, name dropping a friendship with the Ramaphosa family.

Confirms he already shaved his beard a while back.

Recommends Borges, Livy, Tacitus and Cicero as required reading.

Picks his D&D character class, a psionics focused shaper.

He would add community submitted quests and even rivals like Dan Larimer and Vitalik as characters into a Legends of Valor remake, pending a Cardano voting system.

Compares Julius Caesar, Alexander and Genghis Khan, arguing great conquerors were undone by early death.

Picks Euler over Newton out of mathematician team loyalty.

Jokes about adding a Craig Wright stand in character who shovels manure and falsely claims credit for famous books.

Shares a long fascination with the Goldbach conjecture and related number theory problems, calling them intellectually beautiful.

He thought about the Goldbach conjecture on and off for eight years as his mathematical white whale.

Explains why he quietly ended his BigchainDB consulting role after they stopped engaging him, and refunded the unearned fees.

Gives an update on the African farmer voucher program, still awaiting a government bid decision after a delay.

Stay skeptical the ABC conjecture is truly proven, citing unresolved concerns about Mochizuki's overly complex proof.

Names Macho Man Randy Savage as his favorite old school wrestler.

Ethiopian coffee tastes better abroad than domestically because of export laws.

Confirms golden ratio proportions appear in Cardano's official artwork.

Corrects the record, Shelley ships June 30th with July 29th as the hard fork date and July 7th as a backup ship date.

Shares a health update, a botched cholesterol test blamed on mishandled lab samples.

Predicts the pandemic winds down once vaccines clear efficacy trials around Q4 2020 or Q1 2021 and governments declare victory.

Closes the AMA looking ahead to Shelley, the ITN vote, and the July virtual summit.