AMA 10/06/2019

Back in Colorado after a trip through Wyoming, Boston, Scotland, Bulgaria, Prague and Vancouver.

The storm about Cardano delays is fake news: the project is in good shape and Shelley is shipping in 2019.

Why decentralize through a sandbox instead of throwing everyone to the wolves: rapid changes without coordinating a hard fork, and a place to learn stake pool setup, dashboards and business models.

Blog posts in the middle of October will explain the snapshot, the incentivized testnet and the software, while almost a hundred stake pools already run on the non incentivized testnet.

The Haskell side is also looking good, and having both the Rust and the Haskell codebases means learning from both.

More commits on GitHub than any other cryptocurrency project, and thirteen year old kids in Wyoming got stake nodes running on Raspberry Pis.

Never fired: a buyout at BitShares because working with Dan Larimer did not work, and Ethereum's for profit versus not for profit split that left only one of eight founders.

Working on Cardano since 2015 without golden handcuffs, with 200 people at IOHK and a hundred of them on Cardano every day.

Cardano's protocols come from peer reviewed research with no code to copy or fork, like the Apollo program, and when it is done wrong the users and token holders pay the price.

Crypto markets bring out the worst in people, and daily videos attacking the project's ethics and values insult the 200 people at IOHK who just want to do a good job.

If this were only about getting rich there are easier ways: the point is lifting billions of people out of poverty over decades.

Proud of eighteen papers submitted to academic conferences in September and of solving open problems in computer science, with research flow speeding up not slowing down.

Parity is scaling things down and clearly focusing on Polkadot.

Never part of the Cardano Foundation, only a representative helping rebuild it: an interim board, a hunt for seven new board members and an executive director, then full independence.

IOHK will put organizational pressure on the Foundation to work on the Cardano improvement proposal process and Voltaire so a clear governance model exists by the end of 2020.

Not retiring and not leaving: the technology, market credibility and resources to execute finally exist, so why walk away now.

The ecosystem cannot run on cults of personality: process over people, because anyone can be corrupted, compromised or killed.

Any voting system or incentive model can be built, but if the community stays ignorant and does not use it, decentralization goes nowhere.

Scaling, interoperability and better smart contract languages are inevitable, but better elections, a stable European Union and a free China are not.

New Balance will announce on October 14 what they are doing, and they specifically requested Cardano rather than Atala.

Authentication unlocks better secondary markets for luxury goods, including residual royalties for the brand on every resale.

The difference between Casper and Ouroboros is not just finality: no common clock, bootstrapping from Genesis, 50 percent Byzantine resistance and a semi synchronous model.

When the IOHK contract ends in 2020 the work continues until the scope is done, then the community, not a single entity, decides on a new contract.

Getting into this field was a complete accident through a free course and a TED talk, and it turned into 52 countries, heads of state and a sense of global empathy.

Yuval Noah Harari is right that governments, religions and corporations are shared fictions: you cannot physically touch Microsoft, and as society changes new fictions are needed.

Steven Pinker makes the data driven case in Enlightenment Now that the last hundred years made this the best time ever to be alive.

Globalization broke the old fictions, which is why Brexit, Trump, China and Hong Kong feel so unstable, and blockchain is really a storytelling device about property, identity and money.

Artificial intelligence can give people mirrors that protect them from confirmation bias and self delusion, working with systems that are like Old Testament gods, all rules and no mercy.

The worst days are the politics of personal destruction, and the best answer is the picture of him on a Lamborghini tractor captioned suck it up buttercup.

A Haskell testnet will likely come in January with one more major update before year end, then the Shelley era on the Haskell side, and the network team wrote a hundred page networking document.

In Ethiopia the girls were trained and a pilot agreement was signed with the Ministry of Innovation and Technology, with a feasibility study now under way.

The Ethiopian pilot concludes around June 2020, and if the economics align a public private partnership could build a full currency for millions of people in Addis Ababa on Cardano.

Answering the troll who says the project only delivers delays and a fake testnet, he asks how the critic would run it.

A near infinite war chest does not win: Microsoft had billions against Google and Apple, and Bitcoin was started by one guy on a laptop with no money raised.

Ethereum's ICO was smaller than the fine EOS paid the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Ethereum is still beating EOS, so money does not buy success.

A treasury is a printing press for the ecosystem: ask the community for fifty million and it shows up, the same way Tesla prints stock, but you can never print integrity.

Ouroboros Genesis is progressing very well and can be used today by downloading the network testnet, after four years of invention.

How to learn Haskell from scratch: Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell, then Learn You a Haskell for Great Good or the Haskell Book.

Shelley will prove you can run a global scale financial system for millions of users, 250 times more decentralized than Bitcoin, on about 10 kilowatts of power.

Haskell was his first programming language in his first year of college, which is rare outside schools like Edinburgh.

The big mistake was overemphasizing the science division and formal methods while lacking a strong product and development focus, then patching it with heavy project management.

Starting over, Byron would have been a command line full node with Icarus as the first product, tight user experience, easy multisig and hardware wallet support, and Daedalus held back much longer.

The first generation product might have been better in Scala or F sharp than Haskell, and it should have started as a browser client with agile iteration.

Research driven development has a waterfall shape: papers, prototypes, then back up the waterfall, and even a six month conference cycle is too slow for an entrepreneurial product culture.

The formal methods touch is lighter than people think, LaTeX and reference Haskell with some Isabelle, and the wallet and ledger specifications became a lingua franca for working with external firms.

Icarus proved IOHK can be agile: built in months as a proof of concept and productized by Emurgo into Yoroi within two months, and a full lessons learned retrospective comes at the end of 2020.

The Cardano Foundation relationship under Michael Parsons is a real regret, and the delay to Goguen and Shelley is why people can say nothing is deployed on Cardano yet.

ETHDenver showed that developers are not loyal to Ethereum or EOS, they follow whichever infrastructure helps them solve their problem.

The cost of this job was missing family: his grandfather's and grandmother's funerals, anniversaries and birthdays he will not get back.

No, the IOHK contract to build Cardano cannot be published: it is a standard software development contract with a scope of work, and any overruns are his responsibility, not the funding entity's.

Quantum computers are not a problem for Cardano, do not read the headlines.

Identity starts with the DID standard, a decentralized identifier pointing to a DID document, but attestation, web of trust and aliasing are not included.

The blockchain agnostic identity product built for credential verification in Georgia can be lifted onto Cardano, starting with a message center in Daedalus 1.7.

With DIDs and pub/sub, delegating to a stake pool subscribes you to its channel for fee changes, retirement notices and use of funds reports, and friends can be aliased so you send to Bob instead of an address.

Some curation still has to be centralized, so expect x.509 support and a certificate authority style system alongside decentralized identifiers.

DIDs plus pub/sub also give you multisig without a trusted relay server, and contingent settlement where both parties agree before a transaction settles.

Exchanges could whitelist withdrawal addresses against a registered DID so a compromised account cannot be looted, which also answers the FATF travel rule and could restore liquidity for Zcash and other privacy coins.

Yoroi staking has been discussed with Emurgo and will likely arrive by the second wave, since the incentivized testnet gets a hard fork reset every four to six weeks.

The focus on Africa makes sense because things change: 95 percent of Americans were poor in the 19th century, and betting on a young, mobile centric population with 10 percent GDP growth beats betting on the satisfied.

The ICO was run person to person in Japan, Korea and China with passports collected, 9,914 known participants and a published audit report, unlike the recklessness of 2017.

The ETC Summit in Vancouver was a lot of fun and a good ecosystem, and the Japanese share of ADA supply shrinks every day because IOHK never sold its own ADA.

The community cannot vote on renewing the IOHK contract until governance exists, so the incentive is to keep writing code and losing money until it ships.

EOS feels no existential pressure: the SEC fine was about two months of interest on what they raised, and they paid fifty million for a domain name, so there is no incentive to deliver.

Not shipping eats at his soul, but there is no manual for building protocols this hard, only risk and execution.

Atala has no public GitHub or documentation because it is an IOHK product built with his money, not Cardano funds, and there is no moral obligation to disclose it.

Atala started 18 months ago, is entering pilots, is written in Scala with a full product team, and may be spun out as an IOHK subsidiary doing enterprise blockchain work or joined to a consortium.

Dan Larimer called him untrustworthy and called Ethereum a toy that would amount to nothing: the two have been competitors since 2014 and that is fine.

The firing stories are lies: he left the Lisk advisory role rather than collect money for nothing, he is still an advisor at Horizen, and there was no organization at ETC to be fired from.

What has been delivered since 2015: more than 40 scientific papers, roughly a million lines of code and a product in the top 20 on CoinMarketCap.

The community has become Fight Club: an Air Canada agent leaned in to say he loves ADA, and fans turn up from hotel waiters to a border patrol officer in England and a stranger in Canberra.

Listed on more than 30 exchanges with reasonable liquidity, and the plan is decentralization by the first quarter of 2020 with smart contracts shortly after.

Great things are slow: Stephen Wolfram was planning Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha in the 1980s, and when billions of dollars and disenfranchisement are at stake you owe people your best work.

If not enough people run stake pools the system does not work, but almost a hundred already run on the non incentivized testnet and the real risk is having too many to work with.

Wolfram is obsessed with cellular automata and wrote A New Kind of Science, and Steve Jobs needed the NeXT years to find his way, so issuing IOHK equity on Cardano one day would be very cool.

Turnover at IOHK is one of the lowest in the industry despite how unstable the space is.

Multi party computation in Daedalus needs pub/sub and probably a dedicated relay protocol pulled into the stack.

Joining the testnet means installing a separate, reskinned Daedalus build and running an import stage, explained in a blog post and a Cardano Effect episode, with an airdrop and a genesis block so it boots instantly.

Two parallel threads run during that phase, mainnet and the incentivized testnet, with release managers and comms people coordinating announcements on both.

The incentivized testnet is also a liveness test of how much ADA sits in cold storage, so marketing can target the communities that need to wake up.

Exchanges are starting staking as a service businesses, so their requirements matter for how the testnet and staking are run.

The hoped for user experience is install, import your seed words and go, since the testnet uses a different address structure based on the bech32 standard.

If your ADA sits on an exchange at the snapshot there is no guarantee they will let you withdraw the testnet ADA, so pull it off the exchange before the snapshot and put it back afterwards.

Daedalus has had massive upgrades and around 96 percent of help desk users are satisfied, so report issues to the help desk rather than reddit, a service IOHK pays for that the Foundation was supposed to provide.

Client diversity matters for odd machines, Yoroi in Chrome runs about 20 percent of the network, and the Daedalus codebase is high quality after many refactors.

The snapshot date will be announced in the blog post, and if the Haskell client turns out to be less relevant IOHK simply takes the loss on the contract.

What supporters can do: use the software, keep criticism fair and have some empathy, file logs with the help desk and the stake pool task force channel, write smart contracts at Goguen and vote at Voltaire.

The skin got thick over the years, so trolls no longer have an impact: either help or leave.

Documentation is a real deficit on the Rust side because design decisions kept changing, so a dedicated cleanup sprint follows the incentivized testnet launch.

Libra is a warning, not a danger: he told Mark Zuckerberg to run, PayPal pulled out, and launching a cryptocurrency is far harder than thousands of ventures expected.

Hashgraph went from 36 cents to about three cents and even Algorand's good people and legitimate project still have a lot to do, which proves how hard launching a chain is.

The Fed will digitize the dollar within the next five to ten years.

Staking from a phone should be possible because cell phone processors are supercomputers now, like the Microsoft and Qualcomm SQ1 in the new Surface.

Private smart contracts are coming, not in the style of Enigma but through Kachina, whose paper was just published.

Foldable phones are not a real product category yet: too thick as a phone and too small as a tablet, though the iPad proved this call can be wrong.

The critic's videos go unwatched now, because people said Obama was a communist born abroad and Steve Jobs would kill Apple in 1997, and the same writers later called him the Edison of his time.

The Colin Powell method applies: say what you will do, do it, then say what you did, and Cardano said scalability, interoperability and sustainability backed by science, five years from could it be done to inevitability.

The impeachment fight and the Mueller report are the same pattern as crypto drama: months of noise while the national debt, healthcare and endless wars go unaddressed.

Bring a better idea about decentralization or protocols and it is welcome, but attacking people for ratings makes you a demagogue history does not remember.

PolderCast is being negotiated into an updated version to fix issues found along the way, alongside a hundred plus pages of networking documentation on the Haskell side.

There is no single network but many: Hydra, multi party computation, stake pools, the general peer to peer layer, relay nodes and light clients, and no canonical standard to copy.

The Wyoming hackathon was great, with high school students bussed in and old school Bitcoin people around.

Wyoming is trying to make it illegal for a court to force you to hand over your private keys, and it played hardball by threatening to repeal the money transmitter act.

People at the hackathon wrote a lot of Plutus code and brought Marlowe code, which produced good feedback.

The critic makes money from manufactured controversy, so the right response is the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror answer: just do not look.

Andrew Yang will not be president and the Democrats will nominate someone unelectable: 70 percent tax rates and a wealth tax are immoral, and fifty trillion in spending is class warfare.

Wim Hof ice training has begun, with a product manager jumping into the Irish Sea, ahead of a shirtless climb up Mount Terror in Antarctica and a paramotor descent to base camp.

A trip to the People's Republic of California might happen, and the Hong Kong situation does not affect the organization at all because it is in Wyoming.

If the Mount Terror escapade succeeds, a bottle of Macallan 30 gets finished in celebration.

The Rust code will go through a security audit before it touches mainnet.

On the Illuminati: Adam Weishaupt founded it in Bavaria in 1776 as an outcrop of the Jesuits, and he is long dead.

The day Shelley launches on mainnet might deserve a Lamborghini tractor and a victory cigar on stream.

Hydra now has its own product manager because the paper is almost done and a prototype is needed for 2020, and every email about it is subject line hail Hydra.

Closing recap: blog posts coming soon, keep using the stake pool Telegram channel, file bugs on the Jormungandr repo, and the march to Shelley has begun.