AMA 11/29/2019

Thanksgiving in snowy Colorado after a blizzard, with parents driving six hours from Gillette, an overcooked turkey and the Cowboys game.

The snapshot on the 29th went off quietly and successfully, and a big data dump with testnet instructions and economic parameters follows on December 5th.

The incentivized testnet ships Monday December 9th on a brand new Jormungandr based client, with wallet restore, delegation, stake pool instructions, the Explorer and the stake pool dashboard in the same release list.

On the Haskell side the relay nodes are replaced and the core nodes follow after the OBFT hard fork, with exchange infrastructure, a Haskell wallet backend integration, a formal methods paper, a two week release cycle and a Root9B security audit.

The incentivized testnet is Shelley in many ways already, with peer to peer networking, Ouroboros Genesis, stake pools, delegation and a GUI, and it is the chance for operators to build reputation and for everyone to tune the economic parameters before mainnet.

His company's own infrastructure is decentralized by the end of the year and block production goes to the community in January, the result of two years of formally verified, audited, high quality code.

Handing the Hydra protocol over tomorrow so a prototype can be built in a month or two, proud that his company became both a great engineering and a great science company.

Critics said the project was too slow and would never achieve it, so he thanks the community that never doubted through the hard years.

Met the marketing firm McCann in Ireland to prepare a major brand refresh and marketing surge in 2020, because Cardano was built as a world financial operating system and should be going for number one with a billion users, not sitting at the back of the pack.

Coming back on The Cardano Effect, and Yoroi wallets will be restorable in the incentivized testnet Daedalus node from early December 2019.

Down from an all time high of 241 pounds to 212 with a goal of under 200 by the end of 2019, training six days a week with Pilates, yoga, cardio and weights, plus a private chef and a food sensitivity test.

Wim Hof style jogs in the freezing morning, no jujitsu blue belt here, though director of engineering Bruno Paleo is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu badass.

A Debian fan currently broadcasting from Ubuntu for running a full node, plus a big shout out to the Saturn Network team.

If stake pool nodes author invalid blocks the network simply rejects them, like a poker dealer who hands you five aces.

The crypto space of 2015 had enormous potential but no rigor, and poor protocol design decisions stay with you for years, as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are the first to admit about the internet.

The world computer idea is fantasy: the real model is a ledger with native capabilities like asset issuance, oracles, randomness, clocks and timestamped data, plus bridge code to applications that still live on Amazon or Microsoft servers, and truly decentralized computation is a 2025 to 2040 problem.

The first company lesson was narrowing things down: EVM, IELE, Plutus with the extended UTXO model, Marlowe as a financial DSL and even a legal DSL were all on the table, and deciding what counts as 1.0 took years.

The second lesson is the value of incumbent platforms: Yoroi is the most successful product in the ecosystem not for its code but for one click install, easy wallet restore and a common experience across Linux, Windows and Mac.

In 2019 the company hired product managers like Aparna and started working backwards from the user experience to the backlog, and his challenge as CEO in 2020 is keeping the soul of an engineering and research company while commercializing.

Halo and recursive SNARKs matter not because they are elegant but because they give a mobile client the security of a full node, and they need formal methods or you get a Sapling style bug.

A Haskell reddit thread where someone working at Kadena dismissed his company's contributions stung, because more than thirty developers spent a year and hundreds of pages of specification on the cardano-node rewrite, and the company gave the community GHCJS, acid-state, cross compilation and Haskell to WebAssembly.

The company has to get much better at communicating, so Tim and Brett are driving a whole article series on Ouroboros, including a dedicated piece on nothing at stake and long range attacks, then threads on Plutus and the engineering work.

Lamborghinis are great cars but really expensive to fix, so no Lambo tractor for Christmas.

Vitalik does not even follow him on Twitter and mostly surfaces to criticize his company's work, and a friend from the Ethereum Foundation, Virgil Griffith, was just arrested for speaking about Ethereum in North Korea, where the Wassenaar arrangement treats cryptography as munitions and 20 years in prison is possible.

Blockchain software will control identity, money and property in the 21st century, so it carries geopolitical consequences for sanctions and regulation, and he will gladly work with African regimes that want to modernize but will never speak at a conference in North Korea.

Ethereum's leadership has been too idealistic, and the fight with IBM over the C++ client license pushed IBM into building Fabric instead of adopting Ethereum, though Vitalik has matured enormously and the honest problem is that Ethereum's design cannot deliver Ethereum's vision without a gigantic Eth2 effort.

40 percent of ADA sitting on 42 addresses mostly reflects exchange aggregation, computing the Gini coefficient would be a fun community exercise, and young projects always show a founder effect that dilutes over time.

You need no high quality PC to delegate, and the stake pool minimum requirements come out around December 5th or 6th.

Smart contracts on Cardano are not just financial: bridge code lets you issue assets for voting or tokenize a soccer team while the application logic stays in JavaScript or Java and talks to the blockchain as a service.

The only tokens he holds are Bitcoin and ADA, and the ginger hippos get formally acquired on a 2020 trip to Uganda.

The Cardano Foundation is moving quite well under Nathan and Domino, with two new Governing Council members to be announced soon, which is exactly why he was in Switzerland.

No Boer goats on the ranch, but there are mini goats and recently mini donkeys.

Delegating on mainnet will work with hardware wallets, cold staking with Ledger is being negotiated right now, and Aparna will share the details later.

Cryotherapy and cold exposure everywhere, including a surprisingly cold Dubai where he had to wear a coat.

An Africa tour is planned with stops in Accra, Uganda and Tanzania, probably on the way back from Antarctica.

The nap sofa works thanks to 14 dollar gel infused pillows from Amazon, and the most recent fast ran three days after breaking it for meetings in Dubai, with a six day fast still to come.

Once the system is decentralized you are the owner of Cardano, and none of his ADA has been spent yet, maybe on a plane ticket or a hotel room, since all he got on Black Friday was an AMA.

Meditation is one of many routes to a good mental state alongside workouts, science based YouTube channels, flow training and wingsuit training in Sweden in December 2019, and yes the shirts are getting too big.

They build open infrastructure they will not own because a triple net business makes money while benefiting the whole world, and that post capitalism mindset beats 20th century silos chasing monopoly.

Staking is coming, December 9th is going to be a good day, staking percentages get announced December 5th, and weekly feedback lets them change things fast.

The Africa programs are at pilot stage with far more offers coming in than the team has capacity for.

Banters about french fries on a blockchain and the ranch name, then the serious answer: being rich has not changed him because things never make you happy, only people, interactions and honesty do, and the favorite dog breed is a German Shepherd and Labrador mix.

Bloomberg entered the Democratic race for cheap ads and a never Trump strategy, spending hundreds of millions to keep someone like Elizabeth Warren from winning, because a wealth tax is no good deal for Bloomberg or for Hoskinson.

In a Walking Dead apocalypse nobody would care about Cardano anyway, and the billionaire line was already crossed back in 2018, which Forbes reminded everybody about against his wishes.

On whisky, neither Glenfiddich nor Macallan: Glenmorangie for Scotch, Jameson 18 for Irish, Hibiki for Japanese, and Macallan 30 is just a show bottle for the shelf.

Transaction fees can come down as the price rises through an elastic model, using MakerDAO style economics to inject price information so ADA becomes aware of its own price and fees stay very low.

Being poor does not necessarily make you sad, some of the poorest people he has met are the happiest, it depends on whether your needs are met.

He and CZ know of each other and talk, CZ is a good guy, and Tulsi Gabbard is a good gal too.

Still have not seen Joker, and the Irishman just came out too, there is simply no time.

Cardano needs a tipping bot and a tipping service on Telegram, so that is a challenge to the community to build it.

No Yakuza membership and no body suit tattoo, and the question that shows up in every AMA gets answered on Joe Rogan one day.

Watched all three new Rick and Morty episodes on the flight from Colorado to Toronto and on to Dubai, the writing still holds up.

Happy to fight Chico Crypto in a celebrity boxing match after Shelley ships, training like Rocky IV with temporary Russian mafia tattoos.

Would love a Cardano blockchain conference or at least a meetup at Denver University, great campus even if that copper roof was way too expensive.

Bitfinex keeps saying they will list Cardano and they did assign a developer, with the Foundation talking to them, so it is happening.

John O'Connor met Jack Dorsey and the first thing he asked was why Hoskinson still has no blue checkmark, and he is glad Jack takes moving to Africa seriously.

If Crypto Crow promotes it he will do the Chico Crypto fight in Cincinnati, with Dan Larimer in the next round, but no boxing match against Floyd Mayweather jr.

Coinbase does not hate Cardano, people just need to be patient.

Greetings to Colorado Springs and to Sweden, where he is heading in December for the wingsuit training.

Tesla's new truck is trying something new and deserves credit even if it looks weird, and a Neil Young concert sounds like it would have a heart of gold.

Probably getting the new Roadster when it comes out, since 0 to 60 in 1.8 seconds beats his current fastest car at three seconds.

The three objects above the whiteboard are laser cut, layered and fully wearable masks made by a gentleman on the East Coast.

Closing out: the data dump comes December 5th and staking begins December 9th.