One small step for Cardano; One giant leap for the industry

Opens after travels through Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Guatemala, RareEvo in Vegas, the SALT event, Denali's Sheldon Chalet, and a Barbados acquisition with his friend Gabe, reflecting on nine years since Cardano was just an idea.

Declares September 1 2024 an independence day where every ADA holder stands as an equal with a say over the protocol, and says he joined crypto for a front-row seat at changing the world's economic, political, and social systems.

Recalls Bitcoin's innocent early days after 2010 when cipherpunks mined and traded on spreadsheets, having deep philosophical conversations about sound money restoring property rights against inflationary bank-issued currency.

He worked on Ron Paul's 2007 campaign and Campaign for Liberty's Audit the Fed with Mike Caldwell, whose Casascius physical Bitcoin coins aimed to lure the gold-standard-loving Ron Paul into crypto.

Satoshi's white paper was a check he could not cash, since Bitcoin's instantaneous trustless value transfer begs for programmability, governance, interoperability, and scale that later generations pushed forward.

Calls governance the hardest and unsolved problem of humanity, citing a controversial US election that will leave many disenfranchised, because systems built for one era's incentives resist change.

The durable 18th-century US Constitution shows cracks it could not anticipate, like a monoparty of Republicans and Democrats capturing the state for the few, as happened toward one-party rule in Russia and China.

Crypto reached a multi-trillion valuation because it solves a real problem, being the machine of trust that lets people with different incentives, cultures, and languages act as if they trust each other, the biggest governance advance in history.

Cardano's core entities, Emurgo, the Foundation, and Input Output, sometimes coordinate and sometimes do not, and good governance lets them move forward for the greater good despite different incentives.

Calls Voltaire the biggest governance experiment in the industry, handing a 10-billion-dollar network of millions across a hundred countries a constitution, representative and liquid democracy, and tools for new voting systems.

Voltaire as a self-evolving governance machine starting from minimum viable governance and improving yearly at the speed of the iPhone rather than the speed of wars, potentially as meaningful as the American Revolution.

The community now builds the tools of democracy and accountability in public as equals with no kings, which is scary because losing a leader means making your own decisions and accepting accountability for being wrong.

Acknowledges ten years of decisions people agreed or disagreed with, like Haskell being the right or wrong choice, and says the community is now 100 percent in the driver's seat to figure out the future.

His original intent was to run the Haskell node until about 2020 using a functional language tied to a dependently typed one like Agda, but new features overwhelmed a new architecture, so they hybridized across 15-plus companies.

The path forward needs a new architecture without surrendering formal methods, and that believing the mission is accomplished is Bitcoin-maximalist thinking, but who decides is now a governance question.

Some are frustrated enough with the monolithic node to build fully independent competing clients, which is reasonable for redundancy like aerospace, but costs more time, money, and coordination friction.

The budget process is beginning with Intersect's budget committee, and once DReps turn on in 90 days they will work with the constitutional and budget committees toward yes-no votes on spending and accountability.

The ecosystem must have adult conversations about brand, marketing, and the US election, since one candidate likely brings a bull market and the other a bear market given radically different policies.

While he loves America and reveres George Washington for giving up power, America the ideal has become like Superman turning into Homelander, driving talk of de-dollarization and blacklisting US customers.

The de-Americanization of Cardano through growing DReps and the constitutional committee lets the ecosystem choose priority geographies, expecting strong growth in Argentina, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe regardless of the US election.

The constitutional workshops on six continents in 50 countries elect delegates who stand as equals in Argentina to draft a constitution ratified on-chain, the first time anyone gave every member both a voice and the means to express it.

Cardano is an instrument of liberty with deflationary sound money and self-owned identity and data, meant to be in every home and on every phone so no one fears tomorrow will be worse than today.

Warns that the kings of technology are seldom the kings of tomorrow, that overnight billions with no principles or utility are unsustainable, and that Cardano was built for the human race, not any one region.

After nine years, despite others going to prison or rug-pulling, Cardano is stronger because it can measure decentralization and plan in decades while competitors chase quick alpha in days and weeks.

Thanks two years of work since the first CIP 1694 workshop in his office and 25 more worldwide, and shows a flag flown on the summit of Mount Everest in 2022 sent by a community member, moved that Cardano inspires people to climb the highest summits.

In under five hours Cardano forks into a new network that looks the same but must now be judged on a community with more PhDs than any other, no single face, and rights protected by algorithmic governance.

Reflects that the role has taken a physical toll of white hair and weight, and that his clinic will start producing mesenchymal stem cells in September 2024 for FDA trials he hopes will fix him up alongside lifestyle changes.

Lays out his future: building on Cardano, including a decentralized social network for free speech and a decentralized AI aligned like Cardano, having just spoken at the AI4 conference about the dangers of AI alignment being used to control thought.

He wants to finish Midnight, Lace, and the Atala Prism thread on or connected to Cardano via partner chains, potentially bringing billions of transactions a day, and will present a Cardano 2 vision in October for the community to vote on.

The incoming DReps that governance is not about getting what you want but explaining it, listening, and finding a third option, accepting that some differences are irreconcilable without violating your principles.

Real leaders bring people up rather than burn them down, and that like Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum Classic, a Cardano fork is fine if differences are too extreme, though Voltaire aims to be the first chain that need not fragment.

Warns the legacy world is trying to capture crypto through a pizza-table set of companies controlling liquidity, and the only defense is staying one community with one voice and one on-chain government across a hundred countries, his Eisenhower military-industrial-complex farewell.