AMA 04/25/2019

Opens another AMA to make up for the last one being cut short by the roadmap and Shelley announcement.

Plans to catch a 2 30 am Avengers Endgame showing right after wrapping up.

Weighs turning the internal Haskell course used in Ethiopia into a public online course.

Plans a Plutus textbook for July and a possible OReilly book covering Plutus and Marlowe.

Confirms Ledger hardware wallet support is on the way.

Staking keys stay separate from spending keys so a compromised stake pool can never touch your funds.

Reflects fondly on a guest at the IOHK Summit.

No plans to chase a listing after being ignored by that exchange back in 2017.

Denies working for a rival exchange founder or that Cardano is dead, pointing to record development velocity.

Commits to being more aggressive about releasing internal reports and documentation publicly.

Explains why Daedalus doesn't show USD values yet, since picking an exchange feed means taking a position.

Names fried scorpion as the best thing eaten while traveling.

Confirms Daedalus staking delegation and a Windows command line stake pool tool are coming.

Guarantees Shelley ships in 2019, joking he will eat his own shoe if not.

Getting pygmy goats for the ranch.

Traces proof of stake history from Peercoin through NXT to Tendermint and Cosmos.

Confirms the Rust Ouroboros Genesis implementation is the mainnet target, with a Haskell prototype also running.

Walks through defenses against a 51 percent attack: cost, forking out attackers, checkpoints, trusted hardware.

Stake pools can run on x86, ARM was chosen for cost, hopes to get the barrier down to a $50 Raspberry Pi.

Distinguishes Plutus as a general purpose smart contract language from Marlowe as a domain specific financial contract language.

Pushes back on a rival developer calling proof of stake insecure, demanding concrete proof over assertions.

Confirms the team uses static analysis, linting, fuzz testing, and property based testing.

Explains why ADA still tracks the wider market despite having no ties to Bitfinex or Tether.

Clarifies a website isn't required to run a stake pool, though metadata and a page help attract delegators.

Gives a quick tour of the home office.

Surveys network layer research including libp2p and gossip protocols, noting the network stack stays under researched.

Reiterates the company holds no patents and finds them incompatible with an open ecosystem.

Recalls a great meeting with Stephen Wolfram and the potential of an oracle data provider for smart contracts.

Drinks black bulletproof coffee in the mornings.

Praises Joe Rogan's interview style of genuine listening over a pre scripted agenda.

Contrasts open ended podcast conversations with traditional journalism's pre planned angles.

Recalls a conference pitch that turned out to be a $25,000 ask for a consensus meeting slot.

The eye has healed well after a hemorrhage.

Confirms stake pool selection probability is proportional to ADA staked.

Points to the Wyoming secretary of state site to confirm the company's registration there.

Jokes that Satoshi is dead and everyone should move on.

Details the year long research contract with Runtime Verification and its three goals for the K framework.

Semantic based compilation, letting one set of language semantics recompile programs across virtual machines.

Flags a lingering efficiency problem, machine generated code still 10 to 200 times slower than handwritten.

Decides to pause the K framework research contract for 2020 and focus 2019 on shipping Plutus and Marlowe.

Frames 2019 as the year of Plutus and Marlowe and 2020 as the interoperability era.

Shares Steve Jobs' advice to Jony Ive that great products come from saying no.

Argues the research foundation already built shrinks the gap between aspiration and a shippable 2020 product.

Ledger's move toward the Nano X may mean older device owners need to upgrade.

Jokes about banning a resident troll from the chat.

The limited rural internet options at the ranch: DSL, 4G, and satellite.

Shares experience with Brave and BAT tokens while still preferring Chrome.

Confirms Ledger will eventually work with Daedalus, with multisig support also coming.

Pushes back on calling Chromium garbage, noting Edge and other browsers also run on it.

Confirms Atala is open source Scala code with repos opening at some point.

Praises a proof of sequential work paper from Bram Cohen's team winning best paper at Eurocrypt.

The last minute Shelley testnet configuration delay.

Updates on Ethereum Classic: a funding proposal submitted, with the client development at risk if it's unfunded.

Questions whether the ETC ecosystem is viable if the community won't fund the infrastructure work it wants.

Clarifies Marlowe and Plutus contracts settle on the Cardano settlement layer under a two layer architecture.

Yoroi gets a delegation center for staking, though the wallet itself won't run a pool.

Clarifies being an unpaid Storm project consultant, distinct from the company's relationship with Horizen.

More Haskell courses likely coming to Uganda.

Recommends switching to Yoroi for Daedalus users with issues while the core wallet gets rewritten.

Opens the Tether and Bitfinex story with a question about a Cardano backed stablecoin.

Breaks down the New York Attorney General inquiry into Bitfinex's relationship with Crypto Capital and the $850 million gap.

Tether's reserve backing shifted to a Bitfinex loan after the funds froze.

Calls the situation a symptom of crypto's youth and hostile legacy banking relationships.

Recalls Bitfinex's interest in listing ADA back in 2017 that never happened, apparently now moving forward.

Recalls the great cover band at the summit and the resulting hearing loss.

Argues negative interest rates are a moral case for why crypto needs to exist.

Predicts stablecoins resolve independent of legacy banking, driving a crypto adoption wave if negative rates arrive.

Explains why deposit insurance becomes unnecessary once you hold a full reserve of your own money.

Riffs that the whole crypto industry exists because of banking industry malfeasance, and adoption keeps building.

Opens on blockchain identity, weighing what to build versus what to borrow from existing standards like UTXO.

The W3C DID standard and how DID documents self authenticate identity.

Walks through root of trust models: personal web of trust, federated certificate authorities, and centralized corporate registries.

Distinguishes verifiable facts from subjective, referential opinions within an identity system.

Stresses that credential revocation is the hardest and most important part of any identity system.

Cites Wikipedia's convergence on controversial topics as a model for communal opinion systems self correcting.

Cardano will embed DIDs into transaction metadata so only sender and receiver can decrypt it.

Obfuscated DIDs letting an auditor prove a transaction link without making it public.

Unpacks contingent settlement, requiring receiver sign off before funds move, unlike Bitcoin's push model.

Applies contingent settlement to exchange withdrawals, verifying address ownership before releasing funds.

Contingent settlement also fits supply chain and trade finance deals, a gap Bitcoin fundamentally has.

A $500 rescue horse compared to million dollar dressage horses.

Confirms contingent settlement is being implemented as a business requirement, paying an early mover cost.

Highlights that DIDs give individuals data ownership even after fleeing a country like Syria.

Gives a take on the Theranos scandal and whether its CEO should go to jail.

Theranos duped Silicon Valley despite lacking published science or FDA approval.

Asks how so many smart investors missed basic due diligence on Theranos's claims.

Turns the lesson into a checklist: what independent test would verify a startup's claims.

Dismisses the idea that ADA's price weakness reflects a moral failing tied to Tether or Bitfinex.

Crypto's wild price swings aren't correlated to progress, citing Bitcoin's run from 10k to 20k.

Distinguishes real circular token economies with genuine demand from pure speculation, likening it to gambling.

Credits Tesla with forcing real, industry wide battery technology improvements, unlike pure speculation.

Recounts asking a rival project's founders where token demand actually came from, exposing a purely speculative loop.

Contrasts closed circular economies like ad tokens with pure greater fool speculation.

Explains why a Cadillac CT6 won out over a Tesla.

Quick Colorado football banter about the Rams and Buffaloes.

Argues battery recycling and future chemistries make EV batteries no worse than fossil fuel extraction.

Denies rumors the lifestyle is funded by ADA sales, pointing to publicly verifiable Bitcoin holdings.

Riffs on direct air capture turning CO2 into oil and battery power as a form of energy independence.

Explains why oil companies favor hydrogen fuel cells since they preserve the existing supply chain.

The US is the largest natural gas producer and that he has never personally owned Ether.

Big Westworld fan, listens to the Wisecrack podcast about the show.

Jokes about eventually cracking Satoshi's PGP key just to declare him dead and end the speculation.

Admits gaining weight since starting the company, citing 100 hour work weeks and heavy travel.

Beer and whiskey picks: Sam Adams winter lager, Glenmorangie Signet, and a 30 year Hibiki.

Calls a well known Ripple executive a pragmatic, nice guy.

Best ramen recommendation in Tokyo's Shibuya district.

Closes with the story of narrowly missing Bill Gates at a hotel bar in Miami during the summit.

Praises the Gates Foundation's daily 18 million dollar giving and its influence across Africa.