AMA 06/16/2020

Open the AMA live from Colorado, show off a custom silver belt buckle a fan made as a rodeo style gift, and explain the cowboy tradition of never buying your own buckle.

Gives a brief update that Shelley hit its deadline, with wallet backend components now connected to the Shelley node ahead of end to end balance check testing in late June 2020.

Reflects on five years of whiteboard sketches, notebooks and setbacks that led to this moment, calling it the most special milestone of a career shared with an entire global community.

Shares stories of parents bonding with their kids over staking and Raspberry Pi nodes during the pandemic, thanking the community for sticking around for years.

Poll the community on whether to keep the incentivized testnet alive as an experimental chain with real economic value once its rewards end on the nineteenth.

Reveals buying the intellectual property for Legends of Valor and reading a book on designing magic systems as research for a new game.

Scout Colorado, Wyoming, Rwanda and Mongolia as possible sites for a game development studio, planning to reuse the Haskell training pipeline but teach Unity and Godot instead.

Teases the free Cardano virtual summit with over a hundred speakers already signed up including Stephen Wolfram, plus a podcast tour to push attendance past ten thousand.

Names Wish You Were Here as a favorite Pink Floyd song and greets an old friend, Aviva Bulow, who caught the AMA live.

Picks Chopin as favorite classical composer, saying there is no comparison.

Wishes for thermochromic fabric that shifts color with temperature, recalling a color changing shower and riffing on real liquid metal alloys.

Play down fear of SEC or government intervention, arguing that staying honest and keeping a good relationship with the community removes the worry.

Confirms finishing the Polymath consulting contract, wishing the team well as they move on to building Polymesh on Substrate.

Confirms the k and a0 decentralization parameter values were selected the prior Wednesday, with a blog post explaining the choice coming around the summit.

Slam Ripple's decision to hire Ben Lawsky, tracing his role creating New York's BitLicense and blaming it for gutting the state's crypto exchange industry.

Argues that putting a former regulator on Ripple's board legitimizes the company only because it wants an IPO, insisting the industry's real goal is to put banks out of business, not enrich them.

Cardano's stablecoin work as still in the exploration phase, with the research team having produced what may be the most comprehensive stablecoin research in the industry.

Confirms Daedalus is still in talks to support FIDO hardware based two factor login for the wallet.

Confirms loving Radiohead and enjoying the Creep remix made for The Social Network trailer.

Send love to Argentina, praising Atix Labs as an incredible firm and a close friendship built through the local blockchain scene.

Update on Africa work: a competitive bid for a voucher program in Ethiopia and an ongoing feasibility study for a payment system in Addis Ababa, with more to come from John O'Connor at the summit.

Genuine, kind collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on agricultural transformation in Africa, dismissing population control conspiracy claims based on what he has personally witnessed there.

Argues that public figures who portray themselves as different from who they really are invite others to define them, contrasting authentic self presentation with examples like Mark Zuckerberg.

Wanting to travel to Norway and Greece again once possible, mentioning family heritage and an IOHK office in Athens.

He owns a Lamborghini Huracan rather than a Ferrari, joking that Lambos do not have cup holders.

Confirms smart contracts on Cardano do not require GHCJS to function.

Update on Legends of Valor development, comparing the slow grind of side project work to George Washington managing Mount Vernon by letter during the Revolutionary War.

Floats composers Ramin Djawadi and Max Richter for a hybrid Legends of Valor soundtrack, mentioning a connection to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Just finishing a two day fast as part of ongoing health experiments.

Calls Craig Wright a special flower over his claims about Mt Gox, describing the Bitcoin SV community around him as a cult.

Shows off a Waterhouse inspired painting and a collection of symmetrical geometric masks decorating the office.

Confirms Shelley remains on schedule, admitting there have been plenty of roadblocks but all have been cleared so far.

Slam Seattle's CHAZ autonomous zone, arguing occupiers are extorting elderly residents for food and money while the city government responds with cowardice instead of enforcement.

Argues that grievances should be solved by voting out municipal government or holding a constitutional convention, not by rioting or burning down what you claim to want to fix.

Claims neither party wants to fix illegal immigration because Democrats want a future voting bloc and Republicans want permanently cheap labor, so both benefit from the status quo.

Proposes that real reform means changing the voting system itself, citing liquid feedback, term limits and the ninety percent disapproval rating of Congress as proof the current system cannot converge on good choices.

Teases a Prism presentation being saved for the summit rather than shown early.

Recommends Ron Chernow's Titan as a favorite inspiring book.

Deleting LinkedIn because it was only useful for spam and recruiter messages once he no longer needed to job hunt.

Reports the garden's jalapenos thriving after a hydroponic transplant while the super red hots struggled.

Promises to put together a critical thinking book list, following up on requests since the propaganda video series.

Rules out a NASDAQ listing for Cardano on the grounds that ADA is not a security.

Compares himself to Stanley Kubrick and trades Kubrick movie trivia, from A Clockwork Orange to Eyes Wide Shut.

Recalls wingsuit training in Stockholm and canceled plans to train with Wim Hof in Amsterdam once the coronavirus outbreak hit.

Names Seneca and Marcus Aurelius as favorite stoic philosophers, noting Seneca is who he actually reads despite everyone quoting Marcus.

Jokes that sixty months at IOHK caused most of his hair loss, promising to shave it all off and go full Bezos if it gets worse.

Recalls seeing kakapo parrots on a New Zealand trip.

Plans a refresh of the old Bitcoin education course and confirm talks with the Cardano Foundation about a certified Cardano professional program.

Admits having never really looked into VeChain despite fans frequently asking about it.

Delegation incentives stay tied to ADA even after multi asset support, since block producers would simply earn a portfolio of non native tokens as extra transaction fees on top of ADA rewards.

Muses about competing with Chainlink and invites developers to build an oracle solution on Cardano instead.

Turing completeness is not strictly necessary for smart contracts but is desirable for generality, noting most systems are only quasi Turing complete because they meter computation.

Covers the halting problem as the reason metered gas systems are required, and why Ethereum keeps needing to retune its virtual machine after every hard fork.

Recommends Charles Petzold's Annotated Turing as the best walkthrough of Turing's original paper alongside Church's lambda calculus and Godel's recursive functions.

Traces Hilbert's program back to the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians, explaining why a sound mathematical system needs independent, non self proving axioms and internal consistency.

Walks through completeness and decidability, crediting Godel's incompleteness theorem for proving math can never be made fully complete, and noting both Godel and Cantor struggled with mental illness studying it.

Confirms owning four dogs, two big and two tiny.

Honeycomb as an oracle solution and clarify the Turing test is about fooling a human, not measuring human stupidity.

Ricardian contracts and recall the failed ADA debit card and Ted10 initiatives from the Michael Parsons era of the Cardano Foundation as a cautionary mess.

Praises Paul Halmos's Naive Set Theory as one of the clearest books ever written on the subject.

Argues Confederate monuments should not have been named on US military bases since the Confederacy fought against the Union to preserve slavery, distinct from any legitimate states rights debate.

Defends keeping statues of flawed or evil historical figures as reminders rather than tearing them down, warning that applying contemporary standards to the past sets a precedent that will eventually be turned on people alive today.

Compares Confederate memorials to Germany's handling of Nazi era monuments, warning that ignoring rather than teaching that history has fueled a rise in right wing extremism in East Germany.

Confirms the mainnet hard fork is scheduled for July 29, explaining exchanges need advance notice to avoid losing liquidity.

Previews that Voltaire follows Goguen on the roadmap, with EMURGO getting equal billing alongside IOHK and the Foundation on the summit agenda.

Names Nimzowitsch as favorite chess player of all time for his prophylaxis strategy of overdefending, pointing to his book My System as the classic text.

Defends native assets as an improved, peer reviewed version of what colored coins originally tried to achieve, backed by two published papers.

Calls Bitcoin SV the worst top ten coin and a cult, then dig at Dan Larimer for dismissing peer review as dumb because he never went through it.

Lists Taekwondo and judo training so far, with Muay Thai and Brazilian jiu jitsu planned before coronavirus put it on hold.

Recommends Eloquent JavaScript as a starting point for new programmers but pushes them straight to TypeScript afterward instead of staying with plain JavaScript.

Recalls Brazil as the one place where women approached him on the beach rather than the other way around.

Trevon James lost all credibility by promoting BitConnect, using an Irish bar joke about how one bad act erases a lifetime of good work.

Confirms a cardano.org website refresh is coming as EMURGO's first visible artifact of new work.

Teases flying a plane with Shia LaBeouf as the most disgusting celebrity encounter, promising the full story could start real beef if told.

Trash object oriented languages for producing more code with lower reliability and harder maintenance compared to functional programming, while conceding Java or C++ still work if that is your preference.

Reiterates BitConnect was an obvious Ponzi scheme from the start, questioning how anyone pitched it with a straight face.

Calls Python a great entry point into computer science and data science, noting his chief of staff is currently taking a Python course.

Credits Wolfram Alpha as the leading supplier of oracle data across the crypto industry, calling Stephen Wolfram a kingmaker in that space.

Admits staying in a self imposed media blackout to avoid Westworld season three spoilers before watching it.

Pitches AI lawyers as a moral imperative, arguing it is unfair to punish people for breaking laws they had no realistic way of knowing when a legal opinion can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Predicts that formalizing law as a machine readable system will expose it as inconsistent and incomplete, and that poorer nations adopting better governance tech first could become the world's richest.

Closes the AMA thanking the community, looking ahead to the late June 2020 balance check test, the approaching summit, and an August full of blocks after the Shelley hard fork.