Dubai Surprise AMA 03/26/2022

Opens from Dubai on March 26th 2022 for the Binance event, calling it a heavy development month for Cardano.

Reports major progress on UTXO-HD, Hydra, and pipelining, with CIPs 31, 32, 33 and CIP 40 collateralized inputs heading to testnet plus Plutus versioning, making Vasil a significant hard fork with both big throughput and new contract dev styles.

The February update was a non-hard-fork and everything rolled into an overloaded June hard fork; he prefers smaller releases but the code and testing are on schedule.

References a blog post on increasing Cardano's transaction throughput and explains Ethereum took an accounts model based on NXT and the JVM which is simpler for devs, while extended UTXO has no global state, is deterministic and local, and parallelizes better for Lightning-like layers and side chains with isomorphism.

You must decide the minimum viable expressiveness, with the blog showing about 150 TPS for a canonical transaction and lower for Plutus scripts, all coming in June's Vasil with reference inputs, reference scripts, collateralized inputs, and possibly SECP256k1.

Says reference scripts mean you do not spend something to see it, sometimes with no transaction, and clever output use lets one Cardano transaction emulate hundreds of Ethereum account transactions, but warns increasing UTXO expressiveness too far is dangerous, citing the 2010 Bitcoin inflation bug.

MinSwap showed the community coming together when WingRiders found and reported a bug and the auditor Tweag blogged about what they missed, showing why certification and automated tooling matter.

Says unlike adversarial communities Cardano's is friendly and collaborative, with over 500 dapps under construction, millions of assets, and TVL growing fast, and notes the Foundation came to Dubai to represent the mission with more to come in the 360 episode.

Announces Consensus in Austin June 9th to 12th with the Foundation and dozens of independent Cardano ventures countering the ghost-chain narrative, plus a free community event like the one in Miami in 2021.

A teleprism could replace bureaucracies like a DMV, since Atala Prism excels at credential management: licenses, who issued them, and their validity terms.

Prism is why they are exploring an African Credential Alliance to bring credential services to the poorest people in Africa, giving them a better experience than the one in America.

Gives WingRiders a shout-out as one of the more professional DEXes with great tech, an example of rapid iteration from SundaeSwap to MinSwap to WingRiders, faster than Ethereum ever saw.

He will likely see CZ at the Binance event, with Gabe Abed and many others floating around Dubai.

On TODA, says it is a new protocol class not yet analyzed, but Cardano's design keeps a strong root of trust that spins out dedicated computation layers with different consensus and accounting models, per his 2016 settlement-layer and computation-layer whitepaper.

Metastable consensus like Avalanche, Algorand, or TODA can all be spun up as Cardano side chains, benefiting the network with throughput and new smart-contract styles, without replacing Ouroboros on the long march to Omega.

On Mithril for mobile dapps, says it improves inclusive accountability for checking balances and double-spends despite lacking a full blockchain copy, extendable to broader predicates, alongside recursive-SNARK work like Nina Protocol and StarkWare.

Corrects the misconception that Hydra releases in June 2022, noting it has a public roadmap and a testnet head iterating every three to six weeks, but the 2022 focus is pipelining and input endorsers.

Hydra is a phenomenal long-term solution for off-chain activity, micropayments, and interoperability but not the be-all of scalability, since the base ledger improves by orders of magnitude via pipelining and input endorsers while side chains like Milkomeda and Mamba offload volume.

Warns it is dishonest to tell people Hydra will flip a switch to a million TPS in June, insisting on iterative tangible growth backed by the real numbers in the blog post.

He would not recommend Dubai as a vacation destination, calling it very hot, expensive, and fake, though trillions of dollars are here.

On his JavaScript course, says he wants a free intro-to-programming course taught through JavaScript then TypeScript for type theory, then functional programming with Ramda and monad-like concepts, but ambition exceeds his time.

He is focused instead on his biotech startup with his dad and brother, possibly opening a clinic practicing medicine in 2022, and that the ranch is taking more time than expected.

He no longer contributes to Ethereum Classic, having left in late 2020, because there is no innovation, roadmap, funding, or treasury, and it was worth it only to prove a point about social contracts.

The ETC codebase was turned into the Mamba project launching on Cardano for EVM interoperability, so Solidity and web3 developers get Ethereum tooling better, faster, and cheaper.

Recommends the Minotaur multi-resource consensus paper, which weights more than one consensus algorithm at once to combine proof of work, proof of stake, and other proofs into a more egalitarian system.

On ISO 20022 and Sharia compliance, says a small group is looking into the certification standards as a likely Cardano Foundation work package, noting Algorand is already compliant.

He owns the video game Legends of Valor whose IP he bought, and is setting up a game company called IO Games whose first product is Crypto Bison.

As Ouroboros evolves the entire notion of an epoch may be removed, per Grigore's Nakamoto proof-of-stake paper, especially with multi-resource consensus.

Recommends the Haskell Book for learning Haskell, says the recording studio has not started because a tenant is still in the lot and will take six to nine months, and suspects Djed drops in the second half of 2022 since Vasil makes it easier to deploy.

Cardano has had many discussions with Algorand about VRFs and how they got Sharia compliance, praising Sean and Silvio, and is looking for low-hanging shared infrastructure like verified crypto primitives.

Explains why smart-contract chains ignore Bitcoin: it is hostile to smart contracts by design, with innovations like Taproot and SegWit hard-fought over years, which is why Ethereum founders worked on Mastercoin, colored coins, and BitShares.

Challenges maximalists to build a DEX, oracle, or stablecoin on layer-one Bitcoin, saying they cannot due to finality time, fees, OP_RETURN limits, and the restricted scripting language, which is why they built Plutus and embraced extended UTXO and proof of stake.

Acknowledges attempts like BitML and Russell O'Connor's Simplicity with jets at Blockstream, but says smart contracts are seldom done on Bitcoin's main chain, which is why Lightning, side chains, and NIPoPoWs take so long.

People will only do Bitcoin smart contracts via wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum or another system, since Bitcoin has not meaningfully updated in that direction in 13 years, which is why Cardano, Ethereum, and Polkadot exist.

His favorite Pink Floyd album is Wish You Were Here, and that dapp peer review is the developer's responsibility while the ecosystem builds automated static and dynamic analysis tooling.

A dapp certification summit in Barcelona May 17th to 18th will build a comprehensive testing and verification strategy, but your own code is your responsibility via bug bounties, audits, and open sourcing like MinSwap did.

On the University of Wyoming Cardano research lab, says they are in discussions to create a standards body, moving at the speed of bureaucracy.

The Mastering Cardano book author fell ill so they found a new team, and changing the design means it likely ships in 2023, which is fortuitous since a 1.0 would already be out of date.

On physical injuries, says he suffers from gout treated with allopurinol, has old taekwondo and judo sports injuries, and probably PTSD from constant crypto criticism.

The psychological toll is real, with white-powder mail, death threats, and no empathy in the industry, requiring meditation retreats and daily work to keep going.

No money is worth the abuse without a mission, that Africa and Ukraine demonstrate why the technology must exist, and that the good days meeting people who believe in the mission far outweigh the scowls.

Many entrepreneurs develop substance abuse and that he drinks one year on and one year off to avoid becoming an alcoholic in a tough industry.

He created a biotech company to learn about longevity, supplements, and fasting, but has a beginner's mind and no strong opinions yet.

Admits crypto feels like a scam at times at conferences full of pointless dogecoins and NFTs, but points to real progress like the October Bermuda trip and Africa.

Cardano and Ergo are part of an extended-UTXO alliance of three or four projects running the model or a variant.

He just finished reading The Three-Body Problem, and that the woolly mammoth team, Ben and his crew, may come to Consensus while making great progress on a world-changing long-arc project.

The gourmet mushroom farm should be fully operational by the end of June.

Explains why proving one plus one equals two takes hundreds of pages: unifying logic, set theory, and arithmetic constructively means balancing axiom independence, contradictions, completeness, and decidability, like Euclid's parallel postulate.

Math is neither complete nor decidable, referencing Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica whose failed unification agenda birthed computer science, and recommends Charles Petzold's The Annotated Turing and Joel David Hamkins.

There is no ADA burn happening.

Warhammer 40K on Cardano would be fun but is not happening soon, and advises a JavaScript developer to learn Solidity then use Mamba to save pain before gradually learning Haskell.

For learning how to learn, recommends Coursera's Learning How to Learn, Moonwalking with Einstein, How to Take Smart Notes on Zettelkasten, memory palaces, and the Pomodoro method.

He will make the next security lecture video eventually and is quite happy with Cardano's progress despite a horrible hard quarter, quoting Mike Tyson that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Cardano has the best layer zero, its network stack, which they thought about for five years.

As Cardano transitions to an open-source project where IO is a community member not a steward, he can run a meta-company of biotech, VC investments, and IO as an incubator for interesting ideas, never getting bored.

Crypto is magical because it can actually change the world, pointing to two million Ukrainian refugees in Poland unable to access government records back in Ukraine.

Cardano must give economic identity to the three billion people who lack it, that cynical journalists mislabel this as alt-right or crypto anarchy when he just wants to help people, and that hardened cynics writing about how evil crypto is while people suffer saddens him.

Acknowledges the sickening scams, Ponzis, moon-boyism, insider trading, and market manipulation he has seen over eight years, having known John McAfee and watched BitConnect.

People who make a thousand-x think they are the smartest in the world when they just got lucky at roulette and will lose it all, an unhealthy mania that jades him without the renewing mission.

Says he has become reclusive, enjoying privacy and asceticism at his ranch, and declines monthly invitations to meet billionaires and heads of state since travel is counterproductive to a healthy life.

Cardano is his life's work and he will never walk away until it is self-sustaining, self-determining, and still does what is promised on the label as it gains millions of users.

Vigilance now comes from over three million people, with pipelining, input endorsers, Mithril, Hydra, Omega, multi-resource consensus, side chains, and ISO 20022 all on a three-to-five-year horizon.

Calls this the most exciting time in the project's history because they get to do real things impacting hundreds of millions of people, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity worth any price of admission, like a Shackleton expedition ad.