AMA 05/26/2019

Live from a warm Colorado ranch, driving the land and posting the video on Twitter.

The new stake pool operator questionnaire covers server infrastructure, existing businesses, staking and mining pool experience.

The questionnaire also decides what education content gets made, from Nix and git to reporting an issue on GitHub.

Still on schedule for the June self node launch, with a YAML generator so you can run a testnet in a box on your own PC.

After the local testnet comes the networked version, then the incentives layer, then a switch flip to mainnet.

As an advisor to Polymath and Polymesh he gives advice on building a blockchain and token mechanics, but never makes the decision.

Polymath may be better off staying on Ethereum layer 2 given how much Solidity code they have written.

Advising on security tokens gives Cardano a snapshot of regulations, exchanges and infrastructure for illiquid assets in the developing world.

Eastern Europe already has a strong presence, with Roman Oliynykov's team in Kharkiv plus friends in Kyiv, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary.

Traveling to the country of Georgia in June 2019 to meet the Prime Minister and a litany of ministers, with possible Cardano news out of it.

Strong STEM and math education in Eastern Europe creates a predisposition toward Haskell, Lisp and OCaml, which makes it a great market for Plutus and Marlowe.

Facebook's GlobalCoin is not scary: an asset backed coin with a centralized issuer is a value add, not a cryptocurrency.

In the shoes of JP Morgan, Wells Fargo or Bank of America he would be terrified, because Facebook could kill correspondent banking and replace the Tethers of the world.

People who see Facebook as a threat miss the point, like Paul Krugman calling the internet less impactful than the fax machine.

Smart contracts after Shelley means hackathon after hackathon: the imperative world was captured by Ethereum but the functional world is up for grabs.

Hundreds of thousands of functional programmers already exist, visible at Strange Loop, ICFP and Lambda Jam or just by counting Meetup groups.

Rather than forcing the best engineers onto tools that look like JavaScript but worse, micro target five hundred to a thousand of them and add interoperability later.

Vitalik got brutally blamed for the DAO hack even though nothing was technically wrong with the EVM or Solidity, beyond a permissive language design.

Bring your A game at launch: start small and methodical, build a core of experienced people and mentors, then open the floodgates.

Plutus is already usable today through the Plutus Playground and Udemy courses, with hackathons coming near you.

The DAO was audited by the best Solidity developers of the time, which is a fair criticism of Ethereum: Plutus instead reuses thirty years of Haskell tooling.

Gabe Abed runs one of the most interesting channels in the space and, through Bitt, is the only one in the industry to get a central bank to issue a currency.

In Japan from June 8th to 13th, speaking in Tokyo at a digital world conference on an Asahi invitation, plus a meetup.

ADA is an unregulated product, but he talks to US regulators directly including the CFTC, backed by organizational knowledge from the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and FS Vector.

Regulation kicks in when you hold something for somebody else, act as an unavoidable middleman, or make promises people commit money to.

US regulation is primitive, draconian and byzantine because it came first; functional regulation with a clear set of tests would be far better.

Switzerland gives case by case rulings, which is how Ethereum got a legally binding tax ruling from the canton of Zug in weeks.

The 2020 election will shape crypto regulation: the Trump administration has been hands off, while a Democratic win could install Wall Street people who are hostile.

Crypto may follow the marijuana pattern of states against the federal government, with Colorado, Montana and Wyoming already passing legislation.

Big financial institutions will try to buy politicians and regulation to keep a state sponsored monopoly, but the cat is already out of the bag globally.

IOHK is a software company that does no investment banking or private placements, so regulating it would run into First Amendment problems.

For a complete beginner: the Coursera fundamentals of computing series from Rice University in Python, then Harvard's free CS50 on edX.

After the basics go functional through the thousand page Haskell Book or SICP, and consider Regis University's online degree or Udacity nanodegrees.

Sharding comes to Cardano as Ouroboros Hydra, alongside layer 2 work on lightning style batching, snarks and Starks, MPC and sidechains.

All the Ouroboros papers are being rewritten for journal submission and dishonest majority issues cleaned up, with Hydra as the summer project.

Learning to run a node from scratch will come via YouTube videos or a Udemy style course, shaped by repeat questions from the stake pool task force.

Ledger Nano X support is being discussed with Vacuum Labs and should be much faster than Nano S was, hopefully in June 2019.

Multisig with Ledger devices and a Copay like phone experience is wanted for large holders, and multisig is a Shelley launch requirement.

On Casper Labs: he hired Vlad Zamfir at Ethereum, the two never agreed on anything, but if all his critics were like Vlad he would be a lot happier.

Divergent paths are a consequence of success, so eventually there will be a Cardano classic just as there is Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic.

Wishes Casper Labs well, because open source means even ten bad ideas with one good one give everyone something to borrow.

Greets Portugal, points out the many Brazilians at IOHK, and confirms that yes, this is a rancher shirt.

There is no kill switch in Cardano, but the IOHK ADA is deliberately unspendable, which is why claims that he sells ADA to fund his lifestyle are absurd.

To feel safer holding ADA, start with a hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S or Trezor, or a paper wallet, so the private keys stay cold.

Paper wallets have a generation and printing risk, since a printer buffer can retain the blueprint, which is why some keywords must be written by hand.

With a hardware wallet you trust the manufacturer, so pick a reputable vendor with third party audits and a track record, and keep a backup.

Once multisig lands, use two of three across hardware devices with one in a safety deposit box and one with a trusted friend.

Daedalus will be upgraded to watch accounts without holding private keys, connecting a Ledger device or paper wallet to observe balances.

Trusted hardware options include a secure enclave in the Rust client compiled for Intel SGX, and Zymbit, separating key signing like Samsung Knox does on Android.

Private key theft is one of the least common ways people lose crypto, usually it is a hacked account or a friend's email asking for a Bitcoin.

Insulate yourself from social attacks by physically calling the person over VoIP and applying a 48 to 72 hour rule before sending anything.

There are eleven chickens on the ranch for eggs, geese to guard them and a chicken coop nearly finished.

You do not build a landing strip for a Gulfstream G650, you build a helipad and keep the plane in a hangar at a real airport.

Answering Anthony, who calls him a phony posting memes instead of shipping Shelley, he asks what else he should be doing while running 200 people and signing agreements with heads of state.

A CEO's job is to know where to go and rally people, not clear the brush; engineers in power often demote themselves to lead engineer and fail.

Having David as senior product manager on Cardano cuts his meetings from seven a week to two, freeing five hours for partnerships, products and revenue.

Vitalik started in 2014 and Cardano does have a product: Byron has been in market since September 2017 with multiple wallets, papers and testnets.

Critics can never be satisfied: eclipse Ethereum and they ask about Bitcoin, eclipse Bitcoin and they ask about Facebook coin.

The MetaMask do you know who I am tweet is still used as an indictment of his character, mostly by the Ethereum and EOS ecosystems.

Works 80 to 100 hours a week in intermittent intervals, and nothing he does can make developers write code faster or ship a day sooner.

Downtime spent reading and thinking makes better products, the way Steve Jobs' calligraphy class shaped Apple; every great CEO needs varied interests.

Anything involving money or politics draws relentless criticism, and people keep claiming IOHK sells ADA even though the address is on its blog and unspendable.

Deepfakes arrive within ten years, letting anyone put words in Trump's or Obama's mouth, and society is not prepared for a post truth reality.

Outrage culture means one offensive remark can cost you your job, which is what happened after the do you know who I am tweet written from Vietnam.

Nobody can fire him, he owns his company and people tattoo its logo, so deepfakes will hurt but the outrage pendulum will swing back.

The Kigali genocide museum in Rwanda, where 1994 neighbors killed neighbors and now work together, shows forgiveness is a human superpower.

The Treasury system is scaling up and leaving the lab, and is the very next thing IOHK starts as Shelley draws down and some people move to Hydra.

Snark work may optimize the anonymous voting protocol, whose partial additive homomorphic encryption primitives are a bit heavy.

The Treasury has to be done in 2020, and IOHK will not leave Cardano until the CIP process, voting and Treasury are deployed and stable, self funded if needed.

Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now is a great book that shows life is getting better, and hand it to any postmodernist college kid to watch them get triggered.

On who would win a sumo match: he has about a hundred pounds on the questioner.

Ethereum Classic is still near and dear, so IOHK will likely submit a grant proposal to the funding agencies backing ETC to put shelved protocols into Mantis.

If the Ethereum Classic community declines the proposal IOHK retires the Mantis client and moves the team on, because staying uncompensated is a donation.

Tezos is tested with good code and a loyal community, Dfinity has not shipped, and VCs talk up the protocols they hold positions in.

Complains that supposedly objective outlets like CoinDesk blacklist IOHK, ignoring its labs at Tokyo Tech, Edinburgh and Athens while covering Stanford's Ethereum lab.

IOHK is negotiating a currency for six million people and it draws no coverage, but every leader has their New York Times and his is CoinDesk.

Traditional media matters far less now: Twitter, fifty thousand people on Reddit, telegram and these AMAs reach further, plus national press in Ethiopia, Mongolia and Georgia.

A big fan of the ketogenic diet, he finds veganism evolutionarily unconvincing since hunter gatherers were likely in ketosis by default.

He was 180 to 190 pounds before starting his businesses and is now around 235, so traveling less and staying in one place is the key to getting healthy.

Invited to keynote the Crypto AM event in London on June 25th, right after saying he should stop traveling.

Lab grown meat within 25 years will force the ethics question, and until then the vegan moral superiority is hard to take.

Bulletproof coffee is great, resveratrol suffers from bioavailability, and 16:8 intermittent fasting is the easiest to maintain.

On mushroom decriminalization in Colorado, read Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind on psychedelics from the discovery of LSD onward.

Paul Stamets is worth reading on mycology, and psychedelics offer a way out of harmful thought patterns, much as CBD and THC are being reintroduced to medicine.

Both keto and psychedelics were politicized in the 60s and 70s and became taboo, and thanks to Joe Rogan, the internet and the intellectual dark web proper science can resume.

Fasting puts you in ketosis once glucose stores run out, with proteins converted through gluconeogenesis and ketone bodies absorbed.

Sightseeing in Mongolia meant Karakorum and the Gobi Desert, staying in a ger, a phenomenal experience.

Karakorum was the seat of the Mongol Empire eight hundred years ago, with religious freedom and a fountain of free flowing alcohol, all swept away in two centuries.

Rode a camel and ran the sand dunes in the Gobi on a glide day between meetings with the president of Mongolia.

Medical knowledge changes, homosexuality was once in the DSM, and inflammation and the postwar surge in smoking fit heart disease data better than dietary fat.

There is legitimate peer reviewed science supporting ketosis, from Dominic D'Agostino at the University of Florida to Peter Attia.

Being accused of disgracing Cardano by talking about mushrooms while the roadmap slips is just more of the same noise.

The Greek university project with GRNET is complete and reportedly in production, and research continues at the University of Athens where IOHK has an office.

Microsoft's identity overlay on Bitcoin makes sense as the least controversial anchoring choice, with all the magic happening off chain.

For anyone building identity products, look at the Sovrin Foundation, Hyperledger Indy, the Decentralized Identity Foundation and the W3C DID standard.

Quantum resistance is being worked on by Peter Schwabe and Alex Russell, most likely a post quantum checkpoint at the end of each epoch using hash based crypto.

The hard part is that snarks, VRFs and VDFs rest on assumptions like discrete log, and the quantum paper slipped past the Crypto, Eurocrypt and CCS deadlines.

The 2019 Cadillac CT6 is the finest car ever made: twin turbo V6, 400 horsepower, Magnetic Ride, Super Cruise self driving and fifty thousand dollars cheaper than an S-Class.

Solar powered mini staking pools are plausible, the Rock Pi boards already demoed a battery, but off grid internet connectivity is the open question.

Nothing beats a Tesla Model S in ludicrous mode for acceleration, and within ten to twenty years every car will be a hybrid with battery torque.

If ADA were the new world order then CoinDesk would cover it, and yes he does own a John Deere tractor.

Artists can tweet him a link and he will connect them with IOHK's director of design Richard Wild, which is how the Shelley and IOHK summit posters came about.

A rollback of the Bitcoin blockchain is theoretically possible but unlikely, and the price reflects that lack of risk.

OpenBazaar accepting ADA will probably happen at some point since IOHK researchers already contribute there, it just is not a high priority.

Once everything ships, rolling back Cardano will be harder than Bitcoin thanks to original research plus quantum resistance checkpoints and a BFT piggyback protocol.

His dad Mark and brother William both live in Wyoming, and his dad is a doctor working himself to death while getting into real estate.

Visited the University of Wyoming, its computer science chair and math department, and it is nice to spend time at an American university again.

Craig Wright's copyright on the Bitcoin white paper means nothing: there is no vetting process, you file a form and anyone listening could do the same.

Even if he were Satoshi you cannot retroactively change an MIT software license, that is promissory estoppel, and the SV and Bitcoin Cash code is not Satoshi's anyway.

Satoshi is an idea about giving something to the world, not patenting and controlling it, and every experience with that side of the aisle opens with threats.

The K framework is not gone, IOHK just chose not to renew the contract for 2019 after IELE work stalled on three criteria: a full K rewrite, automated semantic compilation and reasonable performance.

The market collapse meant cutting fat and focusing on Plutus and Marlowe as the first step of Goguen, but the imperative side still needs a solution.

Reading the unkind words in the chat, he just pities people who must treat everyone in their life this way.

RINA is not gone either, sixty man months and five million dollars was too much, so IOHK built a lesser version as the mini protocol design in the network stack.

Constraints can produce better products, the way a small budget turned Han Solo into a scoundrel instead of an alien, while unlimited money produced the Phantom Menace.

He is not on a month off, he is running IOHK from home and the Longmont office with several hours of meetings every day including weekends.

Defines working product: IOHK already has one, has said Shelley is coming, and has a clear roadmap it is building.

He sold his Bitcoin for fiat near the twenty thousand dollar peak because it was not sustainable, then went back into crypto at the bottom.

The first Rocky was a wonderful movie, Rocky 4 was pretty good, and he really enjoyed Rocky Balboa.

Shelley development costs millions every month, it is really expensive to keep everybody going.

He cannot talk about Coinbase because of a nondisclosure agreement, but considers them a great company IOHK would love to work with.

An end to end security audit is overdue and must be done by a non IOHK entity, with Kudelski as preferred auditor alongside IOHK's own RPISEC based auditing group and QA department.

Yes there will be a team in Wyoming, which is why he visited the university, because a jurisdiction that passes a law deserves real substance not a shingle.

Daedalus is named after the mythological figure, the father of Icarus, not after a ship.

Shelley in 2019 one hundred percent, and he will eat a cowboy boot if IOHK does not ship it.

Wrapping up with thanks for a great AMA and a promise to do these more frequently.