AMA 01/10/2021

Open the AMA broadcasting from Colorado, upbeat about traveling again once the pandemic recedes and excited for 2021.

The decentralization parameter d is heading to zero this March, closing out the hybrid Shelley phase, with the Mary hard fork adding native multi-asset support in February.

Welcomes Lunatec, a Scala development firm founded in 1993, as a new IOHK partner competing with the Rust team to build Cardano's devnets.

Highlights Plutus progress, upcoming hybrid wallets and partial delegation, and the go to market strategy for smart contracts in early 2021.

Kick off the January 10 2021 AMA, noting a turbulent week politically and defending recent videos on free speech.

Recaps Catalyst Fund 2 closing with payments going out and Fund 3 opening, aiming for a new funding round every six to eight weeks.

Scaling up Catalyst's governance consultancies working alongside DCF toward what is called the best governance system in cryptocurrency.

Reacts to news that Dan Larimer left Block.one, reflecting on the small world of crypto founders and friendly rivalries with Vitalik and others.

Dan Larimer never sticks with a project long term, having been at EOS about four years versus six years on Cardano so far.

Argues EOS raised too much money and became defined by its treasury rather than adoption, unlike a smaller Bitshares upgrade would have been.

EOS will always be seen as falling short of its lofty goals regardless of when Larimer left, hoping failing projects' investors can still be made whole.

Wonders why Larimer built an entirely new EOS system instead of hard forking the already decentralized Bitshares with its working treasury.

Acknowledges the crypto community has not been kind, comparing the tribalism to how Bitcoin maximalists attack everyone else.

Credits Dan Larimer's real contributions, co inventing DPoS and building the first algorithmic stablecoin with Bitshares, plus the flawed but ahead of its time Steem.

Contrasts Cardano's openness to outside ideas with other projects, describing how the 2015 choice between proof of work and proof of stake was left to open scientific research.

Tout Cardano's 92 published papers and tens of thousands of citations as a commons belonging to the whole cryptocurrency space.

Admits Cardano has not solved every problem in scalability, governance and interoperability, criticizing EOS's mentality that its founders had all the answers.

Peer review and security audits as independent checks that keep projects honest and stop them descending into a cult of personality.

Predicts Larimer's departure will ultimately help EOS become more open to outside ideas rather than reliant on one founder's philosophy.

Denies the claim that IOHK does not publish technical content, pointing to the IOHK website, forums, GitHub and Cardano.org documentation.

Names Dan Boneh as the smartest cryptographer known personally, with Silvio Micali and Adi Shamir tied for greatest impact on the field.

Praises chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias as the best scientific administrator met, mentoring students who went on to design Catalyst's treasury and sidechains research.

Traces how Aggelos Kiayias's former students have gone on to their own academic careers, comparing his mentorship legacy favorably to Einstein's.

Credits Aggelos Kiayias's interdisciplinary approach, mixing economists, game theorists and programming language experts, as key to solving proof of stake.

Predicts decentralized exchanges could kill centralized ones within 10 to 20 years, though front running, fees and liquidity remain hard problems.

Shares excitement for the new Tesla Roadster and joke that supercars become obsolete once battery hypercars arrive around 2024.

Teases an upcoming Africa special announcement without giving details yet.

Poke fun at Koenigsegg's Scandinavian engineering being overpriced despite making incredible cars.

Reveals Lamy pens as the favorite for cursive and mathematical notation, a habit developed over a decade ago.

Muses that cryonic head freezing is unlikely to work, guessing cloning with an imprinted personality simulacrum has better odds.

Recounts founding Next Cryptography after leaving Bitshares before getting pulled into Ethereum, later reusing the Hong Kong shell for IOHK.

Confirms having read Neuromancer and calls Pagani's supercar designs overpriced compared to the mid engine Corvette.

Waves off a vague random number generator question, noting RNG is a whole subfield of cryptography like asking about fields or rings.

Jokes that Dodge Vipers are terrible cars before reassuring a crypto newcomer that wild volatility is just what crypto does.

Confirms YubiKey hardware support is planned for Daedalus and pushes the team to accelerate getting it out.

Breaks down the goal of cryptography as securing confidentiality, integrity and authentication, using digital signatures on a will as an example.

Timed encryption and dead man switches, imagining a government that auto declassifies data on a set date.

Cryptographers model an adversary's capabilities to prove a scheme secure, including the threat quantum computers pose to classical crypto.

Outlines the cryptographer's method of starting from a goal and an adversary, then searching for impossibility theorems and hard problems.

Uses integer factorization and the trapdoor of public key cryptography to explain why one is deliberately excluded as a prime number.

Challenges listeners to factor a huge number, illustrating how the Euler totient function underlies key pair construction.

Cryptography draws tools from any branch of mathematics, highlighting lattice based cryptography's promise for post quantum security.

Distinguishes information security from cryptography, using the Twitter hack of Obama, Biden and Gates as an example of social engineering beating strong crypto.

Admits not having played Cyberpunk 2077 yet, criticizing early game releases that ship unfinished and get patched later.

Names EverQuest as the last MMORPG played and praises Red Dead Redemption 2 for killing off the player character with tuberculosis.

Confirms the Goguen hard fork is tentatively on track for Q1, following Allegra and Mary with native multi-asset support and extended UTXO.

The best US state to move to depends on job and travel needs, explaining why living in Wyoming full time is not practical.

Gives the shortest answer of the day on what makes Cardano resistant to quantum computers versus Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Jokes about obviously beating Vitalik Buterin in a boxing match and confirms wanting a Neuralink implant if it proves successful.

Weighs in on Julian Assange, admiring the push for government transparency but criticizing the ego wrapped up in wanting credit for the leaks.

Wonders whether Assange or Snowden would still have leaked if anonymity technology let them do it without ever being identified.

There is no strong COVID vaccine preference, leaning toward Novavax's protein subunit approach over adenovirus vector vaccines.

Flags the Johnson and Johnson single shot vaccine's paused trial over transverse myelitis cases while awaiting its safety data.

Credits UK sovereignty from Brexit with getting vaccines two months ahead of the EU, though the real verdict is years away.

Once Bitcoin is fully mined, transaction fees alone will need to cover network security.

Cardano's network stack and peer to peer governor are built and being profiled on testnet, targeting activation before end of March.

The small network team prioritized simulations and technical debt reduction, aiming to enable peer to peer alongside d equals zero.

Recommends the memory palace technique for retaining knowledge and defends grass fed beef over grain fed as a hay grower.

Confirms a Cardano Litecoin collaboration is coming via a joint LIP proposal.

Growing hay to feed horses and selling the surplus to a neighbor's hay business.

Recommends Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind and predicts broad psychedelics legalization within 20 years.

Declares the Incentivized Testnet fully retired now that its job of bootstrapping Shelley is done.

Promises to publish dates for a Japan trip and help desk tour with Sebastian's Cardano hub, filmed from Hokkaido to Okinawa.

Read Elon Musk's Dogecoin promotion as good natured, tongue in cheek mockery of the crypto industry rather than anything personal.

Reports KEVM testing is going well and plans to fold it into the January 2021 smart contract report.

Argues Ouroboros Genesis already beats proof of work for bootstrapping since it needs no checkpoints, though proof of work still suits massive computation aggregation.

Welcomes Polkadot's modified Ouroboros fork as validation that open research benefits the whole ecosystem, not a threat.

Meditation happens with Calm and a Muse headband, crediting it with major personal growth.

Traces how oil companies bet on hydrogen fuel cells as the post fossil fuel future before mobile computing's battery R&D caught them off guard.

Details why hydrogen looked like the natural heir to oil's supply chain before it lost out to battery technology.

Credits the smartphone and laptop boom for forcing battery energy density and cost improvements far faster than oil companies expected.

Predicts battery cars are here to stay once range anxiety disappears and batteries drop to a quarter of today's cost.

Installing 250 kilowatts of solar on the farm to never pay for gas again, while acknowledging oil will still supply plastics.

Recalls Denver residents poisoning themselves making backyard biodiesel during 2008's 140 dollar oil, a price spike that pushed people toward risky alternatives.

Concludes the oil industry's short term greed cost it the chance to extend its dominance through hydrogen infrastructure.

Names Rick Ross as the current favorite rapper.

Lists engineering rewrites and false starts that would be avoided with hindsight if rebuilding Cardano from scratch.

PRISM identity would launch much earlier for tighter wallet identity coupling and a regulatory advantage, and KEVM would start a year sooner.

Reflects that Scala or F# might have been chosen over Haskell had those languages been mature enough back in 2015.

Counters critics who say Cardano is frozen in place, insisting the project is now moving faster with growing momentum.

Praises traveling wave reactors for breeding uranium 238 into plutonium 239 with no long term radioactive waste or proliferation risk.

Runs through thorium reactors, pebble bed designs and laser inertial fusion as favorite nuclear alternatives.

Names the capybara as spirit animal for getting along with everyone, even crocodiles.

Calls Algorand a good project.

Calculate Cardano's roughly 100x decentralization edge over Bitcoin by counting the 300 to 500 unique stake pools that produce blocks versus Bitcoin's handful of miners.

Another dry year is unlikely, though no drink has been had yet in 2021.

Argues Cardano's intrinsic value comes from its users and utility just like Bitcoin, not the token count that Peter Schiff misses.

Recalls forking Bitcoin's code into a worthless single node Bitcoin Charles Edition network to illustrate that value comes from population, not tokens.

Points to Cardano's 1200 plus stake pool operators and 10 plus development entities as further proof of its intrinsic value.

Confirms doing quarterly water fasts, with two weeks being the longest so far.

Laughs off a critic's old jab about having a face for radio and a voice for silent movies.

Confirms being left handed and rules out ever running for US president, calling it a powerless figurehead job.

Weed would be smoked with Joe Rogan after Goguen despite Texas's tobacco only rules at the studio.

Worries about Jack Ma's safety after crossing the CCP, calling freedom the most important thing a billionaire can lose.

Sketches happen in the Microsoft Whiteboard app that ships with the Surface Studio, and messaging runs through Signal.

Denies that China controls Bitcoin or Ethereum.

The downside of fame as people already having made up their minds, calling out the narcissist, incompetent, cannot code stereotypes critics repeat.

Details a daily web scraper report that pulls Cardano and IOHK mentions, including especially nasty 4chan biz posts.

Wonders what compels anonymous posters to act out fantasies about a public figure never met, chalking it up to low self esteem.

Online insults have no psychological impact personally, disagreeing with Jordan Peterson's view that criticism always affects you.

Notes Reddit long hated Cardano, but says Bitcoin maximalists bother more since real relationships exist with some of them.

Distinguishes real maximalist friendships like Tone Vays and Max Keiser as understood theater and marketing shtick.

Recounts being compared to Jeffrey Epstein by a longtime friend over a PPP loan comment, calling it a deeply disturbing betrayal of values.

Concludes the real hurt comes from people once trusted, not from anonymous 4chan posts.

Mocks QAnon, the storm and Pizzagate conspiracy theories as nothing but harmful nonsense.

Says if deplatformed the plan is to happily return to growing mushrooms, hay and animals, since nothing lasts forever, not even the time at Ethereum.

Compares losing a platform to a quarterback's career ending knee injury, saying you must enjoy being in the saddle while you're there.

Warns against sacrificing life today for a glorious future, insisting meaning has to make sense in the present, not just at the destination.

Points to a video on curated social networks as the answer for stopping Twitter and big tech censorship.

Banters that it is a slow technical question night before inviting more from a specific viewer.

Jokes that targeted psychological manipulation is just called marketing, or psyops when governments do it.

The graphene battery power bank is still around but a more convenient one with built in cords is now used.

Confirms plans to go to space in 2025 once the opportunity opens up.

Closes with the answer to the meaning of life: live well, be well, and treat others well.