AMA 03/12/2019

Opens the AMA live from Hong Kong, jokes about a pet kangaroo joey from Australia and luggage lost by the airline.

Gives the monthly update: Cardano mostly on schedule, rest API a success, strong odds the Shelley testnet ships in March 2019 with a Rust command line interface.

Praises Vincent and his team for a month of near nonstop work getting the Rust testnet ready.

Confirms 1.5 release candidate five is cut, calls it the last release built on the legacy Byron codebase before a full backend swap.

The plan to merge the Rust wallet backend with the Haskell Daedalus backend over the coming weeks.

Ledger hardware wallet support is close, likely shipping in March 2019 or early April.

Previews the upcoming IOHK Summit with workshops and announcements the month after Shelley.

Brushes off a heckler calling Daedalus slow with a one word reply.

A low cost DIY full node kit on Raspberry Pi style hardware, with a community workshop planned at the summit.

Lays out the Ethiopia trip: ministry meetings, graduating 23 trained developers, and a phase two pilot likely in the coffee supply chain.

Details progress on interoperability research, including a family of NIPoPoW proof of work side chain papers moving from theory to practice.

Side chains will give Cardano light clients and eventual EVM or WASM compatibility.

Outlines a plan for quantum resistance via a post quantum checkpoint done at each epoch close.

Lists other interoperability protocols under discussion, including Lightning, Interledger, and Fusion.

There is no clear path onto Samsung's wallet yet but hopes to find one through IOHK's network.

The Tangem NFC card demo, a sub-dollar hardware wallet secured with a PIN.

Sketches a longer term vision of Tangem style tap-to-pay cash cards for offline transactions in Africa.

Comments on the Ergo project from IOHK research fellow Alexander Chepurnoy, built on Sigma protocols.

Critiques the fly client paper, saying some proofs look incomplete and the comparison to NIPoPoWs was unfair.

Praises the fly client and Merkle mountain range authors and hopes NIPoPoW ideas spread to other chains after peer review.

The scope of the advisory role with Endor, a predictive analytics venture with an eToro partnership.

Debunks the media claim he promised a trillion dollar cryptocurrency within a year, explains what he actually meant by a self sustaining Cardano economy.

Calls out Chico Crypto as a shock jock who baits guests for views, says he will not reward that with an appearance.

Shares personal news: his mother's knee replacement recovery and his grandmother's death while he was traveling.

Clarifies Cardano is not using BLS signatures and will likely use hash based cryptography instead.

The extended UTXO model and how Plutus turns every transaction into a form of smart contract.

Gluing on chain and off chain code together in Template Haskell, portable via GHCJS and WebAssembly.

Walks through a proposed Texas identity law for crypto payments and how contingent settlement contracts could keep transactions compliant.

Fires back at the claim release dates were made up, walking through the technical debt and missing foundation work that caused delays.

Lists concrete delivery proof: the Icarus wallet running 15 percent of the network, five Cardano releases, and a much improved v1 API.

Reflects that price will not move no matter what ships, but takes pride in the team's steadily improving estimates and delivery discipline.

Comments on Enigma's MPC based private smart contracts out of MIT Media Lab, notes SGX acceleration and IOHK's own MPC research line.

Gives updates on other IOHK linked research projects: ScorEx is dormant, RSCoin is retired, and Qeditas is being revived under Polina.

Jokes that almost nobody knows what homotopy type theory even is.

Lays out a multi pronged plan to train over 10,000 Plutus developers via a MOOC, channel partners, and an Emurgo program in India.

Lists university research partners including Edinburgh, Tokyo Tech, Athens, Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of Connecticut.

Argues smart contract quality is less about the language and more about capturing business intent correctly before writing any code.

Uses the Parity multisig bug to show the gap between intent and code, walking through the ladder from prose to TLA plus specifications.

Contrasts domain specific languages like Marlowe with general purpose ones like Plutus and Solidity, and their portability tradeoffs.

Predicts stablecoins will play a prominent role in crypto's future.

Expects to deliver the full 2020 contract scope within its original budget despite a slow start.

Declines a proposed panel with Kadena's Will Martino and Kyle Samani after Samani publicly called him a criminal.

Marvels at how global the Cardano community has become, citing chance encounters with fans in Hawaii and at an Australian airport.

Recounts his own math research into additive number theory and prime factorization, joking he counts as a failed mathematician.

He really likes the Lightning Network and expects some integration with Cardano.

Walks through the formal methods spectrum from a plain English spec up to LaTeX math that translates almost one to one into Haskell.

Explains when full formal verification pays off, citing flight control software and pacemakers that rarely change and cannot fail.

Cardano's lighter weight formal methods pipeline of LaTeX, derived Haskell, and QuickCheck that captures most of the value without a theorem prover.

Recommends the Netflix animated series Bojack Horseman.

Gives early lab TPS estimates of 100 to 250 for Cardano at launch, with Hydra and layer two protocols planned to scale further.

Snaps at a critic questioning IOHK's peer review process, pointing to Crypto, Eurocrypt, NDSS, and CCS venues.

Expects smart contracts to gain real legal recognition across a growing patchwork of jurisdictions, recommends following Coin Center and OpenLaw.

Jokes about possibly running into Justin Sun at Token2049 for a photo.

Picks Marvel over DC, naming Doctor Strange and Iron Man as favorites.

Jokes that Qantas lost his luggage again and he is stuck wearing the same clothes.

Sarcastically deflects questions about IOHK's revenue and his personal income.

A friendly rivalry with Tone Vays despite Vays insisting Cardano is a security and a scam.

Riffs on doing a Joe Rogan podcast someday, praising the Alex Jones episode as unbeatable.

Jokes he knows absolutely nothing about Lagrange multipliers.

Counters a claim that Tone Vays cannot use GitHub by pointing to IOHK's roughly 70 developers, 24 with PhDs.

He is unconcerned about Justin Sun forking Cardano's code, noting Tron never even forked the open source Mantis client.

Banters with a troll asking which avoided question he should answer, cannot place a Nostradamus reference.

Jokes about being accused of a Jekyll and Hyde personality.

Clarifies writing code before a formal spec can be the right order too, since it helps establish the business domain first.

Defends Haskell and Plutus's steep learning curve as a deliberate choice to curate a small, capable first cohort of developers.

Compares the strategy to Apple's tightly curated early iPhone App Store, including the Kleiner Perkins backed iFund.

Expects the curated developer cohort to become mentors and Stack Exchange veterans as the ecosystem gradually opens to more developers.

Muses on the untranslatable Voynich Manuscript and recommends the medieval Codex Gigas.

Jokes that Cardano's dog mascot is basically Disney's Pluto.

Names Legends of Valour as his favorite childhood video game and its accidentally missing ending as a life analogy.

Thanks the audience and signs off ahead of Token2049 in Hong Kong.