2024-11-02
Surprise AMA 11/02/2024
- A two-hour surprise AMA dominated by the budget debate, where he argues an annual budget with oversight beats a month-to-month model that no serious vendor or scientist would accept.
- He details the Bitcoin OS integration, a zero-knowledge proof validated on Bitcoin mainnet that could enable a trustless bridge and hybrid apps bringing 1.3 trillion dollars of Bitcoin to Cardano.
- He gives long takes on politics, the Peanut squirrel raid, the Unity party, and the two-America split he predicts, plus a deep dive into philosophy from Russell to the Stoics.
- He defends IO against transparency demands, explaining he was contracted to build Cardano for 38 million and spent 450 million of his own money, since it is a private firm not a public agency.
- He explains why he stays out of governance to avoid being a lightning rod, and previews a social-media pivot, the Argentina convention, and the budget fight deciding Cardano's future.
59 entries
Opens a November 2 surprise AMA amid Chang-plus-one on testnet, warning that Dunning-Kruger opinions on the budget miss that no credible vendor works month-to-month on long-arc projects.
Advocates an annual budget bound to a coalition with monthly or quarterly quality checks and the power to kick members out, since he cannot sign a 4.5-million-dollar three-year Stanford lab deal on month-to-month funding.
Warns against surgically defunding people retroactively, a race to the bottom that wrecked NASA's long-arc programs as priorities shift, and that top formal-methods engineers will not train on your tech without payment certainty.
Cites Boeing handing safety-critical work to 15-dollar-an-hour workers in a cost-cutting race to the bottom that crashed 737s and stranded Starliner, warning Cardano's treasury becomes a failed experiment without a stable annual structure.
Month-to-month funding would lose brilliant cryptographers like Dan Boneh, David Wu, Benedikt Bunz, and John Mitchell, whom no inexperienced team can match.
The Peanut squirrel raid, where four agencies and 12 officers seized and euthanized a seven-year pet squirrel and raccoon while ignoring real crime, is the poster child for the modern American government people are angry at.
Real world assets and tokenization will come to Cardano with Midnight and hybrid applications, a big believer in that future.
He has no official role in Cardano so his political opinions are his own, is very angry at the SEC and US government, and does not believe reelecting the party in power 12 of 16 years will stop it.
Ouroboros Genesis is code-complete for Q1 and was stripped from Chang-plus-one to simplify and de-risk the release without needing a hard fork, so it works its way in later.
Rebuts a troll that he is not a builder by asking if Djed, Lace, and Midnight are not real applications going multi-chain, and challenges anyone to state the technical reason Cardano cannot scale, met with crickets.
Bitcoin OS uses clever taproot and zero-knowledge tech to validate a ZK proof on Bitcoin mainnet, potentially enabling a trustless bridge and hybrid apps where a Bitcoin user pays fees in Bitcoin while using Cardano DeFi under the hood.
1.3 trillion dollars of Bitcoin could visit Cardano as tourists, and since both are UTXO systems the apps fit hand in glove, so IO will formalize the Bitcoin OS proof, work with Maestro, and build the user experience.
The Babel fees CIP 118 nested transactions is the foundation for the feature, plus a pub-sub channel like MQTT connecting both chains, calling Bitcoin integration a high priority with more liquidity than Solana and Ethereum combined times two.
Says Ron Paul joining DOGE makes him happy, framing a Unity party ticket of Trump, RFK, Tulsi, Elon, and Ron Paul, and jokes he cannot give Leios dates under a month-to-month budget where staff update resumes as Microsoft offers 500,000 a year.
Native token listings on big exchanges will come with Midnight leading, costing millions to onboard custodians because of little CNA support, hinting an ecosystem entity should fund that.
Agrees a centralized government cannot work when the main information medium is a rage algorithm like X, so society must decentralize to have calm, fact-based adult conversations.
Milei's Argentina has a philosophical tension between a libertarian chainsaw and running a government, and the Hegelian synthesis is killing the central bank to let private money compete while a blockchain becomes the government's spine.
He told Argentine officials and newspapers to write a Digital Argentina 2030 doctrine covering blockchain, AI, IoT, and citizen services, from which RFPs and a public-private coalition of local firms flow, warning outsiders cannot just run Argentina.
Milei is philosophically closest to Cardano, and Bitcoin plus Cardano via Bitcoin OS could be the programmable spine of Argentina, a good political compromise.
He will slowly move from X to a differently curated medium after a 40 Years of Zen reset, since the platform is not working for him.
The Trump Liz Cheney clip was about war hawks who never fought experiencing war before committing young people to die, which the media twisted into a call to kill her, showing two parallel realities and a distortion of derangement.
Argues America has been too hawkish over 20 years with too many invasions and drone deaths, a 22-a-day veteran suicide rate, and handing Afghanistan back to the Taliban, yet hawks want another round paid in children's blood.
Recommends US national parks over just New York and LA for a family visit, since the middle of the country is like 26 countries in one, noting his own bias for low-density beautiful nature.
He sells guided bison hunts on his ranch with huge elk herds but cannot bring himself to shoot an animal, the great contradiction of his life, and points to the Edinburgh Decentralization Index for measuring decentralization.
Answering his favorite philosopher, walks through Bertrand Russell's rigorous analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein on language, and the Viennese schools of will to power, meaning, and pleasure via Nietzsche, Frankl, and Freud.
Praises Dennett for clarity over the obscurantist postmodernist Foucault crowd, loves Camus's absurdism and Sisyphus, and says stoicism is back via the Jordan Peterson effect, criticizing wokeism as a mercy-less Old Testament religion per Marc Andreessen.
He now reads transhumanist philosophy since he runs synthetic-biology and anti-aging companies changing the human organism, but the field beyond Nick Bostrom lacks a dominant bioethics framework outside fiction like Gattaca.
He has come to value philosophy that navigates ambiguity while keeping a stable core, like resurrected virtue ethics and stoicism born in a world of extreme uncertainty, over Russell's black-and-white analytic crank.
He is exploring altered states and non-materialist consciousness, noting humans perceive only a dot of a vast universe, that bees see flowers in more of the spectrum, and cites synesthesia and the book Wednesday Is Indigo Blue.
Rejects that utilitarianism runs the world, since much policy harms the majority to benefit a few and wealth inequality grows rather than shrinks as a utilitarian aggregate would predict.
He wanted to be a surgeon but left medicine after seeing a hyper-bureaucratic system with a gargantuan middleman between doctor and patient, evidence-based care dictated by pharma and insurers, and burned-out physicians drowning in paperwork.
Contrasts his OBGYN grandfather's cash-pay 1960s practice where the rich paid for the poor with today's four-trillion-dollar system run for private equity and insurers, and describes fighting local hospital pettiness and permit delays at his Gillette clinic.
Wealth inequality is a huge deal in a static aristocratic society but a byproduct of innovation in a meritocratic growth system, and that nepotism and corporatism marrying public and private into an oligarchy is the real problem.
Says he knows the Austrian School of Ludwig von Mises well and is excited an Austrian, Milei, is now in office, and recalls playing Zilean, Xerath, and Zed in League of Legends.
Analyzes the Unity party as strange bedfellows like JD Vance, Bill Ackman, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, and Elon, calling it the birth of a new party like the Republicans rising from the collapsed Whigs in the 1850s.
Predicts a Trump win brings four years of two mutually exclusive Americas, one seeing improvement and one seeing death camps, escalating toward a 2028 revolution and street violence, and calls out BLM-versus-COVID lockdown hypocrisy.
Gives a Midnight update that its testnet launched October 1 with heavy activity, calling it the most difficult product they have built, a layer two for everyone learning hybrid apps and bridges, that takes a huge amount of his time.
Criticizes the Kaspa marketing that takes his out-of-context words about Yonatan Sompolinsky as an endorsement, saying projects should stand on their own merits, and notes Kaspa's DAG lineage of GHOST, SPECTRE, and PHANTOM with Aviv Zohar.
Rebuts a Dunning-Kruger jab about vaccines by asking why the control group was vaccinated for the first time ever, and says expertise is not all it is cracked up to be these days.
Herpes is a fascinating virus that hides cleverly, linked to how COVID and HIV hide, which is why HIV drug research like acyclovir helped, and that he will attend the election at a ketamine EEG meditation retreat instead of watching.
Month-to-month funding makes marketing impossible, since sponsoring a conference would need a public on-chain vote each time with ADA that cannot be stabilized into a stablecoin, urging holders not to delegate to DReps who want that.
Clarifies he is not waiting for a market bottom to ratify the budget, but wants an annual budget with built-in audit, oversight, and intermediary agencies that return leftovers to the treasury and can be fired in 2025.
Nitpicking every expense at the DRep level over a business-class flight weaponizes governance into bikeshedding where nothing gets done, and that a 100-million budget only has 50 million if ADA halves, so annual planning is the only sensible way.
Suggests a captive marketing firm within the IOHK ecosystem with certainty beyond month-to-month, and on consciousness says a quantum entanglement theory like Roger Penrose's could explain a mother sensing her child's death, deserving real science.
Addresses the Reddit transparency demand by explaining he was contracted to build Cardano for 38 million dollars in Bitcoin and ADA, spent 450 million of his own, and no private development firm would expose its books to competitors like a public agency.
Oversight means verifying paid work is done, not exposing a firm's personal life, like paying a plumber to fix a pipe without asking about his sex life, and that the original counterparty and product differ entirely from Cardano today.
He stayed in the trenches for a decade while his generation retired to yacht parties, and calls out the Satoshi purity myth, noting Satoshi could not sell Bitcoin in 2010 and holds 5 percent of the supply.
Skewers Bitcoin maximalism where Mike Saylor and BlackRock pumping is virtuous but innovators who let you spend Bitcoin on DeFi are shitcoin scammers, asking what utility or vote a maximalist's held Bitcoin actually provides.
Reminisces about the fun 2009-to-2011 Bitcoin era of namecoin, litecoin, alpaca socks, and buying an Xbox on Bitmit, before maximalists turned it into a mercy-less religion where all non-bitcoiners are heretics.
Argues Satoshi's premine is just getting coins cheaper first, that resetting the network in 2010 would have been fairer, and cites the Bitcoin inflation bug that let people create coins from thin air, mocking the founder-purity double standard.
On the deficit myth and MMT, says if government simply creates units as needed backed by taxes, there is no incentive to save, and clarifies he is not critical of DReps since none have gone live or made decisions yet.
The paper wallet generator is live on Lace right now with a million-dollar wallet to try to hack, frustrated when people claim a shipped, usable feature was a missed deadline.
Condemns the Linux Foundation banning Russian maintainers, saying a public good built by thousands should not exclude 135 million people because of their leader, a despicable lack of empathy.
Godel's incompleteness is a system-wide property that infinite axioms are needed for a complete system, which does not prevent proving a specific statement, and is separate from the AI language question.
He is not scared of spending 500 million ADA a year since ADA flows in and its value should rise, and that if the ecosystem will not invest its own treasury in Cardano, no VC ever will.
He stays out of governance to avoid being a lightning rod used for legitimacy or as an evil-emperor target, comparing it to Bill Gates disrupting Ballmer until Nadella sidelined him and Microsoft went from 400 billion to 3 trillion.
IO should have a service-oriented accountable coalition relationship rather than him deciding on the government side, letting DReps and committee members grow their own swarm intelligence without the founder messing up the crops.
Details the Bitcoin OS proof needing the RIPEMD-160 primitive and foreign-field arithmetic to convert any ZK standard to BLS, all validated on the Bitcoin side via taproot, which IO will formalize in a fun paper with the BOS team.
Closes after two hours praising builders like Trim, Pi, and Adam Dean on Hydra Doom, previews a Twitter pivot to a possible Charles Discord, and looks to the 300-plus-person Argentina Constitutional Convention and the budget fight deciding Cardano's future.