AMA 05/04/2020

Kick off an impromptu Reddit AMA broadcasting live from Colorado on a Friday night.

Any Daedalus wallet can be safely deleted only after verifying the twelve word recovery phrase actually restores and spends funds.

The Ambassador Program as a meritocratic community role meant to eventually be elected and funded through Voltaire voting.

Recalls how the Cardano Effect show was first funded directly by IOHK, then handed to the Cardano Foundation to remove any conflict of interest.

Refinement types as predicate augmented types used to catch bugs like buffer overflows and non termination during program verification.

Recalls past efforts to bring refinement types into Haskell before the initiative stalled and key advocates moved on.

Concludes Plutus 1.0 will skip refinement types, favoring simple verifiable DSLs like Marlowe for modeling the movement of money.

Rip into the coindecide website for wrongly claiming Cardano is an ERC20 token that has not launched a mainnet.

Clarifies that running federated consensus today does not make Cardano any less a real cryptocurrency, pointing to Ripple as a similar case.

Argues stake pool operation should reward real competence and documentation, not just idiot proof one click installs.

Proposes an elastic transaction fee system where pool operators set a floor and the network later votes on raising or lowering fees through Voltaire.

Acknowledges a known Daedalus sync bug causing heavy CPU use on some OS X versions, with a fix due in an upcoming release.

Walks through the staged path to Shelley: a self node Haskell block, then a friends and family testnet, then the balance check testnet before mainnet.

Delay trolls to grow up, promising they will look foolish once the Haskell testnet and Shelley launch shortly.

Welcomes community excitement about a possible Coinbase listing while praising Binance's work integrating the Byron reboot.

Contrasts his own blunt style with Ripple's more buttoned up CEO, sparked by Elon Musk's wild stock tweet that day.

Most Fortune 500 CEOs let PR teams sanitize every public statement while he prefers to speak from the gut.

Credits Steve Jobs' unsanitized personal brand for letting Apple charge a premium that a corporatized CEO could never sustain.

Cites Papa John's and John McAfee as cautionary tales of founder branded companies crumbling when the founder implodes.

Speculates that the stress of an imminent crewed rocket launch and pandemic lockdowns fueled Musk's reckless stock tweet.

Argues predatory boardroom culture is more common than people admit, preferring an imperfect but sincere CEO over a polished one.

Lays out a CEO's three real duties: sustainable revenue, managing existential risk, and picking a successor, citing Microsoft's Ballmer era stumble.

Ripple's CEO has far less personal freedom than he does, since Ripple is chasing an XRP non security ruling and an eventual IPO.

Insists he is a mission driven founder CEO who will keep building even broke, not a career executive chasing retirement.

Recalls witnessing both atrocity and reconciliation across fifty two countries, from Sierra Leone's war to forgiveness after the Rwandan genocide.

Liken the Cardano movement to Barry Goldwater's 1964 defeat inspiring Ronald Reagan, arguing movements succeed by keeping the torch lit.

Frames financial sovereignty, uncensorable voting, and transnational property rights as undebatable rights the industry exists to protect.

Condemns drone enforced quarantines and suspended constitutional rights as an unprecedented centralization of power during the pandemic.

Calls out a state governor's lockdown hypocrisy for exempting his own family while enforcing rules on everyone else.

Contrasts Ripple's goal of serving banks and regulators with his own refusal to compromise Cardano's mission, promising to resign rather than bend.

Praises individual Ripple engineers like David Schwartz even while disagreeing with the company's choices.

Marvels that Bitcoin grew from one person in January 2009 to a global movement built on shared values, unlike newcomers eager to cave to regulators.

A spending password encrypts private keys locally to protect against a multi user computer attack, unlike the recovery phrase which restores a wallet naked.

Recounts catching a beach house guest who drained a friend's unprotected Bitcoin wallet during Ethereum's founding retreat in January 2014.

Credits IOHK's female leaders for diversifying the team's thinking and making the organization more mature than it was six months earlier.

Promises the Haskell testnet and community debate will finally settle stake pool pledge and K parameter mechanics, with Cardano Effect explainers to follow.

Shrugs off that ADA's roughly 45 billion supply and six decimal places are arbitrary picks rather than the result of some perfect economic model.

The d parameter will hit zero and be permanently removed by a hard fork once the network is fully decentralized, with no going back.

Argues Cardano already beats Bitcoin on decentralization by node count, noting fewer than ten mining pools control over half of Bitcoin's hash rate.

Predicts geographic drift in delegation, like African holders backing African pools, will keep decentralizing the network over time.

Fields a question on who controls the Treasury wallet's private keys and what checks and balances exist.

The long term Treasury will be controlled entirely by the chain itself through a spending predicate built from votes, not by any party's keys.

Dismisses price complaints from speculators, pointing to network value and the natural resistance created when addresses flip back into profit and sell.

Shares that his family in Gillette, Wyoming has been spared the worst of the coronavirus outbreak.

Warns that banning elective hospital procedures during lockdown is quietly killing people through missed heart attacks and tumors.

Trades banter about Scottish Highlander cattle on the family farm.

Waves off a chat troll by citing Dan Larimer's own SEC fine and lawsuit rather than engaging further.

The Cardano Improvement Proposal process is coming together, with the Cardano Foundation publishing a first CIP template around May.

Argues mass crypto adoption does not require users to understand it, any more than smartphone owners understand the chips inside their phones.

Pitches blockchain voting as the fix for the political blame trap that discourages governors from ever reopening their states.

Showcase blockchain product authentication for luxury goods and art as an everyday use case people will never need to understand.

Announces a 1.3 million dollar University of Wyoming lab funded partly in ADA to build blockchain authentication chips, with the state treating ADA as legal tender.

Jokes about naming a community mascot molten tar monster and 3D printing it at the University of Wyoming's maker lab.

Riffs on the IRS's relentless competence, noting it must legally accept even unbanked cannabis cash as legal tender.

Growing hydroponic jalapenos and super hot chilies as a hobby.

Meeting General McChrystal's team and studying Team of Teams for lessons on running Cardano's three way IOHK, Emurgo, and Foundation structure.

Explains why the defense and intelligence community watches cryptocurrency closely, from its impact on sanctions to its future role in voting and identity systems.

Recommends entrepreneurs build relationships with the State Department, recalling a briefing before meeting Mongolia's president.

Praises Georgia's efficient digital government and describes the academic diploma pilot that grew into its national credential verification project.

Details the logistics of an Ethiopia farmer voucher program, where only a fraction of six million farmers even own a cell phone.

Trades a joking aside about Georgia and Armenia's friendly national rivalry.

Argues for a fact based, data driven approach to reopening, citing antibody test results from Iceland, the Netherlands, and New York showing mostly mild cases.

Warns that prolonging lockdowns risks mass unemployment and instability, invoking Iraq's joblessness fueled unrest as a cautionary tale.

Predicts a mutating coronavirus means learning to live with ongoing risk, as past generations did with polio and tuberculosis.

Traces the Georgia credential project back to an earlier diploma verification pilot with Greek universities.

He is not a fan of protocol level transaction rollbacks, preferring them as an opt in smart contract feature rather than a system wide rule.

Traces his opposition to interventionist foreign policy to Iran's 1953 coup and joining the Ron Paul campaign afterward.

Condemns communism's mass murder while rejecting the Cold War logic that the ends justify any evil means.

Calls Iran's theocratic regime evil while noting its own people are as tired of it as any outside critic.

The cold blooded statecraft logic of using the pandemic as leverage to destabilize leadership in Iran, China, and North Korea.

Flags runaway AI and engineered pandemics as the twenty first century's existential risks, defending Musk's focus on the AI problem.

Proposes blockchain tools as a third option between total liberty and total tyranny, avoiding a slide into surveillance dystopia.

Admits he enjoys reading theoretical physics papers as a hobby even without the foundational training to judge them fully.

Recounts getting pulled into Ethereum Classic on principle after the ICO refund debate fractured Ethereum's social contract.

Details spending a million and a half dollars of his own money to build the Mantis client and hire Ethereum Classic community managers.

Being accused of a hostile takeover after proposing an Ethereum Classic treasury and innovation roadmap that the community rejected.

There is no business case left to build on Ethereum Classic's EVM after Cardano's extended UTXO model proved a better foundation for smart contracts.

Contrasts Ethereum Classic Dev's ingratitude with how warmly he would welcome an equally generous contributor into the Cardano community.

Credits the Mantis effort with giving the Cardano team insider knowledge of Ethereum's design flaws to avoid repeating.

Points to Mantis's weekly public developer videos as proof of the team's transparency even as the wider Ethereum Classic ecosystem declined.

Calls out Ethereum Classic Dev for repeatedly reposting slanderous blog posts about IOHK despite years of unpaid contribution.

Concludes the disappointing Ethereum Classic experience still taught lessons that improved Cardano's own Treasury and network design.

He would happily return to build on Ethereum Classic again if offered real funding and a conservative roadmap.

Reflects that having strong, fact backed opinions and the courage to voice them is worth the backlash it invites.

Clarifies he still has a cordial relationship with Bob Summerwill despite disagreeing over how Ethereum Classic should be funded.

Calls Mantis's security audited, Scala based build one of his proudest technical achievements despite the community's cool reception.

Cites the friendships between Jefferson and Adams, and Clinton and Bush, as proof political rivals can still find common ground.

Estimates the friends and family and public Shelley testnets will both land within May, with little gap between them.

Dismisses the idea that Ethereum 2.0 will make Cardano obsolete, citing better Byzantine fault tolerance, on chain governance, and Hydra's throughput.

Predicts Ethereum's messy transition and rival ETH1 and ETH2 chains running side by side will drag on for years.

Credits StarkWare as a legitimate zero knowledge research pioneer while cautioning zk-STARKs are years from practical products.

Details IOG's own roughly two year effort researching and open sourcing the Sonic zk-SNARK implementation.

Dismisses Ethereum maximalists as cult of personality believers ignoring Cardano's objectively better fault tolerance numbers.

Cardano's method: set first principles, build, then only adopt ideas validated through outside peer review.

Insists the project's combativeness defends principles and process, not ego, unlike competitors chasing hype driven vanity metrics.

Argues no protocol today can scale to a billion users without unacceptable centralization trade offs.

Liken scaling blockchains to a billion people to curing cancer, a collective problem solvable only by opening it to every university through peer review.

Calls out rivals claiming half a million transactions per second as physically impossible once you run the basic bandwidth math.

Points to IOG's more than sixty published papers and top citation count in cryptocurrency research as proof of real, unglamorous progress.

Predicts the Wyoming lab will make Cardano's Treasury a magnet for global academic research, unlike funding models controlled by an inner circle.

His role as pushing the first domino of cascading disruption, IOHK's tagline for how a small push snowballs into inevitability.

IOHK's name simply traces back to the company originally being set up in Hong Kong.

Blast corporate stock buyback culture for gutting cash reserves and then demanding bailouts in a crisis, contrasting Microsoft's conservative balance sheet.

Diagnose Bill Gates' credibility problem as a mismatch between his ruthless 1990s business persona and his current image as a global savior.

Recalls working a single math problem for twenty six straight hours as a young mathematician.

Cites Mitt Romney's flip flopping between Senate and presidential campaigns as another case where inconsistency erodes public trust.

Credits Gates Foundation staff in Africa as sincere and competent, doing real good on vaccines, sanitation, and malaria nets despite Gates' image problem.

Closes by arguing Gates and Jobs succeeded by embracing who they really are instead of pretending to be relatable.