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perfect see here so the link is that on Twitter hey guys another surprise a ma said you guys love them so much I'm gonna post a link on the telegram channels just give me a moment and we'll get started in just a few minutes [Music] meantime you can look at my shiny head okay all right we'll start in just a few minutes all right okay welcome everybody thank you so much for coming into the surprise AMA I had a little bit of time today so I figured I'd do one of these the community seems to like it so it's always a lot of fun anyway I'll probably be here for maybe 45 minutes an hour unless we get some really really good deep questions and I just keep rambling and rambling and then I'll just go until someone grabs me or something like that totally unplanned but that's okay all right so let's go ahead and get some questions going and let's start from the top let's see what we got all right well we'll start with probably the one of the most interesting fights recently it says tell us about the twitter fight with v so no Twitter fight with V yet but basically what happened was that we had a thread about Ora Boris Vitalik posted some questions and concerns about Ora Boris I answered metalic answered back and then I realized that reddit probably wasn't the best of mediums so I had a discussion with the scientists behind Ora Boris and I said could we write a formal rebuttal and basically what we did was we sat down and tried to find as much information as we could about Kasper which was extremely difficult because there's lots of different papers Vlad's Kasper there's Vitalik scaz ber there's like two or three white papers there's some fa Q's apparently there were some repos that formalized some stuff but they've been pulled and we may best effort to try to understand as much as we could about Kasper and and we tried to do a fair comparison but unfortunately Casper's not written in a way that makes it particularly easy for an academic comparison between it and our protocol so we we did our best we posted the rebuttal Vitalik s-- response was to say it was pathetic call us liars and then say that it was a some sort of hit piece I guess he's not used to being challenged and I'm guess he's not used to having and I could rebuttal makes sense because he dropped out of first semester and he never went through that process personally but the the rebuttal that we provided was what wouldn't one expect if they go through a standard peer review and they had submitted a paper or they asked a colleague to look at it so anyway we might write some more we might not just depends on how we feel but we think the things we said were perfectly reasonable and we're pretty proud of our protocol some things that Vitalik wrote were quite strange like we're violating the f philippi impossibility theorem not sure how but I guess he asserts that and other such things and you know it is what it is and we're pretty happy with our strategy all of the orb or scrapers have been accepted at major conferences people from all over the world from China to Japan to all the European countries to the United States have looked at it and we've gotten a lot of great feedback things like finality can be added you know we already have a probabilistic notion of it and we're pretty happy with the protocol also huge amount of work has been done to verify the proofs of the protocol and that we have two different ways of proving the core claims of or borås both have been published and gone through peer review we also have formal verification of many of the proofs using Isabel thanks to Cohen's work at Cambridge so there's been about three years worth of work that we've put into the to the effort and we've gotten tremendous feedback from people all over the world and we're pretty happy about it one little caveat Vitalik said well we could have simply emailed him or had a conversation about Casper what's extraordinary about that statement is despite the fact that we've been publicly working on cat or horse for over three years I think he never really reached out to us we saw him at financial crypto we saw him at the Bitcoin winter school in Shanghai and other places and despite the fact that we keep crossing paths didn't really seem to care too much about asking our scientists in person about how does or Bohr's work or if there was any potential to collaborate between the teams but now that we're having a public rebuttal apparently we should keep it to email or something like that or our rebuttal is apparently a hit job so that's that good for them and we're just gonna keep chipping away we got some great things coming for for Ora Boris to accelerate downloading the blockchain we got some things to add some accelerated transactions get better finality with them we got some things coming to add sharding to it and we're really excited about the future of the protocol and the science really looks beautiful and we're starting to get to those fine tuning pieces to make the protocol really awesome and we're extremely excited about the formal verification side of things where we can actually write a spec and prove some interesting properties out our formal methods team is just salivating at that opportunity so overall we're we're on track things are looking good science is looking good and I look forward seeing everybody at crypto and at CCS and future conferences thanks for all the support okay let's go through okay when mobile wallet one ledger okay so this is real good question so the Haskell code that we have isn't so good at the moment for mobile devices or ledger devices or ATMs or Intel SGX or these types of things and we recognize that we realize that it takes quite a bit of time for us to get some form of a unified wallet architecture going and that's a slightly orthogonal task to the tasks that we have to introduce smart contracts and full decentralisation to the system so what I didn't want to do was create sequential dependencies where we basically said all right well we'll do decentralisation smart contracts then we'll get back to the mobile wallet we had enough resources to go parallel so I ordered the construction of a half of a rust version of our code base and we're going to do our first demo of the command line interface come September there's also a wallet coming out very soon we'll make an announcement about that August 15th based on the rust client so basically that's going to be the foundation I think for our mobile strategy over the next six to nine months and we've already tested the rest code on Android and iOS it worked very well and we think that we could definitely use that as part of a mobile strategy so we're having some internal discussions about what we're going to do with that code what we need to do with that code and how we're going to wire on a nice front end to it the nice part about the way we designed Daedalus is that it's based on the library called react polymorph which is something we built in-house and we think that that code is quite portable to mobile experiences and we've already done some work from that respect so sooner than you think probably later than now as for Leger right now the balls in their court to do a firmware update treasurers also expressed interest and there seems to be an alternative team vacuum labs it's working on that and we'll do what we can to try to accelerate that as much as possible so it's going to come at or around or a little a bit after card on a 1.4 which is currently slated for October so before the end of the year most likely but there are some factors that our hand because we can only take it so far and then we have to wait for the devices to update we did change a few things we have a new dress format which is much shorter than the old address format we have sequential index.html it's instead of random and xhd walls which restore much faster and a lot of other little things that you would like to have with a Leggero treszura device so it's important to get those then over what we currently have so we'll make a dedicated announcement when we have more information about it but for the time being there's certainly a lot of interest on our end on their end and we're all kind of working towards that goal it's just there's mountains of work to do all around and I guess we're all kind of getting around to it so anyway let's see here what stops Cardinal from being number one right now that's kind of a fun question the reality is that for all crypto currencies you need something called liquidity liquidity utility and community these are kind of the three different parameters that you look at these types of things so the liquidity is working you buy it what exchanges trade it who's dealing with it you know or how many market makers are there is there institutional money or not and what that does is it tends to derive lots of people in the space get you media exposure and build up the brand name and really get that token out into the collective consciousness community is of what you do with all of that momentum and collective consciousness who's gonna latch on to it and you know what are they gonna say about it how they going to propagate it and so forth and utility is what once they've collected and once they have it what can they do with it so in the beginning we were all just payment systems and then after aetherium we were smart contract systems and now there's all these next-generation applications that people are thinking about it's a consequence of the smart contract revolution so to be a great cryptocurrency you have to have all three so we're working real hard to try to improve liquidity we're working real hard to try to improve the community and our hope is to get the Cardinal foundation to make some pretty sizable investments that towards the end of the year and go all throughout next year to really market and bring up the community management side do Kili or engagement key leader profiling and get some dedicated community management for certain communities like China South Korea Japan because we just seemed to not have as much momentum as I would hope and I really really would like the foundation to invest more in there and hopefully we'll get there I in terms of utility you know the strategy has always been let's keep augmenting the code updating the code and adding new features and functionality so smart contracts are definitely going to come the yellow test nuts out the K EVM test that's out Plutus is evolving a pretty rapid pace I was super excited about that we have a dedicated smart contracts product manager we've been testing beta chimeric assets and we're really excited about this idea of what people when people can do icos on our platform and issue their own tokens on our platform we've been talking to a lot of people about that and we're quickly converging to a point where we're going to match or exceed the functionality of our competitors and market that's kind of step one because the functionality of our competitors and market isn't so good user experience isn't so good speed isn't so good there's there's a lot of problems there and so a lot of improvements have to be made so we have to go above and beyond that and we have a lot of strategies and we're just trying to roll things out as quickly as we can and it's quite difficult through that on our side and 60 people wake up every day who think a lot about priorities and what we need to do who we need to talk to we bring in a lot of contractors to do specific things just to accelerate things like for example we get asked a lot like when is the Linux wallet coming and the reality is we could launch a Linux wallet today the problem is that the way the filesystem for Linux works in the way that we store files right now for Cardno it would be a very bad user experience to do the ID no dependencies so the only way to solve that is to is to get the 1.3 million files that we currently have and compress it down to about 40,000 or so and we have a strategy for doing that for 1.4 so it takes time and it takes effort and we're moving our assets to get there but unfortunately it's in this environment can seem slow to people on the outside but things are getting better 1.3 shipped people really love the reduction memory utilization they really love the three to 5x performance improvement on the network side of things and we just keep seeing the the software improving and improving and improving and we're just going to keep at it and one day you're gonna wake up and it's just gonna look like a totally different experience and product than it looked like when you started and that's really the goal so liquidity utility community luck that's really what you got to do and we're gonna keep pushing hard on and we'll get there okay yeah so what do you think the cardinal ADA will have for real-world use cases for everyday people you know that's the that's the $64,000 question that all cryptocurrencies suffer from when are we there you know it's kind of like when the internet first came out you know as bunch of bearded nerds and like me they were probably not the skinniest people and they kept saying that's this whole internet thing is gonna go change the world and make everything wonderful and we all kept saying well when is that going to happen and then they they would point to their you know twenty eight hundred baud modem and they were there very slowly loading JPEGs and their static websites and say well I see it's there you know and they had their command line interface browsers and so forth and they say well it one day and then you know we woke up and now we Facebook and YouTube and the Internet is a vital component of our lives so the key to getting cryptocurrency adoption is to find ways to take existing experiences and see where they can have value-added to them through crypto so either you try to solve problems that are endemic to the current structure of markets for example I'm deeply concerned about censorship with social media platforms and you know that's less of a user experience and it's more of a philosophical concern and we're starting to see a definite trend where any speech that people don't like is just labeled a particular type of speech and that gives them justification for silencing a particular person and you always start with the most extreme elements because those most extreme elements are very easy to get rid of it's kind of like when Obama made the decision to kill on we're all a locky really bad guy and so it was pretty easy for people to accept us killing him but on the other hand he was a US citizen not charged with a crime in a non-combat setting denied due process who was effectively assassinated by the government and philosophically to say that one can do that is a pretty dangerous precedent so similarly censorship works that way cryptocurrencies are a key antidote to this because they can create a payment system and incentive system for people to basically build a second internet to host content on and that's something that's going to probably over the next 5-10 years become a big deal and as the intellectual dark web starts to grow we're definitely gonna see a huge culture clash that occurs there between those who wish the silence and those who wish to speak especially speak inconvenient things second you know it's it's a great system for getting value to people who are having a real hard time transporting value around are getting value to them for example we think a lot about Africa I'm just about to go to South Africa and spend some time at a conference there and hopefully meet up with the president and while there you know we talked about Agrotech a lot because that's a huge part of the effort and I economy yeah in Ethiopia you know 1.5 million people grow coffee and a lot of those people have a heck of a time getting insurance getting loans getting access to financial and a lot of their interactions their business interactions are paper-based or oral and as a consequence they're not recorded so it's really difficult to understand how do we implement sustainable farming practices it's really difficult to understand what the supply chain looks like and so forth so really where you see real world adoption is when you can blend the old and the new when you can take processes and change it just ever so slightly for example a lot of farmers Ethiopia use cell phones and text messages for price discovery they'll send text messages find out what the washing stations are charging so you can you can usually take that experience they're used to and just add a little bit more to it and all of a sudden now you have a digital identity and now you have a way of inputting data into a supply chain oh and by the way you can merge that with a system like card on oh and then you can use card on Oh as a system to get lending to them and to create new kinds of financial products instead of I things like stumping which it's where you've chopped down the tree and you let it regrow and you get two to three hundred percent more coffee production and there's hundreds of examples like that you can tease out where you have an old process and if you just apply something like a blockchain to it then once you've identified everybody and you have a payment system installed then you can just naturally all of a sudden interact with millions of new customers and you can globalize them for the first time which gives them access to better markets more fair markets and allows governments and private industry to make some decisions about how do they want to incentivize certain behavior like sustainable farming practices or other things like that so I think that's really where we're going you know it's not dramatic where we're gonna wake up when the dollar is gone and Bitcoin has replaced it it's more of an iterative thing where people who already are going to get digitized and globalized and get online this huge tsunami wave of billions of people over the next 10 20 years they're going to get online into an ecosystem where they have more capabilities and those capabilities do not rely upon strongmen or middle men of necessity rather there's decentralized protocols that enable them to be able to get insurance and to get lending and and so forth so that's one of our goals is a company I which Kay and Cardinals really vision to be that financial stack to get us there and that's my hope now we're not the only player stellar certainly trying to make some inroads and ripples trying to make inroads and there are some people in the etherion community who really care about this a lot Elizabeth Basilio with the paces but in Kenya for years now and she's done some exceptional work so it is really humbling to see how many people in our space really do care about this problem and are working hard on this problem and we're real excited to collaborate with them where we can or to learn from them in competition so that's that's all I have to say about that any thoughts on the et Cie summit yeah it's gonna be a lot of fun you know et Cie has been ironically despite its very stressful beginnings one of the most then and relaxing projects I've I've ever seen in my life you know it is just doing its own thing there are a lot of independent dev teams they're real passionate they're real innovative they're creating their own wallets like emerald wallet they're proposing their own version sidechains community came together got its own monetary policy sorted they needed money for funding of development community managers communicate together got some money for that community came together got listed on coin base and I don't really have to do a lot you know and nobody's really in charge it just kind of runs itself and you know that's how all cryptocurrency should be that's a pretty amazing thing you know we release mantas we've done already one major update to it and in my opinion it's the best etherion client on the market and the summit we're gonna show off some new features we've been working on like aetherium support and ER c20 support and so forth and some enhancements we've made to the wallet and kind of discussed the end of your roadmap and then we'll talk about some innovations we've made a tie which k research for example we have this concept of NEPA pow's non-interactive proofs of proof of work which are kind of like the ultimate solution for proof of work side chains in the ultimate solution for really efficient proof of work wallets as if you're in classic is a proof of work and will stay as a proof of work cryptocurrency pretty exciting to be able to discuss that show that off so that's a that's going to be pretty cool and we're gonna have a heck of a lot of fun going there and talking to people and I just basically recapping the whole year you know the other thing is I've become good friends with a lot of people in the etherion classic ecosystem and so it is really cool shared beer with them and just hang out with them and have some fun with them see what they're up to and what ideas they have and they kind of teach me something and that's always fun too also there in plastic tends not to attract icos so like the early days of Bitcoin aetherium classic kind of feels like that where it's a lot more discussion about philosophy a lot more discussion about vision and where we can go and much less discussion about what's the next big idea where's next big investment who's gonna get rich and so far forth so if all the experiences I've had et Cie definitely feels like 2011 Bitcoin and all over again and that I think bodes very well for the ecosystem and it's damn resilient okay desire which hey have enough funding to take project completion yes we do we were very smart with our Bitcoin that we got we divested it and we're fully funded till 2020 for the Cardinal project why does Carter I don't have slow development cuz good things take time and I would argue the developments actually pretty fast all things considered let's see what else we got going on here BTC dumping you know I rarely comment on the on the markets but you know I really would like to say this you know that the markets when I first joined Bitcoin we were like a dollar and then we had the $30 then we went back down to $1 and then we got the $4 and then we went to 256 bucks and then we went to 80 and then we went to 1,200 then we went down to 250 then we want the $20,000 and you know if you look at any investment and over a reasonable period of time three years or five years and you go from basically 200 bucks to $6,000 that's the best investment of your life you're like whoa I've succeeded wow this is amazing but unfortunately people tend to have encrypted these insanely short time horizons and they say oh wow went from twenty to six that must mean things over party's gone crypto is dead The Dream's dead all the passions did all the entities are dead all the fundamentals are gone governments are all gonna turn on us class-action lawsuits we drag everybody to the ground it's like yeah and what happened everybody when we went from $30 Bitcoin to $1 Bitcoin that was pretty painful too so you know the reality is the markets are markets if I could predict them I'd be a traitor instead of an inch in here so I tend to stay out of them but I do know that you have to be wise when you take a look at these things either you have fundamentals or you don't if you don't believe their fundamentals you shouldn't be in crypto if you do believe there are fundamentals then you'll realize that this is an assets it's insanely difficult the price it's subject to market manipulation it's traded on thin markets which in some cases are unregulated and there's a huge influx of capital there's a lot of shady liquidity around and you know that's what happens with these things when they're young so if you're in it for the long haul all those blips tend to normalize out and you tend to see a long trend and things are pretty good if you're in it for the short term you have to be pretty smart to know when the exit are pretty lucky to know when the exit which means you have different set of skills you're not looking at fundamentals you're not looking at you know where is this going and what is it gonna do for society you're looking at market structures and making bets then when you gamble sometimes you get jackpot and sometimes you lose all your money if you bet it all on black and comes up red so you know I guess it just depends on your expectations but I think it is kind of funny to watch the asset go from $250 to now 6,000 something and for people to complain that the sky is falling and we're all doomed you know the last point about that is that we have yet to see real institutional money come in for that to happen you have to have custodial risk addressed you have to have insurance you have to have ratings agencies you have to have regulation that's all coming there's huge investments going into that everything from Swisscom to coinbase to others goldman sachs is getting involved and once that occurs then people are probably going to rebalance their portfolios and you know the Blackrock has trillions of dollars it would be very trivial for them to throw a few billion dollars here and you dollars therefore some portfolio of Kryptos that other people can store on their behalf you know that's just a standard thing that Wall Street people do there's too much money in the world thanks to 2008 it's all floating around they're looking for a home and you can only buy so much gold and so much land so when you create new asset classes that give somewhere for that money to go so when that occurs my belief is that it's gonna have a huge positive effect on the marketplace whatever that occurs but it's probably not 20 years from now it's probably a few years from now or a few months from now who knows it's hard to say it depends on a lot of factors but at I which came me I'm in it for the long haul and I'll be in this space a long long time so I'm overall very long and I think people who panic about the markets have never traded before I've never invested before and don't fully appreciate or understand that you have to be a fundamental investor as opposed to a technical guy or else you're probably going to lose your shirt because that's a mostly rigged game okay let's see what else we got here [Music] do you think the public blockchain space needs to converge to a handful of reliable reverse cryptocurrencies before one of them will ever have a chance replacing a fiat currency you know I don't think fiat currencies are going to be replaced what I what I think is going to happen is that fiat currencies are going to become less relevant you know cellphones didn't kill the phone companies they just change the way phone companies did business we lost the payphone and a lot of landlines are going away but you know there's still a business model there and similarly the innovation won't kill the central bank what will happen though is we're gonna see competition for the first time ever where basically you're gonna have private money be put on the same footing as public money okay and so what I mean by that is that you're gonna have a universal wallet five ten years in the future maybe 20 and that wallets gonna have your real estate in it your airline miles and your silver in it your gold in and it's gonna have all kinds of things in it and when you go to Starbucks to buy your coffee it's going to go ahead and let you pay in any one of those tokens so you can have Bitcoin or ADA whatever it might be you click a button and boom the merchant has been paid and the merchants gonna be paid whatever they want to be paid if they you're gonna settle in dollars you're gonna sell in dollars if they're so euros are gonna sell in Euros it's a merchants decision of what they want to do and that entire process is going to be open that entire process is going to have decentralisation involve in it because they're gonna be decentralized market makers that make that happen and so you start thinking of wealth in terms of universal wallet and in terms of a portfolio of wealth okay so you no longer say I'm worth ten million dollars you instead take that ten million dollars of value and then you're gonna put it into some diversified portfolio and that becomes your wealth you might even have a different way of measuring it that's a bit more immune to efficient especially if you live in a country that tends to suffer from pretty bad inflation so that's where I think this is ultimately going to go is in that direction so I don't think the goal then for cryptocurrencies is to displace a fiat currency it's rather to encapsulate a particular philosophy that some group of people tend to agree with and believe in I used to be part of the Ron Paul movement years ago and a lot of the people who are Paul group love gold they're a big gold bugs they collect it you know they they'd have gold coins in fact one of the favorite things they do is when you meet up with them and talk with them as they pull out some gold coin that they carry with them they said this is the only real money there is that was their belief and so to say to them hey if you believe that then you can live in a hundred percent gold economy store all your wealth in that and you can conduct commerce as if you have dollars they'd be in heaven and I think that's basically where we're going and there's really not a lot governments can do to stop that and basically it means then governments can lose the confidence and faith of their people in terms of their monetary policy and it and instead of that resulting in collapse of the economy the economy will continue to function people of Venezuela can say yeah the Venezuelan government is they're just a bunch of dummies we don't like them so they're gonna transfer all their wealth into different assets and they're able to still function the marketplaces are still able to function because the people haven't had wealth destruction as a result of the hyperinflation I see tremendous value in that and I think that's one of the points of crypto currencies as a alternative is to look at it in terms of the portfolio as a fiat replacement this is a very adversarial thing and it's a it's a it's a dangerous thing because there's a lot of geopolitics involved in money but it's not inconceivable I mean some countries do live with no control over their monetary policy you know Greek one Greece went from their own money to the euro and they could no longer print money to pay for all their retirement benefits and other things and it force astera T on them so we could definitely see something like that come down the pipe as well and maybe some governments would be okay with crypto especially if they've lost the faith in confidence of their people okay let's keep going you know dad protocols so our steep busing he he says in particular curious about deck protocols compared to orb Boris so a dag is a mathematical structure a linked list is a mathematical structure and it's just a way of sorting reality it's sorting things and it's a way of managing the fact that in a decentralized system certain people are going to have different views of that system based upon where they're geographically at their network connections and how people gossip information throughout that network now if your goal is for everybody in the network to kind of have the same notion of time and order and and have the same experience with events there's a huge overhead to that if it's even achievable and so in some cases what you can do is cleverly cheat a bit and say well if we have different types of mathematical structures in our system and we have different types of assumptions about how the network works maybe it's okay for Bob to have kind of a different view of reality than Alice as long as we have some degree of confidence that when we put everything back together Bob and Alice are kind of playing the same game now the advantage there is when you relax these requirements almost always you get some notion of performance improvement so this is why people look at things like phantom inspector and ghost what was going on there well you have this notion and proof of work where you have something called the block interval so you use the difficulty adjustment to be able to determine basically how hard it is to make a block so what you can do is tinker with that so that you can make blocks faster so you can you know lower the the interval from let's say on average every 10 minutes we're gonna find a blog - maybe five minutes or 2.5 like litecoin is time or you can make it even shorter the problem is the shorter you make it the higher the probability that two people are going to discover a block relatively the same time so each peak of the network is going to think alice is right versus Bob is right and so now you have competition and the first one to build a block on top of their chain is the one that wins the other block becomes an orphan and it gets thrown away which means all the work what say Bob lost that all the work Bob done is useless to the network and he's slowing things down a little bit so Satoshi very wisely said a longer block interval ten minutes because it really lowers a chance of orphan blocks it was a nice calculation but you would want to have a shorter interval because you have more blocks and the same unit of time which means you have more throughput for your system so concepts like ghosts and spectre and phantoms say if we change the structure from a linked list to a dag then we can actually include these competing blocks and there's some way of reconciling that double spending has not occurred and now and all of a sudden we've almost like doubled or quadrupled the performance of the system or so forth so this is a good idea and it's an idea that's been studied for a long time and there's been a lot of papers written about it unfortunately what's happened is some people who don't fully understand the theory have latched on to a particular protocol and use this buzzword directed acyclic graph dag as if it is the end-all be-all of scalability and then suddenly everybody gets a hundred thousand transactions per second or five hundred thousand transactions per second or some outrageous number and they're infinitely scalable as if they've just magically discovered something new and it's the biggest innovation ever and the Turing prize is coming next year or something like that and that couldn't be further from the truth whenever you introduce more complexity into your protocol into your data structures or into the way you manage consensus you give something up either you give up some notion of safety or you you gain some notion you get you get some issue where you're not entirely sure if history or you increase the chance people could cheat or you lower your resistance to people cheating you're giving something up nothing is free in life there is no free lunch so DAGs are interesting we actually are thinking about them with respect to Cardno after genesis is fully done and we're almost done with Genesis we're going to go ahead and work on warhorse Hydra in fact we've already made some progress there and probably towards the end of the year we'll publish our first paper and that's where we introduced some of these structures into our model in a way that we feel would make them productive so there's a lot of things to carefully think about so anyway my overall opinion is that where they're useful they're useful but they're not the solution to scalability if anything they're just an additional tool in the tool bag that we have as protocol designers to try to get us to better protocols but anybody who comes in markets saying that this is the way to go and that's gonna solve all your problems if you listen to them you're probably gonna go broke okay Cisco Charles Hoskinson what are your thoughts on Bitcoin maximalist in their perspective on the crypto space you know the interesting thing about Bitcoin maximalism is some people were Bitcoin maximalist like you know Erik Voorhees kind of wasn't a Bitcoin maximalist they kind of grew up and you know you know you run shape-shift so that's like as opposites of fixed-point maximalism as you can get and a lot of that was a reconciliation of the reality that all coins are not a threat to Bitcoin you know they might take a little bit of the market cap but all coins actually tend to bring in people so it's not a sum 0 game where we only have 1 pi and you have an altcoin you chop up the PI differently and the all coin gets summoned Bitcoin gets less when you create something like let's say let's go innovate the ad model or let's go intervene social media or let's do distribute a computation you're bringing in people who've weren't in the Bitcoin space into the cryptocurrency space and you're capturing them with an altcoin well now that they're in an altcoin they tend to like crypto and if they have a good experience with it they're probably gonna buy Bitcoin - so you're actually bringing net value in when you have these things so a lot of the really mature Maxon was they kind of grew up and they said you know we're all in this game together we're all kind of doing the same thing and innovations here can substantially benefit us here bringing in new people here can substantially benefit us there and they got reasonable unfortunately there are some people in the space that still think that bitcoin is the only legitimate way of doing things and and they're very irrational they see proof of stake is the only consensus algorithm a pre mine is a scam and ICO is a scam in all cases regardless of what's done anybody who participates in these things should go to jail and the only source of truth is Bitcoin and what if you really deconstruct their logic they're saying we're ok with a game were less than 10 actors are in total control of the network we're okay with a game where some people who got insanely lucky to get in early myself included get insanely rich and the only way those people can exercise that value is convincing everyday people to get in today and we're okay with that you know if you buy something at ten cents or at a dollar and it goes up to $20,000 in a five year time horizon you basically won the lottery it's a lottery ticket congratulations you know you got lucky you're not smart you got lucky you may have thought this is the future great but you would have believed it's the future from when to ten bucks you've made a TEDx you say wow that's great if you held on to it that entire time maybe you were in jail or something or maybe it was locked away and you couldn't touch it but congratulations if we're holding you got very very lucky yeah and unfortunately these people these Bitcoin maximalist seem to think that that's that's not a reality that doesn't exist and that they have legitimacy but everybody else doesn't have legitimacy and they get very toxic and they hold long podcasts where they kind of ramble about this for a while and sometimes I even go on those podcasts and have lovely conversations with them not to name names so I think they're less relevant today than they were five years ago and certainly less powerful today than they were five years ago the success of aetherium kind of was the end of Bitcoin maximalism in my approximation because it proved you could have legitimate options that weren't clones a Bitcoin that had totally new innovations and brought completely new ideas to the space and so I think it's a movement that will persist but you know there's people around who think that you can't get blood transfusions and there's people around that wear a magic underwear there's plenty of strange beliefs in the world that's okay you know you still love him he's still tolerate him still invite him to dinner you know he's still talk to him and you still have fun with them you just accept that maybe some ideas are pretty kooky there's a particular person who's a big community leader in the Japanese Bitcoin community he runs the Japanese Bitcoin meetup group in Tokyo and he believes the earth is flat it's a flat earther you know so yeah I like the guy he's fun to hang out with we go drinking at the the pink monkey or whatever it's called their pink elephant that the name of it you know a cool guy but you know obviously I wouldn't take physics advice from them so you know that is what it is anyway so maximalism is here to stay but it's going to become less and less relevant year by year and it's no longer a barrier for innovation or progress in the space ok let's see what we got here hello South Korea yes a good question from red snapper who is my successor one of the clever things that we did with card on oh yeah is that we built a very federated ecosystem you know we have Ramiro we have the foundation we have AI ohk and even within ihk there's a lot of Federation in the organization I don't own the whole company I have a co-founder and we have equal power we have a chief scientists we have a director of engineering Duncan Koontz and a colossus and others and a lot of the major decisions are made in a discussion rather than a monarchy there are certain things where I have to step in and say this is what we need to do I'm firm and confident and I fight like hell to get it through but more often than not decisions are made by a more decentralized process so while I may be is somewhat of a figurehead in certain respect and you know there's some people really like me if I was to disappear Cardinal would continue to be developed and will get that contract done and we're very confident that what we're delivering to market is going to be great you know just look at the authors of war Bors we keep getting more of them and there are very independent people who have had long academic careers long before they've met me and they'll have long academic career as long after they're done working for me so in a way Federation is the successor but my hope is the ultimate successor would be the community itself we really have to start getting the card Auto improvement proposal process ratified we're working hard on it thinking about what we need to do and as we enter 2019 that's going to become a huge priority we have to get the wallet ecosystem more diversified and prometheus is a good step in that direction but I'd love to see a JavaScript wallet I'd love to see an elixir wallet in full node and you know as that happens you'll see a natural descent zatia one of the great advantages of working with the etherium classic community is that they proved how to do that yeah you know in you know they've done it at a pretty small scale and yet it's almost as if it's Bitcoin so there's a lot of lessons to learn there and we're learning them and we're gonna try to apply them so the long term goal is definitely to decentralize and to certainly make me less relevant I think if I kept traveling at this rate I'll just keel over dead anyway so the ecosystems gonna have to find a replacement for me but that's okay and everybody has to know when to leave that was the greatest lesson I think Satoshi gave us it was that you get the party started you invite everybody get them talking with each other and then you just kind of disappear and my hope is that my tenure will be the same that we can get all the major ideas out there we can get all the major research done we can really invite in some great ecosystems you know we have a great relationship with the haskell community we have a great relationship in the academic circles and we've gotten some of the brightest people in the world to really take Cardinals seriously and consider Cardno to be a pretty cool project and throughout 2019 we're gonna really start engaging them and getting them to make open source contributions to the work we do and then what will naturally materialize are strong differences of opinion and then what we can do is to foster those differences opinion to grow allow them to persist and find ways to compromise and work with and build up a really sustainable governance system and at that point Cardno is is basically what bitcoin wanted to be and we know we got it right as long as we don't have a cardinal classic or a cardinal cache or something like that and I hope that never comes and if it does come at least there's a pretty good reason for and so so yeah in a sense the company's all right we have a lot of redundancies put in the ecosystem is already federated and a lot of the design decisions are being made and a group as opposed to an individual so we are pretty resilient and resistant to losing any one particular person that's a good lesson I learned from my time in the space it's burn rated the team developers working on car Donna but a million a month let's see if we have anything else good here yeah I love these types of questions how is Cardona going to manage the distribution of Aida throughout the community to ensure Aida is an owned by a group of wealthy individuals and to allow Aida to be used as the proper currency so first off how can I control that you know there's this cognitive dissonance that some people have and this is a closely related question I think to the burning of ADA question as if there's this large chunk of ADA that's sitting in a vault somewhere that nobody controls you know it's just unallocated and people hold these surveys and they say well when can we burn that or let's fairly distribute that so we're all a Galit Aryan or something like that guys 100% of ADA in circulation is connected to legal owners human beings with pulses okay some of it the III which cake controls some of it the Cardinal foundation you know and some of it emerge Oz and the rest of it is completely owned by the community of which I have no idea who owns it it's all over the damn place we know it's an astral distribution look like I was pretty egalitarian reasonable Gini coefficient I think the average purchase size of five six thousand dollars there was some large-scale purchasers but for the most part you know ADA's ADA it's distributed people are all around buying it and you know what happens is the large whales they sell because they've made large amounts of profit if they got in early and it went way up they divest because that's what you do when you're rich and smart and when you divest you sell it off in chunks you don't sell it all off at once and we still often chunks it goes from one large owner to smaller owners so you have a natural divestment you have a natural diversity that forms with these assets look at Microsoft yeah you know at one time Bill Gates on 64 percent of the company now has less than 5% of the company and it's a very distributed company owned by millions of people all throughout the world similarly when you look at the distribution if a cryptocurrency over time it tends to gradually winnow out and become more distributed but it's not my job to wake up and say how do we have equality you can't achieve equality there are rich people they exist the key is to say despite the fact that rich people exist can everybody use the system you know you have a bad system when a small group of people can inflict their will on the system and force the system to operate in a very bad way and that's what we have in the existing financial system in the United States and throughout most of the world a small group of people have a huge amount of control over how banks work how regulation works how your credit cards work how lending works how Wall Street works and they rigged the system so that no matter how the macro economics are whether we're in a boom cycle or a bust cycle they make money and the rest of us don't do so well we don't get raises you know I think the middle class hasn't really gotten a substantive raise in 30 years you know it's it's harder and harder to buy health care things get more and more expensive year by year because of inflation and so the rich are getting richer and the foresting at where they're at or they're getting poor and that's a bad system okay so the key is you shouldn't be asking what is the distribution of money you should be asking does this system permit a small group of people to co-opt it and convert it into something that they control exclusively and if you look at Bitcoin that's the case less than ten actors are in control of the entire network in terms of its hash power so the entire security guarantee the exhaustion is consensus is controlled by small group of people that's a bad outcome you know I we talked to both the Bitcoin cash core developers and the Bitcoin core developers because we've been building side chains the Bitcoin core developers ignore our people the intensest the architect of our side chain solution is mostly ignored by the coin core we have no ability to influence or participate or to communicate with them we have to be really sneaky like when we fund a dandelion we had to hide the fact that I ohk was involved so they could sneak dandelion into the backdoor you know but for the most part they're unapproachable you know they give some credit that Bitcoin cash guys at least we could have a conversation with them but that centralized development it's it's a exclusive club I'm not in it we can't be in it we have some of the best scientists and engineers in the world built the the first formal spec for UT EXO wallet Bitcoin could use that it's a great idea we've implemented in Haskell it's formally verified in Cocke but yet it's not even discussed so you know it's less about distribution of funds and it's much more about control and if he built the system the right way you can afford the billionaire you know there are plenty economies in the world that have billionaires in them but despite that they don't have many homeless and people are doing pretty well and anybody who wants a good education can get it anybody wants a good job can get it so you're doing something right if you allow people to innovate and enjoy the fruits of their labors and and the meritocracy of their work but that doesn't come at the expense of everybody else you're doing the job wrong if you allow some small group of pre-assigned people to rig the system so that the people at the top always win as opposed to everybody else so that's my focus as for Burning ADA as for trying to redistribute data I don't have the legal means to do so and that would be theft so cut it out it's tough asking it's not gonna happen you know you can launch Commissar coin or something if you want quality of outcome let's see what else we got staking so good news on staking we're doing some real good work and we're putting things together for that so we we just published a paper for we submitted it to wine wine 2018 and that's not a conference on on wine it's actually called web and Internet economics it's a held at Oxford December 15th to 17th I hope the paper gets in but basically the papers are paper on incentives it's some groundbreaking research where we thought really carefully about proof and stake incentives and stake pools and you know what are the economics of these things and you know you know what what is the game theory behind it and that paper I believe is on our website already if you go to our paper library I can also tweet a link to it for people who are interested it looks like we're probably going to have about a thousand stake pools that's our current best estimate - how many stake pools we'd like the system to have but if you're building caps you never put hard caps in so that's a kind of a relative Maxima because basically you minim you start making less money if you have more than a thousand and the incentives paper actually provides mathematical formulas that show how we can kind of use some dampening effects to try to get the system to converge to that kind of a size so much larger than you'd see with normal state pool style systems and it's very egalitarian representative and we're going to make staking pretty easy so that's Shelley will be releasing information very quickly on that as it comes sometime this month we're gonna have all the 21 work units of Shelley completely SPECT up and all the time estimates done and so forth and we're right now shaking up our squads and what's 1.4 is out the door it's gonna become our primary focus and we're gonna try to get through all of those work units as quickly as we can the Shelley test nets will also come out and you get a lot of people who register for the stake pools an opportunity to come and play around and see how staking works and so forth and we'll work really closely with the community to try to build up a lot of knowledge and competency and then come Shelley there'll be some sort of mechanism were epic by epic the network gradually turns over and eventually 100% of the network will be controlled by a completely decentralized and huge group of people so good news is also as technology improves in the protocol improves will probably go beyond those thousand staples to tens of thousands and will also be able to try to tether stake pools with layer two services and with network relay so in addition to just doing consensus they will also launch relay nodes and they'll also do things like host our version of lightning and Oracle services and so forth so you'll end up getting thousands and thousands and thousands of service providers providing overlay protocols to dramatically accelerate user experience and provide data feeds and other things like that that you require for smart contracts in addition to potentially getting more distributed computation with the system as opposed to replicated computation so took us quite a bit of time to get here but we did things right you know this paper we published in wine and we sent to wine is really the first of its kind no one's really written a paper in academia about this topic before the delegation scheme that we've come up with is really sophisticated and there's a lot of careful thought like how do you do cold staking and how do we deal with exchanges in the mix because when you send your ADA to an exchange technically they would have control over that and be able to use cigarettes so we had to create a special address for them to use that would prevent them from participating in consensus there's just a lot of that little stuff there that when you try to pull these things into a practical system and you go from the science to the practicality do take quite a bit of time to work your way through so we spent that time they took a lot longer than I thought it would but I'm glad we did because we learned a huge amount along the way and we know these problems down at a level that we can share these problems with the rest of the community the academic world the game theorists of the world and other such people and so as a consequence we're in a really really good position as an organization to be able to introduce these problems into the 2019 and get hundreds if not thousands of people working on them and we'll move from classical consensus style problems to more a merger of mechanism design and consents and we'll be talking about the crypto economics and we'll be doing it as a very large community with business professionals with lawyers with economists and computer sciences as opposed to doing it as computer scientists where we only kind of see a narrow part of of the world so my personal best estimate but we need to get more data be q1 of 2019 is when we get all that work done but my hope is to find ways we can shape some things off Jennison some cargo so we can get this out the door faster closely related but somewhat orthogonal is the idea of smart contracts and that's a situation where that's actually working faster than the decentralisation we already have the yellow test net out and there's probably maybe only 2-3 months worth of tuning and parameterization that I'd like to do and cleaning we'd like to do before we'd feel comfortable with a 1.0 so our contracts stack assuming semantics based compilation and you know k's rewrite and kata yeah yellow vm is done and so forth that's runtime verifications wheelhouse and they have a 19% team working on that so then it's just a question of how do we want to link these systems together and we're side chains at so we actually have like five side chains papers and we're slowly rolling those papers out we're submitting them to lots of conferences so all throughout this year you'll see more and more side chains papers coming out some papers are papers building cryptographic primitives like the NEPA Pao and other papers are kind of stitching that primitive together into a practical system and other papers are kind of discussing the theory behind it and so forth so look for those as well and as soon as we can find a responsible way to pull that into the stack either pre Shelley Shelley or post Shelley will find a kind of a route that's when we'll be able to link up a CL and actually run some our contracts in the system the other thing that we're really having a lot of discussions on is how robust do we want the scripting language of SL to be we have this notion of taking the UT EXO model and extending the UT EXO model so we can support Plutus Styles more contracts the most conservative way of introducing that would be to introduce an additional control layer with the polluted Styles of our contracts built in the most aggressive way of introducing that would be simply to extend the SL and introduce this so we're really thinking deeply about the security consequences the performance consequences and kind of the utility side of allowing smart contracts in some form in a functional form at the base layer with Marlo and Plutus and the extended UT Excel model or if it really ought to be outsourced to a different ledger that's meant specifically for safe contracts so that's some tension and we're having a lot of discussions about it and we're trying to understand this and this is really the first time though that programming language experts have looked at the smart contract model it's mostly been unbias and now we have people who have spent their lives designing programming languages and thinking about the consequences of these languages applying really heavyweight theory to this issue like manuel chavarri michael peyton jones we are working with John Hughes on the testing side Phil Wadler and and others are on that team and they're just great people and we're real excited to be working with them and we think that they're going to bring a heck of a lot of innovation to the space which is very different than the innovation that was brought with the etherion model yella is more logical refinement of everything that aetherium was about and just trying to take an old thing and make it better and also make it correct whereas Plutus is a completely new thing and there's a lot of potential execution risks there so how we can stage all these things and pull them together we're having huge discussions about that but the good news is we got a big team a lot of the remedial work like the core refactoring and network improvements and one point source where stuff is coming to a close and then that team will can be repurposed towards getting these things out the door as quickly as we can yeah as with all software I wish we had another six months as with all software I wish we were you know further along but that's just the nature of the game the good news is we're not going anywhere and we're pretty damned persistent so we're gonna keep working on it we're gonna keep pushing hard and we're gonna just keep going till it gets done and we also know exactly what we want to do and we have a very clear vision and we have some extremely talented people who are applying very heavy weight theory and very heavy weight techniques towards what we want to do and that's a first for the cryptocurrency space and we're trying to do things the right way but do in a timely way and that's a huge balancing act for us well that's actually a really good question hello Charles would it be possible for I which K to organize workshops tutorials to teach the community to read write formal specifications to increase the safety of the ecosystem yeah so one of the visions grigory ro Xu has with K is to teach people enough about K in the specs of K so that you can actually start thinking about smart contracts through the K lens so he's already demonstrated this once before where people came up to him they said hey we have these ERC 20 tokens can you let us know if we implemented it correctly or not he said oh sure so they actually wrote a formal specification for ERC 20 and then they offer a service at RV where you can go with your ERC 20 and pay them some money and they can look at it and say this is the good the bad and the ugly so it would be really really cool to talk about libraries of contracts or you don't necessarily look at code but you're ready to look at the specifications and your options and then teach people ways of verifying that they've actually correctly implemented from specification smart contracts in a way are perfect for this because they have well-defined business logic they generally are very small so under a thousand lines of code and they tend to exist in well understood kind of toy environments bespoke built for them so when you have those things together you have a very good target for verification and to know what's been done is correct so we've had a lot of discussions with RV about well when and how would it make sense to try to open up some of the magic that they have under the hood and start formalizing lots of concepts and things like that some cases teaching people how to write the semantics of their programming language so that we can support that programming language was SPC or for people to write formal specs of things like non fungible tokens or a security token specification or an asset or something like that so that's one lens then another lens is the bespoke verification for one-offs where you know let's say you have a dowel contract and you want to know that that is correct so it's an open question of what does the tooling need to look like and what types of tests can you use whether it be property based testing or fuzzing or you know these types of things and how do you pull these things together to make that work well and that's a conversation we're having with Kubik that's a conversation we're having internally and within the Plutus team as well and I hope that as the Plutus model evolves in tandem there's going to be a huge discussion about the developer experience and the notion of verification so we've already started some preliminary discussions like we talked to Ranjit Nicky bazoo about liquid haskell and this idea of introducing refinement types into our own development process and it'll be so cool to have like liquid Plutus or something like that where we can introduce that notion into our stack but it is a it is a pretty complicated topic the problem with formal methods is that it's something that as a computer scientists you probably don't encounter you know if you're training it's it's like the it's like the nuclear medicine or you know the or the you know neurosurgery of Medicine where you know most doctors aren't that type of doctor they know of it and they know how to refer you to that person but they don't know much about it or they don't they don't really think about it too much they just know what they do and it's the same situation formal methods is very bespoke and there's some people like Benjamin pierce and Xavier Leroy and others who have done exceptional things and really cool things and there's some interdisciplinary work like for example of Avadh Suki's work on Homo topi type theory which is just elegant as heck and really cool and amazing but at the end of the day the tools are still quite primitive they're not user friendly they're not built for engineer is rather built for academics and the pedagogy behind these things is exceedingly difficult most of the text books written are written assuming you have graduate level computer science training and graduate level mathematical understanding they're written in very complicated prose the examples usually don't have you know the the the example problems don't usually have solutions you know and it's not really done in a way that's developer friendly so we have had some conversations with our director of education Lars Bridges about what would it take for us to kind of get into a more practical sense and not necessarily have tools as heavy as or Isabelle but our way tools that could provide verification of smart contracts so you know we sent our education guys over to the Oregon programming summer school back in 2017 and they got to talk to Edwin Brady and a lot of other guys hadn't created idris which is probably the most accessible of all these dependently type language systems and we did learn a lot and we actually have a formal methods group within i/o HK and some of the people there are actually new to formal methods and we're we purposely picked good people who are great engineers but it didn't know about these things so that we could kind of get experience in teaching them to people and so as we come along that's definitely going to be a priority of our company and this is also important to point out should be blockchain agnostic you know it's really bad world if everything you do vendor locks you into a particular blockchain solution like aetherium aureus or card on oh really you should start with who are my customers what is the business domain that they exist within what do they actually want to accomplish and be able to write that out in some sort of business process language you know and understand what you're actually doing the substance of the relationship and that in a way becomes your specification and you should be able to make that machine understandable then when you implement it you should be able to a/b test and prove by simulation or prove that these things are in some way connected to each other so that you know that the semantic gap between what you thought you wanted to do and what you actually did was close that should not be platform dependent we should not say well we this tooling we've constructed it's only going to work on card ah no because what happens if you as an engineer have a business requirement to use a different platform or what if you just decide that you like another platform war for example if our privacy side is not good enough for you want to go to Manero or something else and they now support smart contracts well you couldn't migrate over and that would be a really bad world living so it's not just can we teach people this the answer is yes it's a question of well what does this mean how do you make this platform independent and also how do we make the tools lighter weight and more developer and user friendly over our of time the good news is that this is not a game we're in a loan there's a lot of people now thinking about this like the Zen protocol guys the are chained guys there's dozens of them running around even some people in the etherium space or it's starting to take this real seriously so we're seeing a lot of desire to move in that direction and probably will end up happening as will have intercompany inter blockchain standards that emerging committees that emerge and basically will just develop some best practices together and then once we have those then we can create curriculums on those put them up on YouTube put them up on Coursera put them up on you to me put them up on EDX and then a lot of people can self assess and self trained and self learn and so forth there might even be ways to actually incentivize people to verify things are correct and that would be a really cool token for people to come up with