AMA 08/30/2019

Broadcasts live from IOHK's brand new Colorado office, the company's first physical headquarters despite staff spread across roughly 20 countries.

Recaps an 18 person, multi day workshop with the Rust, Haskell, and formal methods teams to nail down the long term Cardano 2020 roadmap.

Each team runs its own agile cadence, from weekly extreme programming sprints to the formal methods team's much longer research cycles.

Lays out the three phase Rust node test plan: a self isolation testnet already stable, a networking testnet next, and a final incentivized testnet with real staking rewards.

Announces the networking testnet is on track to ship mid September, possibly slipping a week or two, as the last testnet before real staking begins.

Confirms a trip to Sofia, Bulgaria on September 28th for Byron's two year anniversary, including time with ambassador Fossil and tree planting.

Previews that the Bulgaria event will unveil the full Cardano 2020 roadmap and the launch date of the incentivized testnet, effectively Shelley staking.

Lists the infrastructure shipped so far: the v2 API, exchange integrations, explorers, wallet backend, Daedalus 1.6, the delegation center, and the Goblins testing framework.

Traces the Ouroboros research agenda back to 2015, when much of the industry believed proof of stake was an unsolvable perpetual motion problem.

Runs through the Ouroboros paper series, Genesis, Praos, BFT, Chronos and more, calling Hydra the most important paper of them all.

Hydra as the leap from one to n throughput via sharding, with the network testnet standing in as a near production grade combination of Byron and Shelley.

Mark the two year milestone since Byron as a capstone on the entire Ouroboros research agenda, calling it a major solved problem for computer science.

Announces a hackathon at the University of Wyoming with around 500 developers, where Plutus will be shown feature complete for parity with Ethereum.

Details the hard problems Plutus had to solve beyond the language itself: tooling, calling contracts, server client architecture, and compiling to JavaScript or WebAssembly.

Emphasize Plutus was built with formal verification in mind, led by a scientist with over 25,000 citations, specifically to avoid DAO or Parity style bugs.

Acknowledges the broader bear market has been disheartening and turned some good people bitter, but frames it as an industry wide problem, not a failure specific to Cardano.

Praises the Bulgarian community, led by ambassador Fossil, for planting trees and staying positive throughout the downturn.

Argues IOHK engineers for the next century rather than the next quarter, prioritizing process and strong foundations over shortcuts.

Building the ledger and consensus rules from first principles since 2015, using academic peer review as a repeated sanity check.

Frames Cardano as a process, not a person or company, a methodology that could outlive IOHK itself and that the community ultimately controls.

Tally the output since 2015: hundreds of pages of formal methods documents, tens of thousands of lines of code, and more than 40 papers.

Confirms Marlowe financial contracts will also be demoed at the Wyoming hackathon, capping a four year journey from risky research bet to a real product.

Expresses pride in the roughly 200 person IOHK team and the commercial and academic partners who helped deliver the work.

Answers a question on Algorand, praising Silvio Micali's team as legitimate competition while claiming Cardano is roughly two years ahead.

Complains that industry immaturity forces debates over whether protocols even work, when mature ecosystems should only be arguing over commercial execution.

Argues Cardano's edge over Algorand comes from a bigger science team and a more holistic view spanning interoperability, treasury, voting, and sharding.

IOHK studied Zcash style zero knowledge privacy research closely and learned a lot, even though it is not currently in scope for Cardano.

Rebuts a viewer named Eugene calling Cardano a scam by pointing to published papers, peer review, shipped Haskell and Rust code, Daedalus, and dozens of exchange listings.

Defends slipped deadlines as normal for genuinely novel science and engineering, noting the roughly 64 million dollar seed round still sits well below Cardano's market cap.

Argues the industry only becomes legitimate once products deliver real utility, not just speculative price gains passed from one trader to another.

The goal as a world financial operating system handling metadata, identity, compliance, and self enforcing contracts for economies as different as Georgia and China.

Compares the effort to a Manhattan or Apollo project, arguing software like this is never truly done, just gradually more useful, like the early internet.

The end goal as unsexy, hard fought iteration that eventually produces the new Amazons, Googles, and banks, built on principle rather than a cult of personality.

Challenges Eugene to name a project that has delivered more, framing five years of foundational work as an unprecedented achievement for a decentralized company.

Fields a question on how long the testnet will run before mainnet, deferring the exact answer to the September 28th announcement.

Confirms Phil Wadler is still at IOHK training graduate students and writing papers, and recommends Okasaki's book on functional data structures.

Distinguishes whether a technology can do something from whether it will actually be used, criticizing an industry that mostly copied Satoshi without first principles research.

Outlines two adoption paths: enterprise ledgers bringing new users in the developing world, versus a payments user experience good enough to pull people over organically.

The story of accidentally crashing an Ethereum conference in Berlin and finding developers passionate about solving problems, not about any one project's brand.

Uses Nokia and Blackberry's fall from mobile dominance as a reminder that today's market leaders, including Ethereum, are not guaranteed to stay on top.

Pushes back on the idea Cardano trails Ethereum, arguing Ethereum is actually two years behind since it still has to invent and retrofit protocols onto a live system.

Lists Cardano's technical advantages: a validated sharding strategy, support for both UTXO and account style accounting including a pluggable EVM layer, and on chain governance that Ethereum abandoned.

Confirms tracking competitors daily through their open source repositories, built on eight years of personal relationships across the space.

Points to FlyClient building on IOHK's superlight client research and calls Avalanche interesting, then criticizes the industry's bodybuilder style focus on consensus while neglecting the network layer.

Rejects time locked staking rewards and penalties, arguing protocol security should not depend on incentives, a key philosophical break from Casper.

The staged testnet path: the Rust testnet builds up stake pool density first, then a separate Haskell testnet verifies Ouroboros before the two merge into mainnet.

Wants third party reference hardware like Raspberry Pi nodes, contrasting Cardano's house level power draw with Bitcoin's ever growing energy consumption.

Responds to praise for the improved Daedalus wallet by crediting the value of iterative improvement over time.

Compares Cardano to Tezos's already live proof of stake and on chain governance, arguing Cardano is solving a different, broader set of problems and also works with Hyperledger.

Most remaining papers in the Ouroboros line after Hydra will just be revisions of earlier work.

Admits still following anime on and off, mentioning IOHK even has its own internal anime discussion channel.

IOHK will work with almost any blockchain protocol or community, including Neo and Ethereum, unless it is led by an egomaniac acting against its users.

Confirms the Kachina dolls on the shelf are real, part of a personal collection that also includes a Venetian plague doctor mask.

Gives an update on the Ethiopia deal, expecting to sign a government contract soon with pilots progressing across three countries.

Trades beard jokes with viewers, blaming it on too little sleep rather than any deeper meaning.

Fields a staking permission question by pointing to Nico and Sebastien, believing it is within the current roadmap.

Reflects on the hardest four years of the project, contrasting Cardano's slow foundational research across scalability, interoperability, and sustainability with Tezos's faster, narrower governance first bet.

Recalls having to invent cryptography like key evolving signatures and verifiable random functions, plus new DSLs, from scratch since no usable implementations existed.

Compares research to a mathematician's unsolved conjecture: years of work with no guarantee of ever reaching a usable result.

Credits better estimation and steadier weekly delivery over the past year after an early period of unpredictable timelines.

The frustration of quietly building through delays while critics gleefully declare they told everyone so.

Names the Cardano Foundation under Michael Parsons as the single greatest frustration of the past four years for failing its contractual responsibilities.

Confirms ongoing legal research is underway, with details to be announced later.

Muses about giving another TED talk around 2024 or 2025, a decade after the original, to reflect on what Cardano actually achieved.

Handing governance to the community happens in stages, starting with participation infrastructure like improvement proposals and ambassador programs before any voting matters.

Argues a voting system is only legitimate with high turnout, comparing low participation to a president elected by just five percent of voters.

Cites declining US presidential election turnout and weak candidate choices as a cautionary tale for what happens when participation infrastructure is neglected.

Lays out the concrete rollout: IOHK writes the improvement proposal process, the Cardano Foundation builds ambassador and meetup programs, then a liquid democracy voting system follows.

Closes with a recap: the network testnet ships in August 2019, and the September 28th event in Sofia will reveal the incentivized testnet date and the Cardano 2020 plan.