AMA 02/16/2020

Kick off a Sunday AMA broadcasting live from Colorado after a long stretch without taking live questions.

Confirms the OBFT hard fork initializes in about five days, bringing the fully rewritten Haskell node with a smaller memory footprint and two to three times faster syncing.

The two short lived Shelley Haskell testnets coming next, one for stake pool migration and exchange testing, one for balance checks between Byron and incentivized test ADA.

Daedalus users to download the Byron reboot update in March 2020, calling it the biggest single upgrade in Cardano history.

Announces a $500,000 ADA donation to the University of Wyoming, the first university to accept ADA, matched by the state and school for a $1.3 million endowment.

The Wyoming lab's trusted hardware goal, shrinking authentication chips small enough for shoes, watches, and even livestock.

Hopes the Wyoming lab pushes computer science students toward Plutus and Marlowe instead of Solidity, calling it the right way to write smart contracts.

Suggests any university could one day ask Cardano's treasury system directly for funding to set up its own research lab.

Count Wyoming as the fourth IOHK academic lab after Tokyo Institute of Technology, University of Athens, and University of Edinburgh, with all research published patent free.

Highlights Wyoming's new special purpose full reserve banks that can hold both fiat and crypto assets, useful for future stablecoins and custody.

Recaps ETHDenver, meeting the ShapeShift team and DeFi developers and scouting partnership opportunities.

Argues Silicon Valley will embrace Cardano once Goguen ships a developer first experience, noting the same evangelism push worked for Ethereum after Bitcoin.

Reveals the final Hydra scalability paper is submitted to USENIX and headed to ePrint within two weeks, the capstone of two years of Ouroboros research.

Confirms still consulting for Polymath and Polymesh after delivering the first Polymesh generation and white paper, with more news to come.

Reviews the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, praising the 108 megapixel camera, Snapdragon 865 chip, 16GB of RAM, and DeX desktop mode.

Predicts phones will eventually hold tokenized money and identity as credit cards and cash disappear over the next decade or two.

Praises Samsung Knox's trusted hardware enclave, used at IOHK for corporate security, for safely holding crypto private keys alongside a YubiKey.

Recounts attending the Suits and Spooks security conference and deciding, with IOHK's security director, to build an information security curriculum.

Plans a free Udemy course on information security covering PGP, password managers, VPNs, hardware wallets, and secure operating systems, released under Creative Commons.

Confirms Daedalus hardware wallet support is coming soon, with contractors upgrading Ledger firmware for multi-sig and cold storage alongside Shelley.

Like the idea of IOHK building its own pluggable trusted hardware devices for stake pools, capable of true random number generation and one shot signatures, though not planned for 2020.

Gives an Africa update, heading to South Africa, Uganda, and Rwanda in March 2020 with meetings planned with South Africa's first family and Ethiopian engineers.

Confirms starting a seven day water, coffee, and bone broth fast, done quarterly, describing electrolytes and salt as the only additions.

The wood carving behind the desk depicts Odin's battle with the wolf Fenrir at Ragnarok, a nod to Norwegian heritage.

Holds off on announcing a Cardano mainnet date until the first Shelley testnet results are in.

Dismisses rumors of wrapping Ethereum Classic for DeFi, arguing ETC lacks the funding and appetite to innovate despite sharing Ethereum's technical sins.

Confirms active zero knowledge and useful proof of work research, pointing to the ZKProof standardization workshop in London and the Sonic implementation replacing zk-SNARKs.

The useful proof of work algorithm Minotaur is named for chainless mining, since no chain could bind the mythological Minotaur.

Wants Daedalus to become a light client with full node security using recursive SNARKs, similar to the Coda project, to prove unspent transactions without the full blockchain.

Teases PRISM as an identity project already running in production with a mobile app, saving the full reveal for mainnet launch.

Recommends Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell and the community written Haskell Book for learning Haskell, plus Elm for functional GUI programming.

Calls the Byron reboot codebase the pinnacle of Haskell engineering, worth reading once you know the language basics.

Shift to Goguen's application layer needs, a rich multi asset standard, Oracle support like Chainlink and Maker, and a metadata standard for smart contracts to consume.

Uses LastPass as an example of moving a centralized password manager onto a blockchain, double encrypting so devices can sync through Cardano without trusting a company.

Argues Cardano needs decentralized identifiers as a first class citizen to meet travel rule and security token compliance while letting users choose what history to share.

A registered DID could stop exchange hackers from withdrawing funds, since a signed address requirement acts like two factor authentication for withdrawals.

Lists PRISM, Oracle support, metadata, and a possible native or adopted stablecoin as the utilities Goguen will ship.

Wyoming's Pathfinder ranch, 630,000 acres, as a possible blockchain grass credits project.

Wraps the AMA under an hour, thanking everyone for a fun Sunday session.