AMA 09/09/2018

Kicks off the AMA before flying to South Korea and Japan, promising to work through a batch of pre asked bonus lifestyle questions first.

Answers a fan in Germany asking how he runs a company, travels hundreds of days a year, and copes with the stress.

Admits he came from a family of workaholic doctors and picked up their worst habits, including getting gout at 27.

Recalls gaining over 60 pounds in four years and realizing the trajectory was heading toward 300 pounds and an early heart attack.

Credits nephrologist Dr. Jason Fung's intermittent fasting advice with an eight hour eating window for losing 22 pounds.

Moving toward a ketogenic diet and the mental clarity he noticed once fasting pushed him into ketosis.

Shows off a Muse EEG headband he uses for mindfulness meditation, which gives real time feedback on calm versus active brain states.

Tries floatation therapy, floating in dense salt water in a pitch black soundless tank, and says it has improved his sleep.

Opens up about the emotional toll of constant Twitter and Reddit criticism as he's become more globally known.

Recommends lifestyle resources including Tim Ferriss, the Joe Rogan podcast, and the books Stealing Fire and How to Change Your Mind.

Credits probiotics and gut health work for easing his acid reflux and food allergies, citing the books Grain Brain and The Good Gut.

Explains why every entrepreneur needs people who can say no to them, contrasting Tesla's governance with his equal power co-founder Jeremy Wood at IOHK.

Takes a UK fan's question on whether peer review is too slow for a hyper competitive crypto space.

Argues protocol development must be judged differently than software development since protocols can last for decades.

Points to PGP's 27 year lifespan as proof that durable protocols justify a slower, more disciplined process than apps.

Admits IOHK's software release cycles and QA process are too slow and says fixing that is a focus for the second half of the year.

Lists the checkpoints good protocol teams use: peer review, formal specification, prototyping, and real world deployment.

Claims the Ouroboros and Plutus teams are moving faster than competitors and ahead of Ethereum's Casper.

Weighs the trade offs of running a 16 country, fully decentralized company against a tightly focused Silicon Valley startup.

The market crash is just a return to rationality after an unsustainable run up, not a sign the fundamentals changed.

Compares the shakeout to the dot com collapse, where believers keep building and short term speculators disappear.

Praises the protocol work coming out of Avalanche, the Stellar Consensus Protocol, Tendermint, and Snow White.

Ouroboros is about three years into a research agenda now bearing fruit toward finality and sharding through Hydra.

Sums up his view: peer review does not slow Cardano down, but protocol work and software work need different processes.

Responds to Dogecoin founder Jackson Palmer's dig about his LinkedIn, clarifying he did not finish his additive number theory PhD.

Pure number theory has little to do with running Cardano, which is why the science is led by chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias, Philip Wadler, and Duncan Coutts.

Lists three traits that matter more than credentials for a researcher: the ability to fail, working well in a team, and borrowing shamelessly from competitors.

Cites Bram Cohen, the credential free inventor of BitTorrent, as proof domain expertise can matter more than a diploma.

Breaks down what the ADA token actually does beyond being a legacy style store of value and means of exchange.

Proof of stake block elections through the Follow the Satoshi protocol, where your odds scale with how much ADA you hold.

Outlines plans to route part of the inflation into a treasury that the community votes on, like an NSF or DARPA for Cardano.

Argues a treasury gets holders actively engaged in the platform's direction, unlike passive Bitcoin ownership.

A longer term liquid democracy where holders can delegate their vote to trusted community figures.

Computational fuel, Ethereum style gas costs for running programs, as a further dimension of ADA's value.

Previews the 2019 Cardano Improvement Proposal process that will let the community vote on contentious calls like quantum resistance and privacy hardening.

Holochain is not really a Cardano competitor, describing it as more of an IoT focused framework of frameworks.

He doesn't sweat daily price swings, distinguishing fundamentals driven long term investing from day trading.

Criticizes the ICO era's copycat projects and dubious fundraising, calling for stricter exchange listing standards.

Takes his dad's question on world peace and whether the crypto world ever thinks about it.

Traces how hierarchical, tribal control structures started eroding after the Enlightenment and accelerated with the internet.

Argues human cognition, shaped by evolution for small tribes, was never built to handle instantaneous global information.

Uses Elon Musk's Joe Rogan pot smoking backlash as an example of the empathy gap created by social media fame.

Points to the vaccines and autism myth as a case study in confirmation bias overriding actual scientific evidence.

Questions why GDP remains the default measure of progress when metrics like HDI capture quality of life better.

Cites the backlash against Jordan Peterson as an example of people distorting reality to fit a preferred narrative.

Connects crypto to world peace through its ties to markets, trust, and who gets to be a gatekeeper.

Worries about a society that never forgets and can't forgive old mistakes, thanks to permanent social media records.

Recommends philosopher Dan Dennett's work as a starting point for building better cognitive tools against bias.

Rejects the idea that blockchain has hit a ceiling, recapping the early altcoin fork era of Litecoin and Feathercoin through NXT and Ethereum.

An emerging third generation of blockchain and teases an enterprise product built around a blockchain less blockchain for data.

The story of Inlelo, a South African venture financing apartment buildings in Johannesburg townships without an ICO.

Explains why Inlelo needs a blockchain land registry to rebuild property records that residents only ever settled by handshake.

Building a credentialing system so unemployed township workers without formal certificates can prove their skills.

Fires back at Vitalik Buterin's claim that the space has peaked, saying billions of unbanked people remain unsolved problems.

Predicts trillions in new wealth as millions of township residents get digital identities and access to peer to peer lending.

He disagrees that crypto's best days are over, pointing to research ideas seeded in 2013 and 2014 only now maturing.

Explains why IOHK funds a design and VR team alongside engineering and science instead of treating design as an afterthought.

Argues that raw code and academic papers mean nothing to most people until design makes them tangible and interactive.

Walks through Symphony of Blockchains, born from asking the odd question of what a blockchain should actually sound like.

Shared creative projects like the blockchain animations unify engineers, marketers, and scientists across the company.

Admits the design team is understaffed and slow to hire but expects a major AR push heading into 2019.

Waves off a coin burn question by pointing out ADA has no dedicated reserve of coins to burn.

Recaps choosing Haskell for the core, then spinning up a Rust project called Prometheus that became the Icarus wallet.

Mobile and hardware wallet support, including Trezor and Ledger, should land within three to six months.

Reflects on Haskell being powerful but temperamental compared to Rust's easy portability across mobile and web.

Tackles whether exchanges holding user ADA in custody can be kept out of the staking process.

Proposes a visually distinct exchange address type that is automatically excluded from stake weight.

Sketches a dual key design letting exchanges reverse a stolen transaction within a roughly 12 hour settlement window.

Addresses segregation needs industry wide adoption or game theoretic assumptions about staking behavior break down.

Brainstorms human readable addresses through named lookup tables and a friends with wallets web of trust model.

Rules out BIP39 style word based addresses as impractical since matching normal entropy needs 30 to 50 words.

Prioritizes shorter, sequential index HD wallet addresses as the near term fix, to be backported into Daedalus.

Draws the line between financial contract languages like Plutus and Marlowe and general execution engines like KEVM and Yellow.

Marlowe and Plutus exist to write rich, verifiable financial relationships, echoing why Satoshi limited Bitcoin Script.

The client, server, smart contract triangle developers face when deciding what logic actually needs to run on chain.

Explains why building Yellow on K framework semantics lets any programming language plug in without writing a new compiler.

The two layer ledger design means Cardano can host multiple virtual machines like KEVM and Yellow side by side.

Sketches Daedalus becoming a decentralized app store and the challenge of minimizing trust in outsourced or multi party computation.

Takes a break for a fun question about giraffes, recounting one that begged for potato chips on a South African safari.

Considers whether Cardano will add Monero style ring signatures so funds can be spent more privately.

Breaks privacy into layers: whether an address can be linked to a person, whether network use itself is visible, and whether transaction amounts are hidden.

Warns that OS and hardware backdoors, like a CPU frequency side channel attack that stole a PGP key, limit real world anonymity.

Shares that switching to LastPass and two factor authentication improved his personal security at the cost of some control.

Frames privacy as Cardano's toughest governance decision yet, since going more private risks exchange delistings while going less private risks a Facebook style backdoor.

Lists the privacy toolkit on the table: bulletproofs, ring signatures, dandelion routing, and plausible deniability wallets.

Uses the shifting risk of admitting Ba'ath party membership in Iraq to show how the value of the same secret changes over time.

Proposes a world where users own their KYC data in a personal vault and grant one off audits instead of handing documents to every exchange.

Envisions a pan African financial system built KYC free from the start, sidestepping the legacy compliance stack entirely.

Insists the privacy spectrum must be settled by community governance, not by IOHK unilaterally or by courting regulators like Ripple has.

Opens the reversibility question with a cash analogy, contrasting old world irreversible cash with modern fraud protected bank accounts.

Recounts having his own phone number SIM swapped by hackers and references Michael Terpin's multi million dollar theft case.

Rejects giving any protocol level committee the power to reverse transactions, favoring market based insurance and custodial options instead.

The existing legal system, not a new blockchain court, should keep handling crypto theft as ordinary fraud.

Shares his grandfathers' stories, including one with Alzheimer's, as examples of how elderly people become scam targets that crypto's design doesn't protect.

Cites Hal Finney's careful advance planning for his Bitcoin before his death as a rare example of getting succession right.

Predicts banks and insurers won't disappear but will shrink into a smaller role as one asset class among many for savvy custodians.

Opens a question on where AI and machine learning fit into crypto, starting with complex event processing in modern finance.

Recalls a hacked Reuters Twitter account's fake Obama injury tweet triggering an algorithmic flash crash within seconds.

Argues consolidated, transparent on chain data feeds could prevent the kind of hidden risk buildup that caused 2008.

Blockchain gives AI and machine learning models a more holistic, unified data feed than markets have ever had before.

Takes the closing question on what the world could look like in 20 years.

Argues money and value are collective fictions society agreed to believe, and that those narratives can be rewritten.

Points to Ancel Keys' low fat dietary dogma as an example of a bad narrative driving real world harm for decades.

Debunks the myth that US manufacturing has declined and argues market oriented approaches lifted African infant mortality below Europe's 1950s levels.

A quiet medical revolution shifting incentives from managing chronic disease toward actually curing it.

Highlights breakthroughs in regenerative medicine, immunotherapy, and growing organs and limbs from a person's own cells.

Raises the ethical and societal questions that come with people living dramatically longer, healthier lives.

De-extincting species like woolly mammoths and the thornier question of ever reviving extinct human relatives.

Frames advancing artificial cognition as a mirror that will expose uncomfortable truths about human nature.

Warns that if humanity is careless, AI could evolve past humans and eventually be turned toward war and greed.

Draws a parallel to Cold War nuclear near misses, the Cuban Missile Crisis and a 1983 false alarm, as reminders how close extinction has come before.

Closes with a call for people to recognize they, too, can choose not to end the world, no matter how small they've been told they are.

Wraps the AMA, acknowledging it turned out more philosophical and less Cardano focused than usual, and thanks viewers for tuning in.