AMA 08/30/2020

Opens the August 30 2020 AMA with a recap of a busy month: cardano node 1.19 is up to 100 times faster and fully rolled out to mainnet.

Ledger and Trezor hardware wallet support is now enabled for Daedalus, Yoroi close behind, plus a coming firmware update letting stake pool operators air gap keys with a hardware wallet.

Bidding out a multisig contract with Apex to bring multisig support, a QR code center, and a hardware wallet center into Daedalus.

The debate among smaller stake pool operators over k and pledge parameters as a healthy sign the community understands and cares about decentralization.

Reports the d parameter is decreasing steadily, with about 25 percent of blocks now produced by community stake pools versus none a few weeks earlier.

Peer to peer networking begins rolling out in September on roughly an eight week timeline, removing reliance on relays from stake pools or IOG.

Highlights stake pool guilds and delegation portfolios emerging in the community, with one to many delegation as the top product priority.

Outlines the Goguen three phase rollout: a native multi-asset ledger first, then the Plutus Foundation layer, then the full Plutus application framework.

CTO Ramon Fernandez is personally micromanaging the ledger rules workstream to de-risk and accelerate pulling Goguen work into Shelley.

Announces expanded negotiations with Runtime Verification to modernize IELE and restart the K framework and semantics work.

Benchmarking Cardano's developer tooling against Ethereum, Algorand and Tezos, eyeing a Truffle-like framework called Firefly.

Plans a lightweight specification DSL for smart contracts enabling certified, formally verified contracts alongside Plutus, building on the Marlowe approach.

Funding a roughly fifty thousand dollar grant to explore a procedural, JavaScript-like imperative smart contract language alongside the functional Plutus track.

Becoming deeply obsessed with DeFi, having commissioned hundreds of pages of competitive research across the entire DeFi landscape.

Reveals a partnership with Emurgo to build an algorithmic stablecoin, prototyped first on Ergo before moving to Cardano, aiming to beat MakerDAO.

Announces a new IOG marketing director, Liza, a 20 year veteran hire who will report directly to him and lead product marketing.

Plans product marketing content explaining Ouroboros, Plutus, and the extended UTXO model versus Algorand, Tezos and EOS in plain language.

Hiring a dedicated developer experience lead to run acquisition, collaboration, incentives and deployment, the ACID framework, for the Plutus ecosystem.

Confirms Project Catalyst funding rounds begin in September, with the treasury paying community projects for the first time and repeating every six to eight weeks.

Wraps the August recap: the network is stable despite a frustrating month, dismissing critics who called Shelley easy now that it has shipped.

Teases a Goguen summit announcement coming later in the month, aiming to top the 10,000 plus attendee Shelley summit.

The ongoing Bittrex ada migration issues: the exchange's oldest wallet software has performance problems with address creation and coin selection under load.

The same wallet backend fix for Bittrex will let Daedalus support enterprise scale accounts with hundreds of thousands of transactions.

Expects the Shelley to Goguen hard fork transition to be smooth for exchanges, unlike the rocky Byron to Shelley migration.

Jokes that Bill Gates does not drive a Lambo, he owns a Porsche 918.

Admits he does not know the cause of the Bitpanda exchange issue due to poor communication, promises to follow up.

Lays out Cardano's interoperability strategy for Ethereum projects, from Ethereum Classic expertise via Mantis to planned wrapped Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash bridges.

Argues DeFi projects will migrate to Cardano in 2021 once it wins on cost, security and performance versus Ethereum and Ethereum 2.

Responds to repeated 51 percent attacks on Ethereum Classic, blaming its leaderless no-treasury governance and pitching Cardano-style treasury funding.

Recounts leaving Ethereum Classic years ago over its refusal to adopt a treasury, returning to find market cap flat and hash rate five times lower.

ETC's self-appointed leadership offers no vision, pointing to two submitted ECIPs and urging the community to adopt the Mantis client or force a fork.

Envisions three independent teams competing on Ethereum Classic by Q1 2021, giving the chain its own roadmap instead of copying Ethereum.

Sympathizes with an ETC holder frustrated by multi day exchange confirmation delays after repeated attacks, contrasting it with Cardano's steady visible progress.

Polkadot's Gavin Wood cites IOG research papers, a sign of mutual respect among serious teams in the space.

The goal for Cardano to become a financial operating system billions of people live within, calling it a vision worth sacrificing for.

Argues movements defined only by opposition, not vision, go nowhere, using a Trump versus Biden analogy, and says a treasury is the only way to fund independent competing teams with a real voice.

Opposes mandatory vaccines as a violation of bodily autonomy while affirming vaccines are broadly good, comparing the public health argument to obesity, smoking and alcohol.

He will likely take a coronavirus vaccine himself once proven safe and effective, partly because CEO travel requires it.

Rejects the fear that Plutus's Haskell-like syntax will hurt adoption, comparing it to developers who still learned Swift, Solidity or JavaScript when needed.

Details the developer acquisition angle of ACID, targeting existing functional programmers at fintech firms like Jane Street and Barclays who already know monads and map or filter patterns.

Compares Ethereum's current dominance to past tech monopolies like Nokia, Microsoft, Yahoo, Netscape and AOL, all of which eventually fell.

Reminisces about free AOL CDs and floppy disks handed out at Barnes and Noble in the 1990s.

Uses a red grain of sand on every beach on Earth analogy to explain the astronomically low odds of guessing a 24 word wallet seed phrase.

Trades Netscape Navigator Gold nostalgia with a viewer from before Internet Explorer took over the browser market.

The IOG contract is not over until Goguen, Voltaire and Shelley are fully delivered, with Basho infrastructure ready for the community afterward.

Shares 1995 movie trivia about Hackers, Angelina Jolie's early role and short-lived marriage to her co-star.

The good relationship with Ledger and Trezor, noting hardware wallet development is slow because it means writing near-assembly microcontroller code.

The hard fork combinator lets a client validate the entire chain history from Byron through Shelley to Goguen as one continuous ledger under changing rules.

The Byron reboot testnet history is checkpointed by hash rather than fully re-validated, since full validation would take months for no benefit.

Following the Mali military coup, explaining the narrow window a new government has to prove legitimacy through free elections and property rights, potentially via blockchain.

Navigating political complexity across Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, from internet shutdowns to Zambia and Zimbabwe policy failures to Chinese debt diplomacy.

Warns that a poorly built voter ID or registration system could bias elections, noting US ambassadors and the State Department keep close tabs on this work.

Jokes about the goose in his back pocket doing fine and getting crusty.

Confirms IOG will give a special commemorative gift to every stake pool operator who made a block in the first Shelley epoch, verifiable cryptographically.

Neuralink's brain computer interface works, with silicon threads implanted by a surgical robot reading and writing neural signals.

Neuralink's first applications target quadriplegics and paraplegics, with human clinical trials three to five years out following successful pig implants.

Predicts Neuralink evolves from a medical device restoring lost function into an elective cosmetic device for direct brain to computer communication.

Argues direct thought transmission via BCI would let people share entire concepts instantly, avoiding the ambiguity and slowness of speech and language.

Envisions transmitting emotions, memories and whole books directly between minds as the biggest communication leap in human history.

Speculates AI could mentor humans directly through BCI and even subjectively slow down time to compress years of learning into seconds.

Praises Elon Musk's framing of Neuralink around curing paralysis first, the same pattern he used pitching reusable rockets before Mars.

Criticizes Neuralink's battery and wireless design choices, arguing for a self-contained nuclear battery and a hardware kill switch against hacking.

Jokes he would launch a brain mining cryptocurrency called Tranquil if Neuralink becomes mainstream.

Trades a joking callback about breakfast in Borneo sounding like a movie title, with a John Lennon aside.

Declines to give a broad answer on crypto regulation and taxes without a more specific question.

Plutus and Marlowe courses already exist on Udemy, and plans to buy out top rated existing programming courses rather than rebuild them from scratch.

Outlines a planned rigorous programming course starting from the theory of computation, Turing machines and lambda calculus before touching any language.

Plans to build the course's practical track around JavaScript and TypeScript as the most broadly useful lingua franca language.

Sketches three capstone projects for the course: a web scraper, an AI project, and algorithmically generated music.

Wants the course to teach test driven development, algorithms, data structures and version control alongside the language itself.

Compares JavaScript and Python as teaching languages, noting MIT's switch from Lisp to Python while still favoring JavaScript for its universality.

Jokes he would teach the course on Windows with PowerShell and Chocolatey just to needle the Linux crowd.

Advises a C# developer to spend two to four weeks on functional programming and lambdas before a Plutus tutorial to be ready for Goguen.

Warns that any broad movement, including Cardano's, risks being co-opted, drawing on his own experience watching the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street get captured by narrower factions.

Argues the Black Lives Matter movement has been co-opted by self-declared Marxist leaders despite legitimate underlying grievances about institutional racism.

Traces the war on drugs and mass incarceration as a driver of institutional poverty and generational crime disproportionately hurting minority communities.

Argues every historical attempt at Marxism ends in repression and famine with no counterexamples, from Venezuela to North Korea.

The current woke mob lacks the lived moral courage of past dissidents like Mandela or Gandhi, comparing it to easy retroactive claims of moral superiority.

Ties the unrest to real economic disparity, noting billionaire wealth grew even as the economy shrank thirty percent, with wealth concentrated in the top one percent.

Argues the ballot box has failed to fix these problems, so building parallel blockchain based systems for money, voting and property is the real lever for change.

Frames this as a pivotal era combining neural implants, genetic engineering and exponential AI growth against stagnant collective wisdom.

Warns the same AI surveillance tech used for video upscaling can identify dissent in a crowd, eliminating privacy and enabling social control.

Frames the coming decades as a choice between a century of world war and dystopia or one where humanity finally treats everyone with dignity.

The time for polite diplomacy is over because the other side is deplatforming and consolidating power, so decentralized crypto builders must keep asserting their voice.

Muses that AI or social media collapse, not just nuclear weapons, could be the Fermi paradox's great filter for civilizations.

Argues entrenched monetary systems persist because those in power profit from them, but predicts unsustainable money printing collapses systems like it did the Soviet Union.

Gives a brief Hydra update, saying Rob Cohen will cover it in Monday's press call.

Current Cardano throughput is around 100 to 200 transactions per second.

Hitting the full 45 billion ada supply cap is decades away, and by then transaction fees alone will fund the network.

Gives an update on the Atala project, mentioning a fertilizer voucher tender they lost by underbidding, with the winning bid unlikely to deliver at that price.

A good relationship and mutual respect with Avalanche's Emin Gun Sirer, admiring that his cryptography claims go through peer review.

Evaluating Dan Boneh's RSA accumulator research as an alternative to Merkle tree based accumulators for zero knowledge work, despite its trusted setup requirement.

Predicts cryptocurrencies will become settlement rails between central bank digital currencies, effectively replacing the Bank for International Settlements.

A statement on Ledger hardware wallet support for Daedalus will come soon alongside the hardware wallet center.

Borrowing stablecoins against bitcoin or ada as a currency arbitrage play, noting it only works well while collateral value is rising.

Contracts for difference as the base mechanism behind many stablecoin designs, where one party takes the risk and another gets stability.

Confirms IOG itself will build a dozen or so dapps on Cardano, pushing back on critics who fault him for also building on Ethereum Classic.

Responds to an accusation that power corrupts him too by explaining why he advocates for systems with checks and balances rather than trusting individuals.

A personal story about a police officer letting him speed past in his Lamborghini Huracan while pulling over a less wealthy driver behind him.

Draws the broader lesson that unchecked privilege makes powerful people forget they got there by circumstance rather than divine right, hence the need for rule based systems.

Sees room to collaborate with Polkadot despite similar technology, citing years of good relations with Gavin Wood and the Web3 Foundation team.

Counters that wealth concentration under the Pareto principle matters less than overall societal condition, preferring the Human Development Index over GDP.

Cites Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now to argue capitalism cut extreme poverty dramatically, contrasting relative US poverty with the real deprivation he saw in Indonesian slums and African townships.

Andrew Yang's universal basic income proposal as a response to structural unemployment from AI automation.

Contrasts how the wealthy can hedge against inflation through firms like Goldman Sachs while ordinary people simply lose purchasing power.

Proposes a flat ten percent income tax and ten percent consumption tax with no exemptions, funding welfare through block grants to states and local charities.

Wants mandatory quarterly public spending reports from government showing exactly what was funded, the KPIs, and consequences for missing them.

Chats about the reproduction of Klimt's Freyja's Tears painting hanging on his wall behind him.

A story about a chicken landing on his head while drinking coffee outside that morning.

Loopring is on the due diligence list for September evaluation.

Compares Cardano to a capybara, the animal that gets along with every other species, as a metaphor for staying friendly with competing projects.

He wants to see the Cardano Effect interview showing a stake pool running a block from a smartphone.

ETC's self-appointed leaders resist change because reform would cost them their current influence over the community.

Brushes off an accusation from Dan Larimer that he was secretly working against him.

Recommends the surrealist art of Vladimir Kush after a viewer asks about a print on his wall.

Gives a brief Legends of Valor status update, saying it remains his lowest priority project while Cardano takes precedence.

Quips the real question is whether ETC will fork itself.

He gets along fine with Gavin Wood personally despite both having styles that sometimes rub people the wrong way, calling him a talented programmer.

Confirms the team is drafting a Litecoin Improvement Proposal as part of ongoing Litecoin collaboration.

He does not talk to Vitalik Buterin much these days beyond occasional Reddit comments.

The Jeffrey Epstein case clearly points to something real and uncomfortable that elites and media have tried to bury.

He would consider Vitalik Buterin a phenomenal researcher hire, joking he is probably worth half a billion dollars by now.

Recommends Mr Plinkett's Star Wars review videos as a great example of creative long-form content.

He has had dinner with the Winklevoss twins on several occasions and maintains a cordial relationship despite them being bitcoin maximalists.

He knows Barry Silbert of DCG well from many past interactions.

Praises Lex Fridman's podcast for landing great guests despite his monotone delivery, and would enjoy appearing on it.

Picks Domino's over Papa John's in a lighthearted pizza preference question.

Recounts receiving a roughly 400 pound bronze eagle statue as a gift that would not fit in the elevator, planning to find it a home at the ranch.

He has discussed a possible Mastering Cardano book with Andreas Antonopoulos, contingent on reaching sufficient ecosystem scale.

Trades Dungeons and Dragons edition trivia, noting Baldur's Gate was second edition and Neverwinter Nights was third.

Details early technical plans for his Legends of Valor game under Frontier Studios, built in JavaScript and TypeScript with the Babylon.js engine.

Reminisces about the classic Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons game engine from the 1980s and 90s and wants to modernize it.

Recalls the physical code wheel copy protection that shipped with old Gold Box games like Pool of Radiance.

He is looking forward to Baldur's Gate 3 from Larian Studios, praising their work on the Divinity series.

Closes the two hour six minute AMA, thanking viewers for their questions and promising to keep doing these regularly.