AMA 11/16/2018

Updates on Cardano 1.4, now in regression testing with a formally verified wallet backend, aiming for a November or December release.

Lays out the Shelley roadmap sequencing, starting with an Ouroboros BFT update before moving to Ouroboros Genesis or Praos.

The Ouroboros BFT paper is now published on ePrint and describes a newly designed, top down network stack.

Details progress on VRF and KES implementations for Ouroboros Praos and early research into XMSS signatures.

Advises the community to follow the IOHK GitHub repos, since Shelley core rewrite work is moving out of the main cardano-sl repo.

Congratulates Emurgo on open sourcing Yoroi and flags upcoming Ledger and Trezor hardware wallet support.

Rewriting the wallet backend to be modular so it can connect to both the Rust and Haskell code, ahead of migrating to Icarus style addresses.

Previews upcoming Yoroi features like manual transaction creation and custom UTXO selection, plus multi sig support.

Shows off Tangem's NFC hardware wallet chips from a recent Switzerland trip, cheap full Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets in a card.

Outlines a planned two card Tangem multi sig scheme with a PIN coded spending card and a separate recovery card.

The Rust team is expanding with new hires and steady daily code output.

Points to a newly opened multi party computation repo from the Kaleidoscope research line and hopes it connects to Yoroi.

Runs through the travel schedule ahead: Mexico, Thailand, Vegas, Scotland for Plutus Fest, Abu Dhabi and Uganda.

Teases upcoming December announcements in Uganda as part of the pan African strategy.

Introduces Plutus Fest as the first public showcase of Plutus after sixteen language revisions, including a mock chain for testing contracts.

The two Plutus Fest tracks: one for language experts from Glasgow and St Andrews, one for developers on Plutus, Marlowe and the extended UTXO model.

Lists the Plutus team attending Plutus Fest, including Michael Peyton Jones, Simon Thompson, Phil Wadler and Duncan Coutts.

Addresses the Cardano Foundation leadership change, with Pascal cleaning up after Parson's resignation.

Revives the idea of community funded Cardano hubs to evangelize and grow the ecosystem in different regions.

Celebrates the launch of the Cardano Effect podcast, credited to Philip, Sebastian and Rick.

The Cardano Effect format: a topical episode and an interview episode each week, modeled on shows like Epicenter.

Distinguishes free software from open source and argues Cardano should follow decentralized, non custodial governance like Bitcoin rather than closed roadmaps like Oracle's Java.

Hiring open source project manager Robin and moving issue tracking from JIRA to GitHub for full transparency.

Announces plans for a Cardano Improvement Proposal process to govern all updates after Shelley.

A treasury funded, liquid democracy voting system for deciding which CIPs get built.

Cautions that on chain democracy must evolve gradually, drawing lessons from a decade of DAO governance history.

Names John O'Connor as director of African operations handling regulatory relationships across the continent.

Responds to a hardware wallet support request, noting it depends on demand and a business deal rather than technical difficulty.

IOHK Hong Kong stayed out of an exchange's Forex deal and generally avoids getting involved in exchange listing negotiations.

Muses about ADA sponsoring the 2020 Tokyo Olympics once the treasury system exists, joking about a Dogecoin style bobsled sponsorship.

Answers a consensus question on why an honest longest chain stays denser than an attacker's, tied to the no prior 51 percent attack assumption.

Targets roughly a thousand stake pools, tuned by the Oxford incentives paper, aiming for far more decentralization than Bitcoin or EOS.

Gives his take on the Bitcoin Cash fork, siding with neither camp but citing block size propagation research from Decker and Wattenhofer.

Recounts an unpleasant encounter with Craig Wright in Rwanda and calls him a sociopath and a fraud for claiming to be Satoshi.

Outlines plans to grow in Brazil and Latin America, pointing to Brazilian and Argentine team members already on staff.

Insists wallets like Yoroi must be open source so the community can verify there's no backdoor, calling the Icarus reference client mission accomplished.

Frames smart contracts for web developers as removing trust and censorship risk from existing user experiences rather than inventing new ones.

Gives censorship resistance examples like WikiLeaks payment cutoffs and deplatformed podcasters such as Sargon and Jordan Peterson.

The trust model shift from a centralized server saying trust me to decentralized computation for things like gambling and finance.

Stresses avoiding vendor lock-in so developers can keep familiar tools like React or Angular while swapping blockchain backends freely.

Decentralization doesn't fit everything, like an MMORPG or an internal company payroll server.

Atomic swaps and a DEX are likely priorities after Shelley, layered on stake pool relays alongside payment channels and oracles.

He isn't worried about big tech blockchain protocols like Microsoft's, arguing enterprise blockchain and cryptocurrency are different games, praising Hyperledger Fabric.

Argues enterprise blockchain adoption will come first from paper based, analog settings like African coffee farmers rather than digitized legacy systems.

There are no plans to use Elixir, despite liking the language.

Dismisses worry about Ethereum's proof of stake, arguing it overthinks finality and underthinks long range attacks that KES and the Genesis assumption already solve.

Previews the upcoming parallel chains paper converging with the Hydra side chains research toward Cardano's sharding approach.

Jokes about not taking care of his health while traveling and a running bet about losing weight in 2019.

Explains why governments like the US are standardizing post quantum cryptography now, anticipating quantum computers within 10 to 20 years.

Cardano is looking at XMSS style hash based signatures for quantum resistance, likely limited to delegation rather than everyday transactions due to size.

Expects next generation post quantum signature schemes within five to ten years, moving delegation and ledger maintenance to quantum resistant crypto sooner than transactions.

Flags understanding a quantum adversary's full capabilities, beyond just breaking signatures, as an understudied research topic for later.

The Hawaiian shirt: he used to live on Maui.

He'll be attending a crypto event in Ohio, though he can't recall its name.

Mass address generation can't threaten security because the key space is astronomically large, like finding one painted grain of sand on a Hawaiian beach.

He doesn't like coleslaw and invites any off topic questions.

The Sirin Labs deal negotiated by Emurgo for ADA support on the Finney phone's trusted hardware module.

Traces his path into cryptography through a CU Boulder course and later Coursera classes from Dan Boneh and John Katz.

Walks through core cryptography concepts like confidentiality, authentication and zero knowledge proofs, and how adversary models shape protocol design.

Admires how Ouroboros research builds rigorously from formal blockchain definitions like the GKL model up through networking, calling it elegant provable work.

Uses PGP's commercial failure as proof that great cryptography alone fails without good user experience.

Takes pride in IOTA outranking ADA given China's social credit system, saying he'd rather stay at the bottom of that ranking.

Plutus likely won't get full dependent types like Idris or Agda, favoring refinement types via Liquid Haskell instead.

Plainly that Cardano is not going to fail.

He rarely talks to Vitalik Buterin beyond birthday wishes and hellos at conferences.

Fields a question about ERC-20 tokens ranked above ADA, working out the answer is Tether.

Recommends Ron Chernow's biography Grant and begins telling Ulysses S Grant's underdog origin story.

Continues the Grant story through his alcoholism, poverty and failed attempt at farming before the Civil War.

Follows Grant's rapid Civil War rise from colonel to lieutenant general, then to president.

Grant being swindled in a Ponzi scheme, dying of cancer while finishing his best selling memoirs, and his legacy fighting the Ku Klux Klan.

Two more recommendations: Moonwalking with Einstein on memory training and Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.

Links rising mental health struggles to the loss of clear life rituals and rites of passage in modern society.

Brings in Viktor Frankl's search for meaning and Camus's take on Sisyphus finding bliss by focusing on the act, plus the Japanese idea of ikigai.

Blames social media for reducing people to two dimensional caricatures and fueling campus cancel culture that shuts down dialogue.

Points to the intellectual dark web, Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss guests like Paul Stamets and Wim Hof as sources for new mental and physical health ideas.

Shares his own three life goals in finance, mathematics and medicine, including work on homotopy type theory.

Jokes that Ron Paul is too old to run in 2020 but praises Rand Paul.

He's tried flotation tank therapy and plans to buy his own tank.

Pitches a brand new idea: a cryptocurrency that mines faster the calmer you are, using Hong Chang's proof of human with trusted hardware.

Details pairing the trusted hardware with an EEG headset that dampens mining speed based on focus and calmness.

Jokes that Chinese mining farms could someday be rows of people meditating in headsets instead of running rigs, dubbing the idea tranquil chain.

Confirms IOHK put four million dollars into a project moving from Plasma to StarkWare's technology.

Opens the closing question on whether Haskell was the right choice by surveying programming language paradigms and tradeoffs.

Frames the core tradeoff as correctness and formal methods versus developer accessibility and speed, like PHP versus Haskell.

Cryptocurrency protocol codebases stay small, citing the Ethereum Classic client at about 15,000 lines of Scala.

Haskell was chosen to attract top researchers like Duncan Coutts, Phil Wadler, Michael Peyton Jones and John Hughes to hard problems.

Admits early hires were too junior or too academically idealistic, making it hard to inject pragmatism into the Haskell codebase.

2019 will show off a small, nearly bug free, highly maintainable Haskell codebase that inspires more top talent to contribute.

Compares protocol development to surgery or law, arguing code holding people's wealth and identity deserves domain experts, not accessibility for its own sake.

Concludes Haskell was necessary pain he'd choose again, then thanks everyone and signs off until the next AMA.