AMA 10/03/2020

Open the AMA broadcasting live from Colorado on a Saturday, react to Trump's COVID diagnosis and wish him a speedy recovery.

Covers AMA housekeeping, mentions getting a haircut after the stream, and teases upcoming interviews with Ben Goertzel and hopefully Stephen Wolfram.

Runs through recent releases: db sync, the GraphQL API and node 1.2, with two or three more releases due in October 2020.

Lays out the parallelized Daedalus workstreams (identity center, voting center, QR code center, paper wallet center) each tendered to third party firms, notes the identity center's requirements are due around October 15 after a two week PRISM integration extension, and says Goguen dates stay unannounced until burn down velocity data is solid.

Plans to parallelize and outsource Plutus and Marlowe work the same way Daedalus was split up, accelerating with more budget and outside labor.

Teases the end of October product update, promising a longer presentation covering an ERC20 converter and Marlowe progress.

Announces weekly community updates from the resurrected Mantis team and more third party project showcases on Crowdcast.

Pushes back on a chat comment claiming Goguen work just started, insisting four years of research have gone into merging the Goguen and Cardano workstreams.

Points to the Shelley hard fork combinator as the company's biggest milestone, rebuilding the network stack, ledger rules, addresses, cryptography and consensus while keeping Goguen and Voltaire in mind.

The reluctance to give Goguen dates until confidence is high, contrasting the current one year of consolidated work with claims of two wasted years.

Goguen will have a long tail after launch just like Shelley did, pointing to partial delegation as an example of a post launch feature still being built.

Contrasts today's fast turnaround on performance and Bittrex wallet issues with the hostile, hard to upgrade Byron era codebase.

Confirms Daedalus will support Trezor hardware wallets with Ledger support coming too.

Lays out a five year push for mobile Daedalus clients and client diversity, floating Rust and JavaScript implementations alongside the Haskell node.

Welcomes the idea of a hard copy Mastering Cardano manual and floats Dave Thomas as a potential author.

Open up on access control for Daedalus, arguing passwords are the weakest option because people forget them, pick weak ones and reuse them.

Favor combining biometrics as the username with a hardware key as the password, calling it the most secure and least disruptive way to unlock Daedalus.

IOG is consulting infosec experts on next generation Daedalus access control as more sensitive features like chat and identity land, and UX lead Mike will move from Marlowe and Plutus onto Daedalus next.

Responds to the Ethereum history books Into the Ether and The Infinite Machine, arguing the people portrayed are narrative composites rather than literal biography.

Contrasts six years of continuous delivery and team building at IOG with a brief six months at Ethereum, rejecting the narcissistic, unaccountable portrayal in the book.

Confirms still taking lion's mane supplements and plan to grow the mushroom himself on his Colorado farm.

Patent trolling on open source work does not worry him much since prior art should defeat the patent, though he will litigate if needed.

Frames the small United Nations pilot around Voltaire and economic identity as a long term relationship aligned with the UN's sustainability and anti poverty goals.

Defends the Cardano Effect podcast's funding request, calling public scrutiny of a large ask a sign that Catalyst governance is working.

Stresses that every ada in the treasury belongs to the community, so IOG must justify its own funding renewal just like any other project.

Corrects the record that the Cardano Foundation does not own or control Cardano, recalling how Michael Parsons once acted like a unilateral chairman over the ecosystem.

Recalls the Cardano Foundation's cease and desist letter over the Ethiopia government MOU press release as the kind of overreach he would fight.

The CIP process gives no entity, including the Foundation, veto power over the roadmap, while still crediting it for liquidity, listings and support work.

Takes a lighthearted jab from the Tezos crowd showing up in every AMA, acknowledging they do good work too.

An indexer for contract execution events like The Graph is reasonable and would likely be built into the Plutus application framework or funded through Catalyst.

Jokes about looking younger without glasses and vow to start working out aggressively again after being stuck in a pandemic bubble.

Gives a mixed take on Stephen Wolfram's unification theory, admiring his talent and resources while questioning the rigor of his definitions.

Rejects the idea of a static definition of good, proposing a Rawlsian birth test where preferring a society blind to your future station reveals real social progress.

Narrow AGI as a philosophical mirror that can expose human bias and the gap between humanity's cognitive picture of reality and objective reality.

Uses inconsistent criminal sentencing between similar defendants years apart as a concrete example of the blind spots an AGI's perfect memory could catch.

Envisions narrow AI augmenting professionals like radiologists and judges rather than replacing their judgment, citing IBM Watson tumor detection as a model.

Extends the AGI idea to auditing entire bodies of law like the US tax code for contradictions and systemic vulnerabilities society usually chooses to ignore.

Cites Stuart Russell's view that AI is only beneficial if it stays aligned with human objectives, warning against letting society over trust these systems.

Wants Cardano to become settlement infrastructure connecting non BIS central banks, pairing CBDC concepts with sovereign wealth fund style UBI distributions.

Calls the CFTC and DOJ charges against BitMEX predictable, since serving US customers without a real compliance program invites exactly this kind of enforcement.

Argues the industry's decade of hacks, wash trading and self regulation failures is exactly what invited this level of regulatory scrutiny.

Argues DeFi built on DIDs and authenticated addresses can eventually replace trusted regulators with mathematical certainty, though it will take five to twenty years to mature.

Contrasts Kraken's compliant approach with BitMEX's offshore route, saying any exchange serving US customers should expect to be regulated.

Repeat that redistributive UBI does not work, but sovereign wealth fund style UBI like Norway's, funded by surpluses rather than deficits, makes good fiscal sense.

Talk through exploring 3D printed housing with his brother William, starting with a Wyoming real estate fund before building a construction company.

Compares the cost trajectory of 3D printed housing to Tesla's battery curve, predicting a tipping point where it becomes the strongest and most sensible way to build, including affordable housing across Africa.

Recounts killing Drizzt in the original Baldur's Gate to obtain his scimitars and mithril armor, reminiscing about the Forgotten Realms cast.

Confirms native assets should pay fees in ada by default, with governance able to elevate a specific token like Chainlink to pay its own fees.

Warns that passive, no effort token rewards look like a security compared to staking, which requires active participation, explaining the industry's caution around security tokens.

Denies that market moves or corona speculation have any influence on the Goguen release timeline, saying it ships when it is ready regardless of the markets.

Calls crypto markets irrational, noting technically strong projects like Ergo and Algorand rank far below inferior copycat coins.

Explores treasury funded equity deals, arguing the protocol would need its own legal agency first, floating Wyoming as a jurisdiction that could grant Cardano that status.

Advises a parent that a cybersecurity focused master's beats a blockchain focused one, since blockchain skills are easy to pick up afterward, praising CU Boulder's CS program.

Rejects the idea that smart money entering crypto is a bad sign, noting billionaires, hedge funds and VCs have quietly been participating for a while.

The return on intention concept and paired audit funding model meant to hold treasury grant recipients accountable.

His run ins with Celsius's Alex Mashinsky, including at Real World Crypto in Zurich, have always been cordial.

Calls out a critic for effectively defending giveaway scammers who impersonate him, calling it victim blaming.

Predicts deepfakes will fool most people, especially those over 50, within five to ten years, pointing to the Collider George Lucas parody as an early example.

Warns of a coming post truth economy where fabricated video evidence can justify any conspiracy theory, tying it to the harassment he already gets from scam accusers.

Slam YouTube for profiting from scam videos on his channel while still threatening to deplatform him over unrelated complaints.

He would love to return to South Africa, noting his planned March Africa tour was cancelled because of the pandemic.

Frames failed treasury funded projects as a normal cost of an early stage grant system, comparable to VC and research grant failure rates, calling for audit pairings and reputation tracking.

SMASH may get folded into PRISM using DIDs as the identity layer for stake pool operators.

Calls Avalanche a genuinely strong project and protocol worth watching despite the chat noise around it.

Outlines a cold and hot key split for stake pool security, so a compromised hot operating environment can be rebuilt from the cold environment without losing delegated funds.

IOG works directly with stake pool operators and firms like Vacuum Labs on Ledger and Trezor hardware integration.

He has never met Andrew Yang but would welcome the conversation.

A coin migration takes months of distribution, legal and regulatory planning, like an airdrop or two way peg, even though writing the code is the easy part.

He is now streaming to Facebook, Periscope and YouTube simultaneously and plans to add live screen drawing and guest segments.

Send greetings to viewers watching from Riga, calling out its old town and clock towers as a favorite.

Greets viewers in Buenos Aires and highlights the close working relationship with the ATIX team in Argentina.

He has no interest in the NBA or NFL but wants to buy an African soccer team someday as a testbed for NFTs and loyalty tokens.

Pitches a pan African crypto football league on Cardano, arguing the continent has huge soccer talent but underfunded teams and infrastructure.

Dismisses Bret Weinstein's Unity2020 ticket idea as unworkable, then joke back at a critic accusing him of misusing treasury funds by pointing out his own bitcoin and company profits fund his own plans.

Confirms tokenizing player contracts as NFTs and security tokens is exactly the plan for the proposed African soccer league, comparing the opportunity to fantasy football's popularity.

Frames Jordan Peterson's popularity as a reaction to postmodernist relativism and the erosion of objective truth, especially among young men.

Persuading Ethereum projects to migrate is easy right now, with 90 potential deals in the commercial pipeline and 52 open hires in the queue.

Predicts Joe Rogan will eventually have to acquiesce to censorship demands or leave Spotify, describing the woke cult as an all or nothing movement with no room for negotiation.

Compares today's deplatforming pressure to the 1980s religious panic over Dungeons and Dragons, calling both religious acts against freedom of expression.

Notes Ben Shapiro's move from California to Tennessee after Harvard, then decline to answer a following off topic question.

Muses about giving a bookend TED talk in Bermuda once he retires to look back on everything the team accomplished.

A Unity or Unreal game engine SDK for Cardano is worth exploring in Q1, likely starting with a prototype and an independent team funded through Catalyst.

Plans to approach Unity commercially once IOG has an early integration to show, favoring it over Godot, Babylon.js or Unreal for reach.

Shares his love of Prague, singling out its old town and its thousand clock towers as a favorite travel memory.

Warns dry fasting is unsafe and should not be attempted, while endorsing water fasting as a healthy practice he should do more often.

Jokes about his physique, admitting he is no Lenny Kravitz but promising to get back in shape.

Credits water fasting with triggering autophagy, cellular cleanup and immune system rebuilding after a few days.

Admits he loves eating scorpions and silkworms whenever he travels in Asia, though he is not a fan of crickets.

Takes a jab at Martin Shkreli, the pharma executive who jacked up drug prices and joked about it.

Laughs off being called the Michael Jackson of the crypto space, joking about which Jackson era he resembles.

Recommends math books, currently reading Norman Wildberger's Rational Trigonometry alongside classics like How to Prove It, Rudin and Lang for algebra.

Sketches an RPG magic system built on real mathematics, where spells work like provable algorithms that could be traded as zero knowledge proof backed NFTs.

Lists his current nootropic stack as lion's mane plus a couple of others, saying he is not ready for metformin yet.

He is currently reading Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, a book about synesthesia.

Treat the last meal question as a memento mori worth everyone actually sitting with.

Walks through Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, tracing how terror of death, the harm it causes, immortality cults and their conflicts explain most human suffering.

Link Becker's theory to Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, distinguishing conscious from subconscious existential terror as the root of escapism and the search for meaning.

He watches a lot of Thomas Sowell interviews but has not yet dug into his books.

Closes with a case for choosing optimism over cynicism, describing small moments like watching a butterfly from his porch as reason enough to stay hopeful.

Signs off thanking everyone for listening and wishing them a wonderful day.