AMA 12/05/2019

Broadcasts live from Colorado after a product and commercial summit that for the first time brought product, commercial, and engineering people into the same room.

Center summit work on the 2020 roadmap, agreeing on standards to benchmark Cardano against other blockchains and courting firms like PwC, Accenture, and McKinsey.

Rebuild the user experience from first principles, with the smart contracts program manager touring the summit to explain what makes Plutus and Marlowe's DSL approach distinct.

Feed the summit's sharpened vision and elevator pitch into McCann's brand refresh, and admit the team has long assumed its research speaks for itself instead of marketing it properly.

Teases a team photo tweet and a new data dump on staking rewards, explaining why inflation runs higher early on while adoption and price are still climbing.

Walks through why inflation should taper toward zero as adoption and valuation rise, leaving only a small reallocation from transaction fees.

Details the network deficit design, roughly 7 to 12 percent inflation depending on participation, a new stake pool calculator, and pools eventually offering more than plain consensus services.

Targets launching the incentivized testnet around the 9th, with Jormungandr 0.8 RC7 already out and RC8 close behind.

Warns any delay would only run a few days to a week, caused by breaking changes in Jormungandr needing time to propagate into Daedalus and the rest of the stack.

Reflects on how much protocol design work went into the incentivized testnet, noting a bare cryptocurrency version could have shipped back in 2017.

Credits the 3,000 strong Telegram community and IOHK teams for over 50 Jormungandr releases and more than a thousand issues serviced during stress testing.

Highlights the Haskell node moving to two week release cycles for the first time, pairing formal methods with agile development.

Praises product manager Nick for driving proper agile stories on the Haskell node now that it runs on two week cycles.

Frames Cardano's organizational challenge with the ODCC model, operations, delivery, commercialization, capitalization, historically split across five separate entities.

2020 is finally unsticking that coordination problem, starting with two strong new additions to the Cardano Foundation's governing council.

A first real sit down with a foundation member on the Cardano improvement proposal process, a new Solutions Group for routing deal flow, and the first serious talk about a treasury and RFP process.

Insists Cardano is a community protocol, not a personal fiefdom, and commits to extending decision making beyond IOHK in an increasingly federated way.

The staged release order to a viewer focused only on pools and staking, Shelley for decentralization, Goguen next for smart contracts and DSLs.

Live that Jormungandr RC8 has just shipped, crediting the team's pace of two to five releases a week.

Read the movement of 40 billion ADA as a healthy sign, showing holders are actively engaged rather than leaving coins dormant in cold storage.

Jokes that his bald eagle mascot gets away with everything since the species is federally protected.

Gives a shoutout to a viewer watching from Oklahoma.

Confirms New Balance seems happy with its authentication pilot and say IOHK hopes to expand it across the product line based on sales and metrics.

Incentivized testnet earnings move to mainnet after a credential restoration transaction, with a full blog post to follow closer to launch.

Reveals an internal paper, soon to be public, documenting how the team combined formal methods with agile without heavyweight verification overhead.

Points to Goguen's extended UTXO model as a live example, with Polina implementing the Shelley ledger rules alongside property based testing.

Riffs on nuclear fusion, contrasting magnetic confinement tokamaks and stellarators with America's laser based approach at the National Ignition Facility.

Recalls building a Farnsworth fuser as a kid, note the lab's hybrid fusion fission reactor recently crossed energy breakeven, and predict real fusion plants by the 2030s to 2050s.

Defends fourth generation nuclear fission against myths about scale, waste, and meltdown risk, lamenting that breeder reactors are politically blocked over weapons proliferation fears.

Answers whether Ouroboros needs trusted hardware by saying it doesn't, though secure hardware add ons offer extra assurance for key erasure and Oracle style services.

A quantum resistant checkpoint idea, an end of epoch ceremony where stake pools jointly generate and sign a distributed checkpoint.

Generalize that good protocol design layers multiple independent security assumptions so no single failure breaks the system.

The dead kings Twitter photo as a historical warning, a snapshot of King Edward's funeral right before those empires collapsed in World War One.

Uses the image to describe a sinkhole effect in social dynamics, pointing to Germany and Russia before their revolutions and to today's legacy financial system as another sinkhole forming from the bottom up.

Gives a quick Cardano Foundation update on the McCann engagement, then muses on whether mathematics is invented or discovered.

Compares Richard Dawkins on memes and Yuval Noah Harari on social fictions as complementary lenses on how societies are constructed.

Laughs off a viewer's claim they haven't invested in ADA because of him.

Expects Cardano's price to decouple from Bitcoin once enough practical use cases are running on the network.

Confirms anyone can register a stake pool the moment the incentivized testnet launches, and people can already delegate to it.

Clarifies Daedalus already integrates with Cardano with no plan to merge it with the Mantis Ethereum Classic client, though the Mantis team keeps working quietly on unannounced projects.

Expresses regret that IOHK could not get more traction, or even a development grant, to keep supporting Ethereum Classic and Mantis.

Argues Ethereum Classic cannot survive on immutability and principles alone while Bitcoin adds smart contracts via Taproot and lightning, and ETC needs real innovation to justify itself.

Recalls open hostility from Ethereum Classic's own dev group at summits in Hong Kong, Vancouver, and South Korea, despite IOHK contributing code for free.

Argues a Cardano style treasury would have been a game changer for ETC, pointing to Dash and Zcash as proof treasuries keep developers funded and projects alive.

Building the Mantis Ethereum client as finishing what he started as an Ethereum co-founder in 2014, learning the EVM model deeply in the process.

Details Mantis passing the full Ethereum EVM test suite across roughly 14,000 lines of heavily property tested code, syncing both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic chains, and credits contributors like Alan Verbner and Alan McSherry.

Shares fondness for the wider Ethereum Classic community, including Bob Summerwill, who once gave him maple syrup as a gift.

Confirms stake pool registration happens directly on the blockchain, with documentation available for how to do it.

IOHK will make a statement on the Chainlink relationship, noting product manager Nick is a particular fan of the project.

Pushes back on an unpublished paper claiming to disprove Ouroboros, insisting critics submit research properly to IOHK scientists instead of posting on Reddit or Twitter.

Praises Alex Chepurnoy and Ergo for underrated innovation like AVL trees, NIPoPoW proofs, and Sigma protocols, noting his past collaboration with IOHK researchers.

Weighs in on Ethereum's hard fork path, acknowledging Vitalik has every right to lead Ethereum as a world computer while arguing Tezos style on chain governance is more sustainable, and noting Vitalik rarely returns the kind words.

Jokes that no, he doesn't smoke cigars with Bill Clinton anymore.

Confirms Bitcoin's energy usage is a real Achilles heel, point to the IOHK blog for the day's data dump, and dismiss Chris Larson's suggestion that Bitcoin will ever move to proof of stake.

Confirms Crypto Crow's boxing challenge is on, half joking he wants to beat him twice, once by shipping Shelley and once in the ring.

The fight will happen after Shelley ships and after his upcoming Antarctica training trip.

Cardano brings in social and political scientists for the Voltaire governance work, treating it as a complexity theory problem.

Keep riffing on the boxing match, insisting on boxing rules rather than UFC or wrestling.

Compares the potential fight to Conor McGregor versus Floyd Mayweather, joking he wants Mayweather's size advantage rules.

Half joke about putting together an actual training team for the fight after a viewer offers fifteen years of taekwondo experience.

Confirms he's read Atlas Shrugged and brush off a question about his IQ or Mensa status.

Confirms IOHK works on mix nets, private computation, and its own SNARK construction, though none are scoped into Cardano's 2020 plans yet.

He checks ADA's price and social metrics daily via reports from his team.

Confirms Florentine and Sicilian ancestry on his father's side when asked about traveling to Florence.

Denies the background masks are an IOHK ritual, joking they're for a New World Order bit, and admit he barely speaks one language.

Realize his Brave creator account was never set up, float building a micro tipping app for ADA, and commit to backing a SpaceX satellite node launch if the treasury and price allow it.

Clear up a McCann versus McCain autocorrect mix up from earlier in the stream.

Jokes that Goguen will have as many delays as necessary, but fewer than people fear, then riff on matching hoodies with a viewer.

Confirms the IOHK team has grown to 230 people.

Weighs in that Marvel executes better than DC despite DC's more human, compelling characters.

Reports his gout has improved noticeably since changing his diet.

Flatly that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself, he was murdered, given how convenient his death was for people implicated by the recordings in his rooms.

Answers a trust question by saying not to trust him personally, trust code, protocols, and science instead.

Cardano's reason for being as putting process over people, since humans are fallible while code, checks and balances, and the scientific method are not.

Cites Alex Pentland's Social Physics and the wisdom of crowds to argue well structured collective processes always beat individual judgment.

Confirms state owned quantum computers already exist, then turn to Virgil Griffith's North Korea trip as a serious violation of US policy regardless of his intent.

Criticizes open source hacker culture for assuming rules don't apply to them, then compares it to his own view on psilocybin law reform, disagreeing with a bad law but still following it.

Details North Korea's cult of personality, multi generation punishment camps, and starvation propaganda, then calls Virgil Griffith a useful idiot for the regime while still liking him personally.

Contrasts North Korea with Iran, saying he'd love to help Iranians use crypto against their government but US policy bars him from traveling there too.

Jokes that if Griffith had actually been working for the CIA, the FBI would never have arrested him.

Jordan Peterson is doing valuable work sparking conversation about masculinity and social stability, though they've never actually met.

Clarifies the 2017 wallet issue was a flawed HD wallet implementation needing reimplementation, never an actual security vulnerability.

Compares Cardano's wait for its new node to NASA's post Space Shuttle gap, stuck relying on old infrastructure while the replacement is being built.

Points to SpaceX and ULA as the private space equivalent of IOHK's own effort to replace the Rust node with the Haskell stack, admitting it's frustrating to run on the old code a little longer.

Shares his music taste, classic rock, classical piano training, and a soft spot for Chopin, Pink Floyd, and Boston.

Confess a surprising fondness for KISS despite their reputation as more marketing than substance, and note he reads leadership books constantly.

Champion the OpenLaw project and the codification of law into machine readable systems as a moral necessity, not just a technical nicety.

Argues overcomplicated law mainly hurts the poor, since only the wealthy can afford to navigate or exploit it, making legal clarity a government obligation.

Estimates that codifying contracts and regulation into machine checkable systems could save the world trillions of dollars and is the only path to truly global law.

Confirms an upcoming trip to Sweden for a wind tunnel session.

Gives an update on the Ethiopia project, now in a feasibility study phase with the Ministry of Innovation covering key actors, cash out flows, and asset digitization.

Lays out the path from feasibility study to pilot to a public private partnership RFP that could eventually reach four million Ethiopian users.

African deals typically take three to seven years given coalition building, foreign investment, and regulatory change, calling it some of the most complex dealmaking there is.

Waves off a carnivore diet fiber question and mention his current road microphone setup.

Admits he hasn't seen the new James Bond trailer, too busy.

Says blockchain makes sense for permissionless vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communication in driverless cars, and confirm Cardano will support pull payments.

Takes one more question with the white mask on, riffing that nobody cared who he was until he wore the mask.

Closes by saying Cardano, like government or education, will never be finished, only built to evolve without betraying its founding principles, before signing off ahead of Vegas.