AMA 04/21/2019

Opens the post IOHK summit AMA, recorded just before heading to Mongolia.

Recaps summit logistics: gathering the whole company and a two day public event with about 750 attendees.

Lists summit speakers from Stephen Wolfram and Rudy Rucker to Wyoming state representative Tyler Lindholm and Caitlin Long, plus officials from Georgia and Mongolia.

The summit's goal of showing the human side of IOHK, not just the technology, including its enterprise consulting and research work.

Reads aloud a handwritten letter and an Einstein essay a fan gave him at the summit, The World As I See It.

Sets the AMA agenda: a post mortem on the summit, then the Shelley delay questions and the roadmap.

Argues the crypto community is a bubble where under 1 percent of the world knows about it, so adoption needs more than winning on user experience.

The summit aimed to show real buyers, including government officials from the mayor of Miami to Mongolia's foreign minister.

Announces the Ethiopia MoU with the Ministry of Innovation and Technology for a city utility token with up to six million potential users.

Explains why Atala exists as a permissioned ledger bridge that funnels new users toward the open Cardano ecosystem.

Pushes back on Reddit claims of no meaningful announcements, pointing to a likely coordinated flood of new single post accounts.

Starts the roadmap post mortem, tracing how the 2017 plan split research, formal methods, and code into a waterfall process.

The outside contractor's code quality was deplorable and had to be replaced, prompting new engineering hires.

Details bringing on Tweag, Vacuum Labs, and Emurgo as partners while rebuilding a new Cardano wallet from scratch.

The parallel Rust based product team that built Icarus and bootstrapped the Yoroi wallet in under four months.

Cardano's complexity, mixing cryptography, distributed systems theory, and game theory, made project management hard.

Insists he loses money from delays since his ADA hasn't moved from its address, rejecting claims he's enriching himself.

The project management overhaul: demos, weekly reports, and bringing in Bruno Paletta as internal director of engineering.

The two client model where the Rust client can diverge from formal specs to move faster and learn more.

Highlights the more than 40 scientific papers written and rewritten, including Ouroboros Classic, Praos, Genesis, and Chronos.

Reports considerable progress on Shelley and pushes back on the idea that implementation only just started.

The team is very close to a Shelley testnet after gathering the whole Rust team in Hong Kong for a month.

Compares Cardano's delays to Windows Vista and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, both shipped years late by far larger companies.

IOHK has never sold its ADA and isn't a publicly traded company or the product of an ICO, so it doesn't profit from price appreciation.

Announces the shift to demos and weekly reports, moving away from the old percentage and timer based roadmap.

Some pieces like Goguen are nearly done while the Treasury system is still in heavy debate for the first half of 2020.

Explains why consensus can't be rolled out iteratively unlike other features, drawing a contrast with Ethereum's Casper and Algorand.

Contrasts Cardano's open real time R&D with how companies like Samsung hide product development until launch.

Cardano is his life's work and he has no intention of walking away, unlike Dan Larimer.

David Esser and others are rewriting the roadmap alongside its underlying philosophy and new processes.

Argues nothing fixes the bear market until Cardano decouples from Bitcoin's price swings by reaching mainstream users.

Calls for more empathy and patience within the community, saying most people involved aren't trying to scam anyone.

Uses Manu Sporny and the W3C DID standard as an example of how long it takes to build real infrastructure.

Opens the live AMA, responding to a question about whether the event signals panic inside the company.

Confirms Atala is a separate enterprise ledger project and lays out the spectrum from permissionless to permissioned systems.

Atala gives IOHK a second revenue line and funnels new users into the Cardano wallet ecosystem, like an app store.

Answers when the new 2020 roadmap will release, saying it's close but was delayed to bring in the new comms director.

Confirms he isn't leaving IOHK, calling it the company he wants to run for the rest of his life.

Chats about office decor, a Pink Floyd poster and a painting, and explains how he caught an eye infection shaking hands.

Stable coin options, including a Wyoming based audited coin or a pan African basket currency.

On investing in IOHK instead of ADA, floats tokenizing IOHK as a security token via a future STO and Polymath collaboration.

IOHK will run its own staking pools built with Marcus's hardware, spread geographically, with devices sold publicly.

Details a proposal to fund Ethereum Classic development via Mantis, or hand the project fully to the community if it isn't funded.

Commits to a Treasury system before the end of 2020 and a new five year roadmap the community can vote on and compare to rival proposals.

Confirms Cardano is a two layer settlement and control layer system, describing it as what Bitcoin could have been.

A subscription model so clients don't need the full petabyte scale ledger state, plus chainless and sublinear mining research.

Introduces contingent settlement and metadata as compliance tools, prompted by a proposed Texas cryptocurrency identity law.

Walks through a permissioned sending example where an exchange requires signed consent before a withdrawal settles.

Metadata embedding, letting parties keep an auditable private record of a transaction's purpose for tax needs.

Calls the proposed Texas identity disclosure law stupid regulation, arguing compliance should follow the transaction rather than blanket rules.

Explains why forking Cardano's open source code wouldn't capture its value, since you can fork the code but not the community.

Argues a Treasury and voting system gives speculators real power and turns opinions into funded action, unlike most cryptocurrencies.

Admits he should tone down his aggressive Twitter style and mention EOS and Dan Larimer less often.

Criticizes EOS for claiming decentralization while running mostly on Amazon hosted servers among a small set of block producers.

Confirms Satoshi Nakamoto once got frustrated with Dan Larimer, and reaffirms his belief staking and smart contracts land before end of 2020.

A large painting on his office floor, depicting a Roman emperor deciding a defeated foe's fate.

Details how the computation layer connects to settlement via a master slave signing model or a firewall protocol for foreign chains.

Distinguishes Tone Vays style Bitcoin maximalist criticism from Craig Wright, who he says has never proven he is Satoshi.

Predicts cryptographers will eventually break Satoshi's 1024 bit PGP key, ending the mystery and any cult of personality around him.

The plan to let ERC-20 and NFT projects migrate to Cardano's multi currency ledger with new tooling from Vacuum Labs.

Argues Ethereum is only a temporary home for tokens, like an app hosted on Amazon, and expects a wave of security tokens to move on.

Migrating an existing ERC-20 token to Cardano using its ownership key, either bridging it or relaunching it fresh.

Praises Nick Szabo as a smart, deep thinking cryptographer who avoids falling in love with his own ideas.

Cardano should be better for gaming than Ethereum thanks to its built in cryptographic beacon and layer two protocols.

Names people he respects in crypto, praising Greg Maxwell's technical brilliance and Charlie Shrem's resilience after prison.

Praises Charlie Lee for sticking to his principles despite years of criticism.

Roger Ver's early Bitcoin evangelism turning more controversial over time, and Erik Voorhees' shift toward pragmatism at ShapeShift.

Explains why he invited Stephen Wolfram to the summit, calling Wolfram Alpha a natural oracle source for smart contracts.

Rudy Rucker, an original cypherpunk from Hal Finney's era, brought an outside perspective to the summit.

Recounts convincing Steve Miller to headline the summit concert, including playing Take the Money and Run.

Addresses the long promised ADA debit card, saying the Cardano Foundation is negotiating it after rebuilding its finances.

Points to the free Plutus and Marlowe courses on Udemy, already past 2000 subscribers.

Wants the Cardano Foundation to run monthly AMAs, hire an executive director, and set up an ambassador steering committee.

Declines to repeat his comments on Justin Sun's Tron promotion tactics, pointing back to a prior AMA.

The 1200 stake pool figure is a tunable parameter rather than a hard limit, with Hydra expected to remove the cap later.

Wants geographic distribution of stake pools with trusted hardware for resilience against government policy shifts.

Being interviewed for the Banking on Bitcoin documentary, though his footage was cut from the final film.

There's no land rush for stake pools, since it will be survival of the fittest based on community appeal, not just ADA held.

The two tier delegation address system that lets exchanges signal whether they support staking.

Plans to binge Game of Thrones after it finishes airing, recalling watching season six on a flight to Japan.

Confirms users will be able to create their own custom tokens with ADA since Cardano is a multi currency ledger.

Estimates staking returns around three to five percent, pending final parameters from the staking testnet.

Coinbase isn't ignoring Ouroboros, noting he's in contact with people there even though the company moves at its own pace.

Confirms plans for a plug and play Raspberry Pi based stake pool kit using the triple AMP hardware security protocol.

Details cheap Snapdragon chipsets with 5G, WiFi 6, and ARM TrustZone as ideal low cost stake pool hardware.

Floats a long term vision of a Cardano owned satellite network and global ATM network funded by the Treasury.

Closes the AMA, recaps summit media coverage, and thanks the community for its patience.