Surprise AMA 07/28/2023

Opens July 28th 2023 with his first AMA in a month, broadcasting from a new office after a quick home move for construction.

Says Intersect, the members-based organization, has been announced with over 200 members joined, and promises a whiteboard video on moving code from the IO GitHub repos to Intersect.

Holds up Hydra as the open-source aspiration, with over 40 regular meeting contributors and parallel projects like Hydrozoa from MLabs.

Reports the Edinburgh closing workshop finalized a CIP 1694 candidate spec, and that SanchoNet is a specialized testnet for bleeding-edge 1694 features connecting to wallets via the CIP-95 standard.

Node 8.2 was just tagged to enable SanchoNet, with constitutional committee and DRep features rolling in over six to eight weeks across six major areas.

Calls it the first release with an end-to-end active specification for all ledger rules defining the Conway and Voltaire era, using a dependently typed language with full Haskell code extraction and constraint-satisfaction testing.

Summarizes Judge Torres's mixed Ripple ruling, that Ripple's direct sales were securities transactions under appeal but secondary-market sales look non-security, letting exchanges relist XRP.

The ruling strengthens the case that Solana, Polygon, and Cardano are not securities under Howey and pressures lawmakers to pass legislation, a small win after Luna, FTX, and Celsius.

Nothing materially changed when the SEC named ADA a security, since it is an open-source project run by users in 120-plus countries and the US does not get to redefine a protocol like PGP or TCP.

Midnight people will attend the three big events, Rare Evo in Colorado, CNFT Con in Las Vegas, and the Cardano Summit in Dubai, with lots to share on the side-chains framework.

Eran is CEO of the Midnight devco, a silent figure for now doing strong zero-knowledge work, that Kachina is finally realized with Pluto Eris, and that Midnight's programming language is TypeScript-like.

Points to SingularityNET as the project people think of when asking whether Cardano is the supporting network for AI.

Fields a question on Andrew Tate, grouping him with controversial figures like Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, and describes Tate's misogynistic red-pill view that men are persecuted.

He sees men and women as complementary not adversarial, favoring equality under law plus a celebration of differences, since diversity gives resilience like Cardano's three million people from everywhere.

The woke cult caused problems but that is no excuse to be cruel, and defends Jordan Peterson's make-your-bed stoicism as sound life advice about inner resilience, not racism.

Warns against abandoning inclusive accountability and self-verification to rely on a bureaucracy for truth, the basis of the Soviet Union that told you it is Tuesday when it is Wednesday.

Lays out the four stages of societal capture, indoctrination, institutionalization, criminalization, and gulagging, noting the Communists killed 50-plus million so vigilance is not optional.

Answers the ADA-should-be-30-cents crowd that it is not about the money, since the ecosystem gives decentralized governance, economic agency, censorship-free commerce, and transparency.

Asks whether your life would be great in a dictatorship where your bank account could be shut off, like the Chinese under the People's Bank digital yuan with social credit, or Jack Ma exiled for saying the wrong things.

He is on good terms with Silvio Micali, Sean Ford, and Algorand's cryptographers, but the Algorand Foundation is prickly and hyper-aggressive both externally and internally, and he cannot see what it gains them.

Friendly competition is fine but ideas are transitive, that Cardano learned from Zcash and Halo 2, and that Algorand has cool work like the Falcon post-quantum signature scheme and a novel consensus.

Contrasts Algorand's brittle incentives and under-10-percent participation with Cardano's 74 percent staking and Oxford algorithmic-game-theory group, saying he still has dinner with Silvio in Boston.

Calls RFK Jr's idea of backing the dollar with Bitcoin senseless, recalling he met President Bukele and passed on the El Salvador deal, since there is not enough Bitcoin and the US will not back money with an asset it cannot control.

The US is far past the full-reserve gold standard since Nixon and Bretton Woods, with Nobel economists praising inflation while a three-bedroom house his grandfather bought for 10,000 dollars now costs a million.

Argues monetary policy steals from people daily behind red-team-blue-team distraction, and that the 30-trillion debt or runaway inflation will kill America like Argentina, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.

Confirms he has not forgotten the promised security lecture update and has good ideas for it, just busy.

On kushti rolling out NIPoPoWs, recalls Cardano began as a science experiment exploring proof-of-work advances like log-space mining, non-outsourceable puzzles, and Minotaur in parallel with proof of stake.

NIPoPoWs sample rare superblocks to build a proof giving a concise self-verifiable history, enabling light clients and side chains, from a paper by Dionysis Zindros and Aggelos Kiayias.

Laments no one adopted NIPoPoWs despite it solving Bitcoin side chains and light clients with zero trade-off, blaming radical maximalists, and praises kushti, who worked for IO before Ergo, for implementing it.

Calls it the first mainnet large-scale NIPoPoWs implementation, recalling Zindros writing it on a chalkboard in Greece six years ago and his velvet forks concept to bring it to Litecoin or Bitcoin.

Calls Ergo a spiritual successor to Bitcoin's original intent, lineage from NXT to crypti to Scorex to Ergo, with extended UTXO, Sigma protocols, and Scala.

Says the Ethiopia work is upgrading from deprecated Prism 1.4 to 2.0, which lacks the multi-tenancy Ethiopia needs, and notes the Huawei tablet plan fell through when Huawei did not honor its side.

It is hard to digitize paper documents amid geopolitical instability, with a goal of 5 million students covering all K-12 via a DID-style credentialing system that 1.4 proved as a concept.

The enormous value of the Ethiopia exercise: proving how to go from an undocumented to a documented world, extendable to Kenya, Burundi, Ghana, and Nigeria for microfinance and remittances.

Lace has Brave support with Safari and Firefox later, and that his top wallet priority now is multi-delegation coming in the next release in August.

Recounts a ranch fire destroying his warehouse and the conexes holding his hydroponics and four-chamber mushroom farm, which grew lion's mane, reishi, and oyster and was experimenting with cordyceps.

Plans a proper 5,000-to-10,000-square-foot mushroom lab with automation and different humidity zones to replicate high versus low altitude, since Nepal mountain mushrooms are valuable and medicinal.

Rebuts an exit-scam troll by noting he has been here 10 years across 73 countries while everyone else exited, and that Do Kwon and SBF are being pulled out while no lies from Laura Shin can make it true.

The point is everyone having economic identity and agency, and that the meaning of life is helping millions to billions of people rather than retiring to a beach to watch the world go to hell.

Lists what he does with money: building clinics in Gillette, investing in synthetic biology and anti-aging, setting up labs, and putting 20 million dollars into Carnegie Mellon to make computers understand mathematics.

A community member built a searchable website tracking everything he has said in AMAs since 2018, showing enormous consistency, since no one does the same thing for 10 years unless motivated beyond money.

He is interested to see Vivek Ramaswamy in the debates, comparing him to every cycle's young long-shot like Andrew Yang, Dennis Kucinich, Beto O'Rourke, and Herman Cain as a proto-Trump.

Confirms Netflix committed to a 90-minute film on the Papua New Guinea expedition by Jason Cohn, who made films on diamonds and Brazilian street violence.

Alex Jones as a self-contradictory figure with a burning desire to call truth to power who broke real stories, but who does not vet like a journalist and loves money via dubious products.

Alex Jones oversteps, as with Sandy Hook, causing real harm, and that being de-platformed made him a beacon for radicalized elements, and floats a three-way in-person interview with Tim Pool.

It is a shame Jones discredits real inquiries, calling the COVID cover-up a genuine conspiracy that killed a million Americans and cost two years of freedom, which society must investigate.

He has not reviewed the crypto legislation that passed the House and needs to consult his government affairs people.

Declines to donate to Huberman's lab since Huberman plans to fund others, and says academia wastes money without tight controls, unlike the modest perpetual Carnegie Mellon endowment under Jeremy Avigad.

Argues biotech's bottleneck is clinical trials not R&D, citing David Sinclair at Harvard publishing a Yamanaka-factor-inspired paper where six chemicals reverse aging in cell cultures.

Going from that result to a drug takes 10-plus years and 250 million dollars because of the clinical trial and IRB process, which is why he built the Gillette clinic to vertically integrate ethical testing.

A scientist is not a physician, and that billionaires fund anti-aging at the Buck Institute and Calico but ignore what accelerates it to market, contrasting Neuralink drilling holes with Synchron.

Synchron places a stent-like device in the brain via the neck in a 10-minute procedure with no neurosurgeon, and already ran a trial letting ALS patients think-to-text, because it was founded by an MD-PhD.

His clinic has a first-principles strategy for an extraordinary doctor-supervised anti-aging product within 24 months: put the body in the right condition to regenerate plus supply the right ingredient.

Defends his science record with 180 papers and over 10,000 citations under his watch running IOG and labs, saying managing scientists and the peer-review process is something they are good at.

IO is also good at research transfer, getting science out of the lab to market, which is why some Cardano milestones shipped faster than critics expected.

A room-temperature superconductor's biggest impact would be making quantum computers easier to manufacture and scale, plus energy uses like transmission losses, fusion reactors, and maglev.

Room-temperature superconductors would enhance qubit fidelity and error correction, bringing many-qubit systems into grasp and threatening cryptography, like the leap from gun-design to implosion nukes.

He is going to the ai4 conference in Las Vegas to learn about whether AGI kills capitalism, noting an AI arms race unlike anything seen, with Sergey Brin out of retirement for Google's Gemini.

Recommends the AI Explained YouTube channel and notes Meta's Llama, Gemini leapfrogging GPT-4, and an Nvidia versus AMD chip arms race for exascale AI servers.

Those who master prompt engineering with techniques like tree of thoughts, chain of thoughts, and Auto GPT massively boost productivity, pointing to a free Coursera and Vanderbilt class.

Multi-model setups where GPT, Llama, and PaLM challenge each other mitigate hallucination, and that AI will gut knowledge jobs like paralegals, junior programmers, and business analysts.

Illustrates how an AI reading every US legal opinion could produce securities-law work product beyond a cabal of paralegals in hours, and how Auto GPT could draft legislation based on MiCA and other frameworks.

Predicts GPT-5 to 7 in three to five years will be a superhuman creative programmer once token counts hit one to ten million with RLHF, solving PhD-thesis-level problems on the fly.

Asks why AI, an exponential technology as significant as the nuclear bomb, is not the top regulatory priority instead of sports, bathrooms, and Trump indictments, since those behind the scenes have already chosen its direction.

Calls blockchain the short-circuit to the Matrix, giving control over your data and money, and warns generative AI will soon make convincing fake videos and voice-clone scam calls of anyone.

The defense is digital signatures AI cannot forge, DIDs, and self-sovereign identity on a blockchain, and that the crypto space drives cryptographic enhancement even as Gary Gensler tries to shut it down.

Meld is still in the Cardano ecosystem, that DeFi should be multi-chain for liquidity, and that Meld has weighed in on transaction prioritization and the tiered-pricing paper through the CIP process and MBO.

Walks through hydra.family live, its user manual and benchmarks, and the GitHub with 7,304 commits, 14 release tags, and 31 contributors, saying they are building the same site for SanchoNet.

Shows the public Hydra 0.12 roadmap features like event-source persistence, authenticated network messages, and layer-1 transactions through Hydra, all coming from the open-source community under Apache 2.

Trolls claim nothing was accomplished but a successful open-source middleware project has formed, meant to work into as many dapps as possible, making Cardano better and faster with no hard fork, evolving weekly.

The million-TPS framing missed the point, since Hydra alleviates the need for main-chain TPS by moving logic off-chain with instant finality and isomorphic security guarantees.

As things move to Intersect the core node, network stack, and smart contracts get the same public working-group treatment, an enormous lift that preserves the 2,100-day uptime and the principles.

Contrasts Cardano with Ethereum's eight years to proof of stake and custodial non-liquid staking, Algorand's under-10-percent participation, and a 100-terabyte-node chain that collapses a dozen times a year.

Greatness comes from relentless iteration and from not leaving people behind, honoring the social contract of determinism, predictable fees, and liquid non-custodial staking rather than breaking promises for convenience.

Pulls up eutxo.org for a live block-by-block view of the Cardano network, pausing on a block with 302 outputs and a single transaction issuing 32 NFTs.

It is not transactions per second but transactions per transaction, showing an 88-kilobyte block packed with JPEG Store, Minswap swaps, Kaizen pool, and NFT and DEX contracts happening in real time.

Each block gets more efficient as Plutus improves from v1 to v3 with a 10x reduction and BLS, more moves off-chain, and side chains bring bulkheaded execution models so an EVM blowup does not cascade.

Roll-ups, better data availability, and Mithril evolve in parallel, and that input endorsers are still under construction with a paper coming, while Peras and Genesis are prioritized first for finality.

You need Genesis to bootstrap and Peras for instant finality so side-chain transactions are fast both ways, and that input endorsers become necessary in three to five years with the community deciding via 1694.

Calls Cardano the most elegant cryptocurrency, built bespoke from the network stack to the accounting model and language with nothing copied, delivering native multi-assets from the color-coins idea Bitcoin never shipped.

Cardano has formal specifications on par with NASA rockets and pacemaker and nuclear-reactor software, alongside Hydra, Marlowe, and the best community in crypto.

Laments critics like the Shins calling him a pathological liar while the code, papers, and movement are all visible and speeding up, saying it is sad people cannot see the beauty.

Closes housekeeping with whiteboard videos over the weekend, personal-knowledge-management content, appearances at Rare Evo, CNFT Con, and the Cardano Summit, and a call to download SanchoNet.

Shows a Neosensory bracelet by Stanford synesthesia expert David Eagleman that vibrates motors for sounds like S and F to compensate for high-frequency hearing loss and tinnitus.

He has high-frequency hearing loss and is testing the bracelet for two months, already noticing more crispness like eyeglasses for your ears, and that the tech could train perfect pitch or sense frequencies humans cannot.

Reflects that the five senses show only a tiny facsimile of reality, that a bee sees flowers in ultraviolet, and that within 10 to 15 years neuroscience hacking will let humans enhance their senses.

Closes that it is their job to build these devices and show people flowers can look many ways, the same with the Cardano protocol and the world, urging everyone to look on the bright side.