AMA 07/05/2020

Opens the AMA live from his farm in Colorado on a sunny day.

The story of a recent health scare, a mass found on his liver during a whole body scan.

Recounts waiting on a hepatologist and transplant surgeon in Denver after the mass measured 2.7 centimeters.

Reveals the mass turned out to be a benign cyst, not cancer.

Reflects that brushing against mortality sharpens focus on goals and vision.

Jokes about wearing a Ron Paul campaign button and mentions Kanye West's presidential run.

Jokes about issuing a KanyeCoin and a Brock Pierce coin as native assets tied to their vote counts, with a possible prediction market.

Marvels at how Cardano Summit registrations surged from 4,000 to over 10,100 in the final two weeks.

Praises summit speakers including Grigore, Tyler and the Wyoming crew, plus Stephen Wolfram's talk despite conference software issues.

Recaps summit announcements: IOHK Prism, the Catalyst fund, Voltaire and native assets around the Goguen launch.

Over 150 articles have already been written about the summit, more than the 120 expected, with a Wall Street Journal and Forbes piece hoped for.

Shelley shipping proved wrong the perception that Cardano is only an academic project.

Sets the goal of leading the DeFi category within 12 months and vows to push hard over the next 120 days.

Suggests the University of Wyoming create a pedagogy course on the economics of staking.

Critics on crypto Twitter use soft public jabs to bait a reaction and then play the victim.

He will hit back hard at high follower accounts and marketing directors who attack Cardano or the community, calling them family.

Details two stablecoin experiments in due diligence: an algorithmic coin with Ergo and a basket coin backed by a reserve of existing stablecoins.

The basket coin scales easily like Tether while the Ergo algorithmic coin can explore alternative monetary policy.

The basket coin and Ergo algorithmic coin prototypes are early stage tests of whether Cardano's native asset standard can support complex tokens.

Confirms IOHK pays staff in both fiat and crypto, and Ukrainian staffers have preferred crypto pay for years.

Comments on Polymesh choosing Parity Substrate after he consulted for them, and mentions Cardano's own security token effort.

The difference between CIPs for infrastructure upgrades and CRCs for standards, with a backlog of documentation coming post Shelley.

The Catalyst fund opens for partner submitted ballots in July.

Pitches an ecosystem developer podcast like a Let's Talk Plutus tutorial series building a dapp end to end.

Pitches a governance oriented podcast bringing on outside experts in political science, voting theory and sociology.

Compares the vision to Leo Laporte's TWiT network and floats collaborating with Hive and BitClout on content distribution.

Criticizes crypto media broadly as terrible and says Cardano needs to be better at curating its own content.

Advises dual majoring in applied math and computer science with strong number theory for a cryptography path.

Recommends University of Maryland's program under John Katz, plus MIT, CMU, Stanford and top European schools for cryptography.

Quantum cryptography favors a physics track while hardware security favors electrical engineering, and touts the NSA's graduate internship program.

Argues against a computer science degree in general since the material can be learned online, unlike cryptography's academic pedigree.

Fields a personal question about the f-15 versus f-18 and an old relationship with someone in the Israeli Defense Forces.

Announces paid ambassador roles opening up through the Catalyst fund, letting the community fund and choose its own ambassadors.

The NSA as full of brilliant people who know cryptographic breakthroughs like RSA before the public does.

Cites David Schwartz's path from the NSA to becoming Ripple's CTO as an example of that career track.

Calls DARPA the most elite research arm, tackling moonshot problems like AI, quantum computing and computing on encrypted data.

Muses that there are many paths to wisdom and expertise, whether academic or self taught.

A security clearance and defense industry background commands two to three times higher pay and signals trustworthiness to employers.

He will loop in Ben Goertzel in July 2020 to explore bringing SingularityNET onto Cardano.

A dad joke about two random variables in a bar.

Criticizes public health officials for waving through mass protests while condemning other gatherings, calling it an impossible contradiction on their own COVID warnings.

Argues protesters would predictably infect older family members at home, driving the second wave he says officials ignored.

The burden is on scientists to act with integrity and that officials have entered a post credibility era.

Cites over 140 vaccine candidates in the pipeline and a roughly 0.33 percent aggregate case fatality rate, higher for at risk groups.

Argues isolating and compensating at risk populations would be less economically devastating than blanket lockdowns.

Points to rapid advances in virology and an Israeli breathalyzer coronavirus test as silver linings of the pandemic.

Predicts coronavirus becomes endemic with a recurring corona season much like the flu.

The original SARS never got a vaccine because funding and urgency evaporated once the threat passed.

Chats with a viewer from Ontario and mentions a friend who splits time between Toronto and Muskoka.

Shares that his 90 year old grandfather, a Korean War veteran, is on oxygen for lung damage from asbestos and is his last living grandparent.

Calls former CFTC chairman Christopher Giancarlo a good guy.

An internet blackout in Ethiopia has cut off contact with his team there, threatening the country's MOU.

Jokes that Giancarlo's Senate Banking testimony reminds him he would rather watch Zuckerberg's robotic hearing performance for tips.

Reveals his Cardano tattoo is on his left butt cheek and recalls living in Fairfax, Virginia.

Jokes about Joe Biden's gaffes and cognitive decline.

He wants to negotiate a proper deal with Wolfram directly for Oracle data rather than just hiring a physicist.

Reacts to the Epstein documentary on Netflix and repeats that Ghislaine Maxwell did not kill herself.

Points fans to Crypto Supreme as the best place to buy Cardano merchandise.

Lays out the core tell of a scammer: creating urgency and pressure to hand over money or value right now.

There is never only one shot at an opportunity, and legitimate offers want to educate you rather than rush you.

Mocks trading system hucksters who sell guaranteed returns instead of running their own hedge fund.

Points to Cardano's own peer reviewed papers, citation counts and over 250 GitHub repos as the kind of verifiable proof legitimate projects should offer.

Scammers can never fake a long consistent track record, and recommends asking for proof the way Reagan said trust but verify.

The story of Apple's forgotten early investor who sold his 5 percent stake and has no regrets.

Confirms IOHK decompiled Legends of Valor and is now in the design phase, weighing composers Max Richter and Ramin Djawadi.

Experimenting with a non-Euclidean game engine and alternate physics with variable gravity and time.

The team is still deciding how permanent death and injury should be for player characters.

Confirms a new proof of work algorithm called Minotaur, paired with a useful proof of work function, with a paper coming.

Calls Max and Stacy Keiser good friends despite their unpredictable market calls.

Recommends the Max Richter track November as a fit for an in-game cinematic.

Praises Planescape Torment and Arcanum as narrative masterpieces that used the RPG medium creatively.

Recalls Bill Roper's Diablo voice work and his later struggles running Flagship Studios.

Recounts CCR and Steve Miller playing his conference and calling it the best concert of his life.

Reminisces about the Infinity Engine games Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, built in C with a Lua scripting layer.

Trading is not his thing but floats hiring a professional quant to host a rigorous Cardano trading show.

Names active listening as the personal flaw he is working on, since being articulate can crowd out others.

Credits Nathan Kaiser with rebuilding the Cardano Foundation after it was left in ruins by the prior administration.

Reminisces about attending Front Range Community College, Metro State and CU Boulder.

Harvard Extension School offers a real, cheaper Harvard degree through open enrollment.

Predicts hard times ahead for universities as COVID accelerates the shift to cheaper online options like Coursera and edX.

Calls comedian Bill Burr a modern day George Carlin.

An anecdote about a young philosophy major who had never heard of Bertrand Russell or Kant.

Contrasts rigorous analytic philosophy with soft fields like ecofeminism that lack real standards.

Recounts the grievance studies hoax where a fake paper swapping Jews for white men from Mein Kampf nearly passed peer review.

Warns that abandoning objective truth for pure subjectivity lets a powerful few redefine everything as they wish.

Names Bertrand Russell a favorite philosopher, citing his mathematical work and surviving interview footage.

Jokes about a feminist underwater basket weaving degree and shares a story about his pet toucan.

Denies ever dating Grimes and jokes his relationships have always been more unconventional.

Jokes about why he supposedly broke up with Vitalik Buterin.

Shows off a century old ring from Imperial China and confirms he has been in a fistfight before.

Confirms a Coinbase custody partnership with a press release expected soon, praising the Rosetta listing framework.

A story about an ex girlfriend who stalked him with a suitcase labeled emotional baggage.

Sympathizes that divorce, especially with kids and shared assets involved, is a miserable process the legal system incentivizes badly.

He will make a video explaining why Cardano staking will not end up dominated by Chinese block producers like Bitcoin mining.

Shares videos on Dyson spheres and stellar engines that could move an entire solar system.

He does not plan a competing chain, believing in complementary ecosystems covering areas Cardano does not, like IoT or privacy.

The Alcubierre warp drive concept and praises ITER's recent stellarator fusion results.

Baldur's Gate 3 looks awesome and that the Divinity team is the right studio to make it.

Tezos has fallen far behind and jokes EOS will just raise more money to try to compete.

Criticizes past Tezos leadership and governance failures, saying the moral hazard hurt Swiss crypto foundations broadly through bank scrutiny.

Clarifies he criticizes specific actions, not entire projects or people, and would still collaborate with Tezos.

John McAfee is not insane the way Alex Jones is, and defends Roger Ver as principled even as the industry moved past him.

Bitcoin Cash exists as a real example of a Cardano relevant governance failure, but still respects Roger Ver's early merchant adoption push.

Explains why solving the Collatz conjecture would likely also resolve the Goldbach conjecture through factorization under addition.

Jokes that Peter Schiff being Satoshi Nakamoto would be the greatest twist ever.

He thinks Adam Back is probably Satoshi Nakamoto.

Jokes about a friend's failed bid to buy the Mets and admits he is a Yankees fan at heart.

He gave up on the NFL because it became too political and lost its role as a shared, apolitical pastime.

Answers rapid fire questions on his favorite color and love of Golden Girls.

Praises Caitlin Long as one of the sharpest people in crypto and jokes about drafting her to run for Senate in Wyoming.

Confirms he loved MacGyver and Stargate SG-1 growing up.

Argues Bitcoin maximalists who call every other coin worthless are simply talking their own book.

CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap rank Cardano differently because they treat founder held supply differently.

The intelligence world's warnings about attractive foreign agents, or Natashas, used to extract secrets from cleared personnel.

The same honeypot tactics get reused to extract money instead of classified information, urging skepticism of sudden romantic interest.

Rebuts a hit piece claiming Cardano could fail, noting smart contracts have not shipped yet and pointing to pending Africa and Eastern Europe deals for millions of users.

Dismisses Crypto Briefing's negative coverage, saying the dog barks and the caravan moves on.

Recalls nearly dying in Cambodia after an incident involving an old Soviet tank and an RPG.

Confirms the Cambodia story is true and says he is worried about losing contact with his Ethiopia contact John O'Connor.

Shares hitting 184 miles per hour track racing his Lamborghini.

He has hit 208 miles per hour on his motorcycle and 205 on his Ducati.

Recalls visiting Devil's Tower and realizing it was the real Close Encounters of the Third Kind location.

He has been sober since December 2019, longer than expected given the pandemic stress.

Agrees a permanent DJ booth setup with an extended playlist from the summit would be great.

He used to do float tanks weekly before the pandemic and they recently reopened.

Remembers Hal Finney as a genuinely good person who worked on PGP and always answered emails at length.

Gets excited about the new Tesla Roadster's claimed 1.9 second 0 to 60 time and compares it to his McLaren 720S.

Selling resellable digital game keys as a native asset, tied to play history, would be a great use case for Legends of Valor.

Admits the Lamborghini became his daily driver by accident after he put 10,000 miles on it.

Driving an exotic car mostly attracts attention from other men wanting photos, not women.

Warns that people swerving to film or photograph his car on the road makes driving it genuinely dangerous.

Ferrari oil changes cost more than Lamborghini's and that Ferrari owners have treated him worse.

The Lamborghini came from a consulting deal, still taxed at about 60,000 dollars, and that he has held Bitcoin since 2011.

He prefers American cars like Cadillac and once considered the Ford GT, and that his kids love the Lamborghini.

Recommends LastPass as a solid password manager while he plans to eventually build his own.

A Voltaire led consortium needs to mature before major development proposals can go through it, likely by the end of 2020.

Confirms Daedalus will get a voting center and a mobile voting app, with a whiteboard video on voting coming soon.

ADA's original lock up period already expired in 2019 and the Foundation is moving its holdings into Daedalus once staking is ready.

Signs off thanking the community for a fun AMA after a viewer's mom's 1968 GTO story.