AMA 02/21/2022

Opens live from Colorado, back from a Mardi Gras trip to New Orleans with new legal and operations hires.

The Ukraine crisis is dragging crypto markets down in lockstep with stocks instead of acting as a safe haven.

Pushes back on the wave of do something save us tweets aimed at him, says a truly decentralized system saves itself.

Argues that projects with real utility will look far stronger in five to fifteen years despite short term panic.

Warns that authoritarian regimes and cyberattacks can seize assets and identity, making the case for self-sovereignty.

Previews the Vasil hard fork in June and a further hard fork in October bringing CIPs, pipelining, and input endorsers.

Over 500 projects are now building on Cardano, up from 300 two weeks earlier, and plans a presence and hackathon at Consensus in Austin.

Hopes to return to Bermuda for a TED talk retrospective on eight years of Cardano.

Warns of an upcoming hit piece book attacking Ethereum founders including himself, calling it a work of fiction with an agenda.

Reflects that storytelling and hero versus villain narratives are core to human psychology and drive crypto drama.

COVID mandates created second class citizens and explains why he became more outspoken about politics.

Argues institutional trust collapses selectively along partisan lines while wealth keeps transferring from the poor to the rich.

Urges facing fear by orienting and moving forward rather than giving up.

The Harvard rat experiment showing hope lets rats swim far longer, drawing the lesson that hope is powerful.

Compares the crypto movement to the American Revolution, born from hope even though the founders did not always get along.

Credits the community for Cardano's growth to 500 dApps and 3 million assets issued.

He does fewer AMAs now since they feel less like sermons and more like talking with friends.

The community gives him hope and purpose and is part of why he keeps going despite the grind.

Losing privacy and needing a security detail because of constant threats and harassment.

Frames everyone in the community as having a role in the revolution and says he refuses to be a spectator.

Responds to a viewer on real inflation eating savings, agrees the official 7.5 percent understates a real 20 percent loss.

Banters with viewers and jokes with a troll in the chat.

Reminds the community to set up a burn contract to clean up testnet ADA.

Analyzes Putin as an old school KGB operator who exploits weakness and manufactures crises for leverage.

Dedollarization as Russia and China push to trade in other currencies, weakening US influence.

Criticizes the US military industrial complex and medical industrial complex for perpetuating endless wars and spending.

Jokes about hiring help for his mushroom farm and tells people to send resumes to his executive assistant.

Network congestion sits near 70 percent block capacity and that pipelining in June is the fix for throughput.

Reflects positively on his recent Crypto Jebb interview appearance.

Atala PRISM batches identity registrations as authenticated hashes instead of storing raw data on chain.

Cites the Ethiopia and Bhutan identity deals covering roughly 13 million people as the real world scale case for Atala PRISM.

Responds to a fan's Arena network idea in Japan and points them to Neil at Predictable Network Solutions.

Qeditas, a marketplace for mechanized mathematical proofs using languages like Coq, Agda, and Lean.

Qeditas will launch as a Cardano token in 2023 with an off-chain proof engine.

The story of his Jean-Leon Gerome gladiator tattoo and its lesson about hubris and knowing your place.

Gives an update on his security fundamentals video, warns of a YubiKey backup bug, and recommends rotating keys.

IOG will stay in the Cardano ecosystem even if its development contract is not extended, since decentralization means no guarantees.

There are five to ten more years of research ahead before Cardano can serve a billion people, teasing a 2021 proposal.

The 2007 Steve Jobs and Bill Gates joint interview story about staying tight lipped before a big announcement.

Responds to Chainlink's market cap exceeding Cardano's, saying markets are irrational in the short run.

Ouroboros Praos handles VRF related block collisions, pointing to the Praos paper and Aggelos Kiayias's work.

Research into blending a VDF with the VRF and building a post-quantum VRF for future proofing.

Marlowe as a no-code, drag and drop way to build financial smart contracts, launching with Goguen.

Running a web scraper to monitor mentions and brushing off 4chan insults like meditative background noise.

Jokes about starting a Bob Ross style painting hobby on the farm.

Lists planned Daedalus features including multisig, secure QR transfer, a voting center, and a hardware wallet center.

Floats giving away his paintings to ADA holders through an on-chain lottery.

IOG has around 250 people globally with 20 to 30 based in the US.

Names his favorite beers, a Greek mythos near the Acropolis and a Swiss beer near Zurich.

Ranks whiskey with Japanese and Scottish ahead of American, poking fun at hipster boutique brands.

Advises an accountant learning PHP that Plutus is harder since it is functional, but an imperative Plutus variant is in the works.

He does not see Polkadot or Cosmos as threats and focuses on building rather than watching competitors.

Offers to teach a course on writing web scrapers like the one he built.

Gives his read on the Beirut port explosion as improperly stored fertilizer.

Banters about wearing Hawaiian shirts after living in Hawaii for over a decade.

Compares Hydra favorably to sharding, saying it delivers the same throughput gains without weakening security.

Jokes he will never buy another Dodge and prefers his GMC diesel trucks.

Celebrates a small stake pool making a block with just 116,000 ADA and promises better rewards for small players.

Rebuts Dan Larimer's claim that Cardano cannot handle non-DeFi applications, citing lower latency than Ethereum.

He passed on investing in Tesla's IPO and now thinks the stock is overpriced.

Frames Cardano's mission as giving billions of people economic identity through identity, value, and governance.

Recalls surviving years of relentless attacks and division to reach the point where small pools now make blocks under Shelley.

Lists side hobbies including aquaculture, a game studio, fast cars, and skydiving, but says life needs one guiding mission.

Cites Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and the concepts of ikigai and kaizen as his philosophy of purpose.

The relentless pursuit of Cardano's improvement as like pushing Sisyphus's boulder, always another step ahead.

A day spent debating regulation with a New York law firm partner shows Cardano touches every domain, calling that a good life.

Community feedback on his security video drives constant iteration and calls Cardano his life's work.

Names Hibiki 25 year as the best Japanese whiskey he has tasted, at a Tokyo cigar bar.

Responds to a fraud accusation by pointing to Shelley shipping and building the world's best proof of stake system.

Challenges critics to compare Cardano's economics to slow wire transfers, poor credit access, and traditional finance's wealth gap.

Stake pool operator is a brand new job that Cardano created and calls that the opposite of fraud.

Argues the truly fraudulent system is today's, which controls people through propaganda and violence and will eventually collapse or be replaced.

To apply to the new IOG investment fund, with invest at iohk.io as the temporary contact.

Rebuts market cap fraud claims, noting IOG never sold ADA and that Byron was already a working federated product.

Some critics still deny Cardano has shipped code or that Shelley launched, comparing it to flat earth denial.

Calls crypto a neutral mirror of human nature, reflecting both the good and bad people bring to it.

Argues money is a collective delusion, since a piece of paper with a dead president's face has value only through shared belief.

The story of a Swiss consultant who only trusted Bitcoin's value after watching an exchange happen in person.

Cites Yap stone money, Chinese tea currency, and cigarette currency in POW camps as proof money is social consensus.

Uses a US president's power as an example that authority is a collective fiction that only holds while people consent.

Recommends Yuval Harari's Sapiens and Homo Deus for understanding how shared fictions built human civilization.

He will never renounce his US citizenship or leave the country despite pressure from wealthy peers to relocate for tax reasons.

Argues even a state's threat of force only works if the people enforcing it consent, citing the Soviet Union's collapse.

A well informed, critical thinking population is the biggest threat to dictatorship, and why regimes control media and education.

Dismisses a troll's question about the Daedalus wallet and cuts off further questions from them.

Extends the money as belief point using Venezuelan bolivar hyperinflation as a cautionary example.

Stake pool operators are building their own GUI dashboards and expects healthy competition there.

Confirms Cardano will need oracles and says the team will get there.

Calls socialism and communism among humanity's greatest evils, arguing no one owns the fruits of another's labor.

Predicts Ben Shapiro's new media venture will eventually surpass Fox News.

Confirms he has a written succession plan ready in case something happens to him.

Traces his introduction to cryptography to a CU Boulder course and recommends John Katz's textbook over Silverman's.

Argues capitalism, not socialism, lifted the world out of poverty, contrasting North and South Korea's night light satellite images.

No one in power wants fair elections since division keeps them in charge, recapping the 2016 primaries as managed theater.

Jokes about exercising his second amendment rights while he still can.

Jokes that mathematicians look down on physics as too applied.

Says he does not have a coach since he does not play sports, then confirms he owns a Glock.

Argues building election and property systems is inherently political, citing the backlash against Zuckerberg's Libra.

Cites Gaddafi's move toward a gold backed currency as the real reason he was targeted, warning real disruption invites real risk.

Cardano is built to become an unstoppable, censorship resistant swarm of millions of faceless participants.

He is tired of a small elite controlling media and outcomes, noting Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders voters got nothing after 16 years.

Crypto is not about getting rich, it is about replacing top down Fortune 500 style structures with bottom up ones.

Argues economics, not shadow wars or spycraft, actually brought down the Soviet Union and will drive change today.

Dismisses the Unity2020 ticket idea, saying voting reform is idealism and the system itself is rigged.

Recommends Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life as a leadership starting point, fix yourself before others.

Recommends the book Flatland to explain how a fourth dimension would relate to the three dimensional world.

The iohk.io Hong Kong address is legacy, with a Wyoming address coming once the site is rebuilt under the new IO Global brand.

Confirms proof of stake sidechains and NIPoPoWs are possible for Cardano, pointing to the Gazi and Kiayias paper.

Recommends Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception alongside Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind.

He loves both Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, leaning slightly toward the Coens.

Gives an update on his passion project video game, saying Cardano stays his top priority after 11 straight work days.

He is still figuring out a collaboration with Ben Goertzel and SingularityNET.

Names For Whom the Bell Tolls as his favorite Hemingway book.

He will do something with Alex Mashinsky and Celsius eventually.

Jokes about the fake Kanye West coin rumor.

He is building a podcast studio and considering a Twitch stream and short form clips to reach people better.

Prefers Twitter Spaces for higher quality dialogue over the AMA format, though he still values these AMAs.

Jokes about gaining weight from Mardi Gras beignets and needing a fast.

He will eventually do the Joe Rogan podcast once some unfinished business, including a return trip to Bermuda, is settled.

Responds to you eat pizza with the elites criticism by saying elites are just regular people at the end of the day.

Walks through conspiracy theories about secret societies and lizard people, saying historical secret societies existed but were run by ordinary, flawed people.

Being elite is about attitude and friendliness, not status, and that everyone is fundamentally the same.

Pays tribute to the late Charlie Daniels as an unpretentious, friendly legend despite his fame.

Names otherism, practiced by the woke cult, politicians, and extremists alike, as the root cause of social division.

Recounts being confronted over a vaccine card at a private Denver event and watching the other person's assumptions unravel.

Compares crypto tribalism, like Bitcoin maximalism, to the elite's divide and conquer strategy, a house divided cannot stand.

The Hoskinson axiom, if something persistently makes no sense, someone is profiting from it.

Sends a shoutout to a viewer watching from the Dolomites in northern Italy.

Advises a student journalist that broken incentives, not bad intentions, drive clickbait journalism, using Elon Musk headlines as an example.

Proposes veracity bonds, where journalists stake real money on the accuracy of their stories and lose it if proven wrong.

Works through how a veracity bond would actually be checked and paid out when a story turns out to be wrong.

People retweet without reading and compares it to how intelligence analysts label the confidence level of a source.

Suggests a blockchain based journalism platform with a Brave and BAT style advertising model to reward investigative journalism.

Jokes that politicians would choose their words far more carefully if their statements were financially bonded too.

He shares a November 5th birthday with a viewer and jokes about turning 34 going on 54.

Explains why IOG cannot just hire its way to faster development, citing the limits of adding people to linear software processes.

Details more than 15 companies and hundreds of developers working in parallel across node, network, Plutus, and Hydra teams.

Cardano's layered design, a settlement layer as root of trust with computation layers built above it for sidechains.

Using BFT style quorum protocols like Ouroboros BFT for fast, permissioned sidechains bootstrapped from the main chain's trust.

Sidechains will be permissionless to launch, with bridges giving stake pool operators multiple revenue streams.

Recaps six years of Ouroboros research, including Genesis, Crypsinous, Chronos, and Mithril, plus proof of stake sidechains since 2018.

Pushes back on critics mocking Cardano's design, noting the same architectures are embraced by projects people praise instead.

By 2023 stake pool operators running multiple sidechain nodes will earn multiplied ADA revenue.

Frames connecting Catalyst and Mamba to the mainnet as the 2022 priority in the Basho and Voltaire eras.

A fully sidechained Cardano will contain everything Ethereum offers, like integers within the real numbers.

Admires Ethereum's layer two rollup research and confirms Catalyst funding and Hydra tail protocol work chasing the same space.

Ethereum's community can be elitist but is genuinely effective at solving problems, crediting Vitalik's execution focused leadership.

Credits Ethereum for popularizing non-monetary blockchain use cases like NFTs, beyond the early color coins and Mastercoin era.

Contrasts Ethereum's playful Devcon culture with Cardano's more buttoned up, academic and blue collar mixed community.

Calls out Ethereum's blind spot for refusing to credit Cardano's legitimate research, citing an unnamed critical author's podcast interview.

Defends Cardano's open peer reviewed process and outside contributors as proof it is not an echo chamber.

Uses a biomimicry analogy to argue Cardano learns from other chains' mistakes instead of repeating them.

Closes by praising the good ideas within Solana, Harmony, and IOTA too, and signs off after two hours and forty four minutes.