Saturday Night Thoughts

Opens late night August 21st to 22nd 2021 going through emails, Reddit, and Twitter, seeing irrational exuberance and hate in the cryptocurrency space.

The Alonzo smart-contract launch September 12th is a done deal with the Summit September 25th to 26th at over 20,000 registrants, yet the ghost-chain and cult FUD persists and a developer asked how to do access control in UTXO.

The project did first-principles research writing papers like GKL and Ouroboros, inventing new networking, extended UTXO accounting, and DSLs like Plutus and Marlowe from 30 years of functional programming.

Recalls the painful code rewrite where 3 months turned to 12, with 2019 and 2020 the inflection points, then Byron, Shelley, and Goguen's three stops of metadata, native assets, and Alonzo.

None of the 3000 trained developers or the Ethiopia deal, which took 4 years of bureaucracy, matter to critics who already decided Cardano is a scam and call it astroturf.

Asks who they are doing this for: the small petty crypto industry seeking CoinDesk's love, or the world, since crypto is full of people who got rich quick and think they are smart when they are just lucky.

The real world of supply chains, medical records, e-voting, payment settlement, and identity is far more complicated, with trillions of dollars and decades of history, taking decades to change.

IOHK Global was started to change the world by having real scientists do the hard, unsexy work of papers and peer review, which should not be controversial given billions can be lost.

Engineering should use design by contract, property-based testing, and formal methods, which the industry rejects as too slow even when screwups cost customers 600 million dollars.

Laments the industry wanting to overthrow governments yet not rock the boat while making money, doing crypto without affording to implement anything correctly.

Cites Crypto Gape publishing that he said ADA would hit 150 dollars, sourced from a YouTube impersonation giveaway scam, calling it what counts as journalism in the industry.

His most satisfying moment will be transcending the Homer Pepes, million-dollar NFTs, and Dogecoins to return to improving the world's systems for everyone everywhere.

Asks how to build identity systems without 50 billion dollars of theft and breaches like OPM, Yahoo, T-Mobile, and Equifax, and sound money so politicians cannot debase currency and harm the poor.

Asks how to make voting systems verifiable and online despite an MIT academic insisting paper is more secure, when expensive elections create the two-party monopoly.

Recounts a conversation with Stuart Kauffman that in 20 years humanity will irreversibly destroy the biome because global capitalism's parameterization values the short term too much, so you must change capitalism's parameters with a new competitive system.

Small things like a better voting system for your club via IdeaScale and Catalyst grow to enormous things in 5 years, the point of the Cardano movement from first principles.

The only solace is that the Cardano community gets it, reading books and thinking about right and wrong, fairness, the environment, and equality of opportunity.

Society programs people to work, watch reality TV, and repeat like a Nine Inch Nails song, but this movement inspires them to believe they can change how money, property, and relationships work.

Peer review matters because it strips ego, culture, language, gender, and skin color off the paper, creating a decentralized, culturally neutral global brain that keeps growing.

Independent checks are missing in Silicon Valley as Theranos showed, and in much of the industry, which is why they do government contracting to give economic identity to millions of kids who become crypto-native adults borrowing via peer-to-peer lending.

While people complain about 87-year-old senators, billions of globalizing people have no preferences yet from Microsoft or Google, so getting them in changes the fabric of society, and if the new system produces more value the legacy system must adapt or die.

The slow way proved to be the fast way, being first to market with provably secure proof of stake despite claims it is fake, and the same will happen with smart contracts, side chains, and governance.

Rebuts the GitHub-commits-do-not-count FUD, challenging critics to show which commits or progress are bad, since they cannot and just parrot to confirm a bias.

Asks why critics feel so passionate rather than ignoring Cardano, insisting every paper, the countries entered, and the 154 Catalyst-funded projects must be corrupt because they decided Cardano is bad.

The mission is to improve the world's systems for everyone, done because it is hard, and that Cardano's ecosystem has more people than the million-person Apollo project his dad watched as a teen.

The space could have 10 million good people to do anything, but squabbles tribally, treating everyone they disagree with as evil, and needs to grow up.

Admits he is arrogant and flawed but self-aware enough to know he must work with others, citing El Salvador where a Bitcoiner delegation went to protect the country from shitcoins.

Finds it refreshing that his community and partners like Algorand and Ergo cooperate, hypothesizing they will outgrow the industry into the systems and digital-transformation business.

Envisions transforming individuals into self-sovereign identity, organizations without CEOs, and governments held to immutable rules embracing sound money and real consent of the governed.

It is Saturday night and everyone at IOHK is tired after a long year of coding, traveling, and negotiating, unified by the message that it is about the world not Cardano.

The September 2021 smart-contract launch is a small taste as the community turns on bottled-up projects, planting a forest where many fail but the successes become extraordinary over 3 to 10 years.

In 2022 they must figure out a different way for the human race to communicate, the oldest system needing improvement, since the internet and social media made it acceptable to treat those you disagree with as evil to be destroyed.

The powerful systems they build are neutral algorithms with no ethics like gravity, so people must not lose the plot but set aside their biases, traumas, and pettiness or embrace systems that expose them so they act on their better angels.

Crypto is furthest along in social evolution, a vision of a potential future, like children who discovered alien technology they did not invent and cannot yet use wisely.

The communication problem is a big 2022 pursuit, and Catalyst with 33,000 unique wallets and thousands of weekly conversations somehow converges to good decisions, a microcosm of the macro.

The biggest challenge is not technology or adoption, since Facebook got 3 billion users, but communication and critical thinking, imagining AI and blockchain fact-checking speech and identifying biases so good ideas rise through swarm intelligence not central coordination.

Cardano will change a lot over 5 years with controversial new tech, creating winners and losers as rent-seekers cling to the past, like Ethereum's proof-of-work miners resisting the merge.

Being at the ground floor has been a privilege, and the community changed his pessimistic-kid perspective to believing anything is possible with an army.

Recounts asking his brother about a geothermal plant on the ranch despite no local resources, since the earth is a nuclear-powered battery, and finding an Alberta company that built a conduction proof-of-concept.

Before he dies the world will have hypersonic travel, enhanced lifespans, grown organs, Neuralinks, resurrected woolly mammoths, and human-indistinguishable AI you can marry.

The industry aspires to be the connecting tissue installing new rules and artificial laws of physics across biology, physics, and engineering, with time the only limiting factor.

The lobster experiment: asking the community to name the stuffed lobster on his mic got 197 names like Clawdano and Crusty, and over 100 people from Japan to Ghana to Vietnam emailed graphic-novel backstories in 48 hours.

The lobster could become a folk-hero mascot with NFTs and games limited only by time, and he is no different from you, so ask what your lobster is, since if people trust and empathize they can make anything exist.

You can make a new money, invent a new job, or rewrite Game of Thrones' ending with deepfakes, since it is the world of possible if people communicate and use the systems they are evolving.

To save the environment you retune capitalism into a better system than it replaces, making entrenched interests more money in the new system rather than being cynical about a new world order.

Humanity has achieved freedom from itself to escape its evolutionary programming and become something better defined not by him but by everyone, an emergence people are ant-hiving all the way down.

Cites the Greek proverb that great societies are built by old men who plant trees whose shade they will never know, and that Cardano done right will be here in a century.

The core, not the fair-weathers, stayed when ADA was 3 cents and will stay to change the world, since it is a positive world of yes better than one of variants, inflation, and boomerang children.

Symbols matter, so for AGI he went with the craziest guy, Ben Goertzel, not established scientists like Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig, or Sebastian Thrun, deciding to do it in Africa in Ghana, Rwanda, or Uganda on the hard problem of machine language-to-language translation for uncataloged languages.

He bought the Lost in Space robot and Robby the Robot, retrofitting them to that AGI backend to display at the Wyoming summit and eventually talk back.

Closes that things will change faster and more dramatically than people are comfortable with, and the only choice is whether to be part of it or let it happen without your consent.

Crypto is one of a few dozen industries that will change everything with the lowest barrier to entry, touching artists, philosophers, and garbage men alike.

The lesson of 10 years in the industry is that every great thing and every regret came from collaboration or its lack and the ability to listen and connect, and that September 2021 pours gasoline on those collaborations so one day you too will have a lobster on your microphone.