Post Conference recap, thoughts and an AMA 04/21/2019

hi everybody can you all hear me okay make sure that this looks good all right hi welcome this is the post summit AMA I always figured it'd be good to do one of these prior to going to Mongolia so anyway it was a very very very long week for us at i/o HK first we had to get our entire company to one place which in itself yields a lot of logistical challenges and then there was a public event the the total attendance for the summit which was pretty impressive for short notice was around 750 people we had a lot of great speakers come from Stephen Wolfram to Rudy Rucker Tyler is the representative in the state of Wyoming from Sundance small district he's also the guys running beef chain Katelyn long was there we had government officials from several countries come the country of Georgia the country of Mongolia we were going to get some people from Ethiopia but there were some issues last minute with visas and other such things but they were there with us in spirit and we did have some of our Ethiopian students attend which was always nice and overall I think the summit was a great internal success it was a lot of fun to see everybody everyone who attended at least anecdotally said that hey they had a heck of a lot of fun it was nice meeting all the the I which K personnel and it was really cool to see who we are as a company and what we do the summit wasn't exclusively about Cardno it was also about our company and how we write software who we are the types of products and projects we work on what we're doing in the enterprise space and how that relates to our cryptocurrency portfolio how we do research how we do consulting there were litany of little things back and forth that we covered and we had only two days to do all of it and talk about all of it and then also we had guest speakers like Bill upman from mines who has a very large social media platform that's decentralized and a litany of other things like that we also had aerial garden from muse if you use that meditation headset she talked about the latest and greatest of brain computer interfaces Rudy Rucker talked about his sci-fi work which is just out there and it's a lot of fun and another thing and I wanted to start the AMA with this I got a lot of gifts from random ADA fans and probably the most meaningful for for what we're doing is a letter from Einstein that someone gave me they just walked up to me and said hey keep this anonymous don't mention my name but do do hang at your office so I got to find an available wall I've been putting up some artwork but I wanted to read the letter out it comes from an essay that Einstein wrote in 1935 and it's entitled the world as I see it an essay by Einstein so it begins with how strange is the lot of us mortals each of us here is here for a brief sojourn for what purpose he knows not though he sometimes thinks he senses it but without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that what exists for other people first of all for those who smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent and then for the many unknown to us to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy a hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men living and dead and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and I am still receiving I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves this critical basis I called the ideal of a pixie the ideals that have lighted my way and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully have been kindness beauty and truth without the sense of kinship with men love like mine without the occupation with the objective world the eternally unobtainable in this field of art and scientific endeavors life would have seemed empty me Detroit objects of human efforts possessions outward success luxury have always seemed to me contemptible my passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings in human communities I am truly a lone traveler and have never belonged to my country my home my friends or even my immediate family with my whole heart in the face of all these ties I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude my political ideal is democracy let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized it is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow beings through no fault and no merit of my own the cause of this may well be the desire unobtainable for many to understand the few ideas to which I have held my feeble powers obtained through ceaseless struggle I am quite unaware that for any organization to reach its goals one man must do the thinking in directing and generally bear the responsibility but the lead must not be coerced they must not be to choose their leader they must be able to choose their leader in my opinion an autocratic system of coercion sunidhi generates force attracts men of low morality the really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state but the creative sentient individual the personality it alone creates the notable in the sublime while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling this topic brings me to the worst outcrop of herd life the military system which I abhor this plagued spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed heroism on command senseless violence and all the load some nonsense goes by the name of patriotism how passionately I hate them the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious it is the most fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true Sciences whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder no longer Marvel is as good as dead and in his eyes are dimmed it was the experience of mystery even if mixed with fear that engendered religion a knowledge of the existence of something that we cannot penetrate our perceptions of the most profound distri zijn and the most radiant beauty which only in the most primitive forms are accessible to our minds it is this knowledge and in this motion that constitute true religiosity and in this sense and only this sense I am a deeply religious man I'm satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge a sense of the marvelous structure of existence as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the reason that manifests itself so the letter is signed by Albert Einstein and then this is a letter to John Hurt's from Trinity College that's also sign and that's just a really amazing gift and I'd highly recommend you read his essays again from 1935 and it's still relevant today as it was way way way back in the day it's amazing how history tends to rhyme ok so this is going to be a long one first we're going to do kind of a post-mortem on things and then address two particular collections of questions that reddit's have been flooded with the questions of Shelley's release the questions of delays and also the the road map as it relates to these two things first it's important for people to understand that we live in a bubble in the cryptocurrency community and while we think everybody knows everything everybody knows each other I we think that while things that are immediately accessible to us are also accessible to the broad world the reality is less than 1% of the world really cares or is in our space or has used our products and I'm saying our isn't the entire cryptocurrency industry not card no but Bitcoin aetherium all of these types of things so it's incredibly important to think carefully about how do we get to the millions and inevitably billions what does the marketing message need to be what does the adoption curve need to look and how do we make it accessible if it's a game of user experience and user interface we've already lost and the reason being is that that game has already been won by Apple in Google and Microsoft they control platforms with billions of people there are masters of UX and UI and they will be able to outrun us and out-compete us every day of the week seven days a week and there's no way to catch them you can try to dream your way out of it but it's not going to happen so it can't just be a game of user experience it has to be a game of philosophy and it has to be a game of principles and it has to be a game of education as much as it is a game of first-to-market as in UX and UI and features and capability so one of the things we tried to accomplish with the AIA which case summit was to try to show not just the technology but also show the human side the practical applications the types of people who would be buying these products the types of people who have a actual need for these products to date I think this is the first summit ever held of any company in the cryptocurrency space that had government officials as diverse as the mayor of Miami - the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia attempt and all of these people are decision-makers they control budgets in the millions to billions and ultimately they control the fate of hundreds of thousands to millions to hundreds of millions of people and we tried to make some announcements diverse announcements at the summit to show that we're making progress along those verticals so for example we signed an MoU with the government of Ethiopia the ministry of innovation and technology to create a cryptocurrency for them that will be used as utility token for the city of Addis Ababa it has potentially six million users should this be successful we brought six million people into our space with a real product that has real demand in need second the government can make the use of the token compulsory for utility payments and for transportation payments which means that it has real demand it's not just a made-up thing and aspirational and we hope will acquire customers it's a government sponsored monopoly in that respect which also creates digital identities and digital credentials furthermore this is a model that we can then take shopping to dozens of governments all throughout the world to repeat the process which in turn will bring people into our ecosystem now we need a bridge to get there we need some framework that will allow us to be able to build and deploy these things in a very bespoke way according to the needs of that local government partner Cardno cannot be everything to everyone which is why you need a permission ledger technology which can be interoperable with Cardno and once credentials assets and identities are created within that system they can flow into open systems and that's exactly why we created atala now we have several presentations of what can a topology we have sine mo use from everything from a Maitre shoe manufacturer for anti counterfeiting to what we mentioned with ethiopia it's extraordinary to me that some people have flooded our reddit saying there are no meaningful announcements to this date I don't think there's any cryptocurrency company running around building coins that will be used for six million people with a government-sponsored monopoly to this date I don't think anybody's built something of the complexity and scale of fabric and less than one year of engineering and is already getting ready to deploy it for pilots with things behind it so I I'm just blown away by some of that commentary but it comes another thing is a lot of we did some studying over the weekend and we noticed that there was a lot of noise from accounts on reddit Twitter and telegram which are new accounts single post accounts so I suspect that there was some post conference coordination the spread flood well these things happen anyway let's talk a little bit about the road map and the release of staking because that's something that people have brought up quite a bit so when we first did the road map back in 2017 it was a very different type of project we had they're very different types of actors and we also had a very different type of management so let's look at first the app in which case slide and then the broader community as a whole so on the IOH case I'd we had really three collections of activities that I which Kay was doing research formal methods and code development now amongst the code side the code was segregated into two groups we had a smaller specialized group of people who were doing prototyping and real protocol design and then we had an external entity called Sarah Kell that we brought in to basically release something to market and maintain what has been released into market and eventually transform that with the help of the smaller group of people into a production system now in practice what ended up happening is that we converge to a waterfall methodology quite by accident we didn't want to do it but that's what happened and so when you're a waterfall what happens is you think you have a date to release something and then as you get close to it you regress not just back to a starting point but all the way back up the chain some cases and the science people say oh well we didn't account for that we need to do something and the formal methods people say well we need to respect fi that and the software people say well we'll wait for you to give us something new to build now we realized very early on this wasn't working second the code quality that came from the external contractor was just deplorable it had it was riddled with bugs that had a lot of poor designs and certain things were overly abstracted and overly complicated which made it very difficult for QA to work on that code so what we had to do is take resources that were as to prototyping that could have accelerated and sped things up and assign those resources back to the core product that was in market and we started having to hire and get new actors into the ecosystem which is exactly what we did we brought in tweek as a partner we brought in vacuum labs as a partner we brought in a ticks and scaled up their participation as a partner and then we realized that we needed to build a new Cardinal wallet now we had two options there one was to try to iterate the existing platform that we had to a point that it was stable and the other option was just to start with an entirely new codebase because the existing one wasn't where it needed to be and we weren't happy with it it was too hard to work with that code that had been delivered to market so we had the resources to do both so one team went and started modifying Daedalus and modifying card on OSL so that it would be functional and we did a series of updates from Cardinal 1.1 up to 1.4 where we chased that and for the most part Cardinal now has converged in market two on the Haskell side a very stable wallet there are very few bugs that remain with that system and most people who complain either using an older version of the software or don't actually know how to read we have a helpdesk we process tens of thousands of tickets we've released FAQ as we've released active the debugging the company it software now is fine it's stable it works it works for the exchanges and it works for the users now the other effort was to create a parallel product team and we did this with a tix and on internal rust team and we wrote from the ground up in less than four months the infrastructure for Icarus which bootstrapped the euro project which now is in market it's gone through four or five major they have support for other things such as multi seg and we have now CSV export and so forth these are facts they happened you can just look through the github repos you can look through all of our external communications now we recognize that we had issues with project management we had issues with how we were dealing product management and to be frank these things come up when you're dealing with a very complicated software for example we're not just dealing with cryptography we're dealing with cryptography intersected was distributed Systems Theory intersected with game theory intersected with peer-to-peer networking intersected with Byzantine hackers intersected with a desire for decentralisation and decentralized control of the system this is among the most complicated of all software to develop and when we realized that our project management methodology had converged to something looking a lot like waterfall we realized that we would not be able to achieve the deadlines that we had set furthermore I don't make any money from delays I actually lose money I've already been paid to deliver card on oh there's a scope of work and I'm not going to leave until that's done so every time there's a delay it's a cost I bear every time we can't state I can't stick and as we've publicly announced and you can see the address and nothing's moved from it so the people who say we're just divesting our Ada and living high on the hog it's a complete lie it's a provably complete lie we could make quite a bit of money from staking so these delays hurt me much more so than average people in the community editing I'm not really in love with them I hate them so what we did we did well we change our entire project management system and we change our entire product management system we went to demos we went to weekly reports we went to a litany of other tittles and techniques that allowed us to actually systematically get more agile we also moved from an external director of engineering to an internal director of engineering after we found a candidate who actually knew how to do the things we wanted to do and that's bruno paleo who's been now in the job for a few months and he's completely reformed and refactored a lot of the systems and techniques that we've been using furthermore we moved to a two client model the rust client does not have to follow the formal specifications the rust client has the option to go off spec and the option to go in a slightly different direction for the sake of getting releases out faster and for the sake of also getting a deeper understanding of the consequences of these protocols at scale I will remind everybody that none of these protocols existed prior to us inventing them we've taken nothing from anyone else we wrote scientific papers in this case more than 40 scientific papers and after writing those papers have gone for papers to code in some cases months this is seldom done by anyone yet we did this as a community and as a project and not only are we doing it we're at a point where the software is reasonably maturer we're at a point where we have a reasonable mastery of the protocols to an extent where we've actually now rewritten the or Bors classic paper were almost done with the rewrite of the orb or Sprouse paper and we're gonna then rewrite the orb earth Genesis paper and the orb Morris papers have evolved including Aurora's Chronos which decentralizes our timekeeping so we no longer have to be reliant on ntp or other such things we also have the ability to turn Cardno into a cryptographic beacon with or porthos this is an output of great research but every time it's done it does tend to move the goalposts a little bit and so to avoid a waterfall style cascade we had to do new things so these delays didn't come from incompetence they didn't come from the fact that we didn't know what we were doing they came from the fact that we were doing new things that no-one's done before furthermore they have been mitigated by the fact that we've added different teams with different philosophies and were running them in parallel and doing great things now we have May considerable progress towards the final implementation of Shelly another piece of FUD that I see floating around the Redditt is that because we just released the final set of formal specifications or at least the candidates said of them that now we have to write all this new code and now an only now or have we begun the implementation of Shelly since September of last year we have had more than 40 engineers working full-time doing nothing but implementing the Shelly codebase prior to that we had about half as many people trying to get there and they were regressed because of delays due to the prior Mishu that I've mentioned and that work has come to a point where we do have reasonably mature nodes reasonably sure Walid's software and right now what we're doing is pulling things together blowing the wallet back in yeah they're verifying that all ties that we think are going to work work the way we think they're going to do that the systems are stable and we're very close to getting out the Shelly test net we had the entire rest team together in Hong Kong for a month away from their families away from their wives living in suboptimal conditions basically exclusively coding to get to a point to have a Shelly test that we had a very strong organizational belief that we would have that work converge either at the end of March to around the Sun we're almost there I got an internal demo to see the quality of the code and where we're at the features yet we have we're nearly there it's not we have months and months and months and months and months and months of more things to do and there's a lot of unanswered questions the questions have been answered we've gone from aspirational to research to prototype to actually having a good blueprint for how to build things and put things together and at this point people keep saying give us a test that date and the answer is when it's done I'm getting incredibly tired of people demanding something when they don't understand the context what does it test net me does a test that need a full production system we're just not confident if it's God 2% ready and secure does a test net mean a proof of concept had we had proof of concept test nets we could had proof-of-concept test nets last year we wanted to get to a test net that we could share with the state pool task force and we're nearly there furthermore we wanted to see certain infrastructure mature for example the cardinal state pool nodes that Marcus has produced so these things are nearly where they need to be if you're upset about it I will remind you that even amongst the largest and most powerful companies in the world who have many years of track record of building crazily difficult things delays do happen for example with Windows Vista which we used to be called Project Longhorn it was started a few months before the release of XP in 2001 they anticipated a release date in 2004 to 2005 it was released in 2007 they had over 5,000 engineers in decades of experience billions of customers and they still released three years late furthermore it was released without the ecosystems full support which led to a device driver nightmare challenges with the UAC and other such things and they had to basically rush a new product Windows 7 as a way of repairing the damage done by the Vista Lodge I will also remind you that Boeing one of the greatest engineering companies in the world was two years late with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and even still today they have production problems software issues and some of the innovations they brought with a 787 actually has apparently had a flaws which has resulted in the crash of planes and I'll also remind you that they pre-sold many of those planes and customers had to wait years to receive delivery despite the fact that they have forked billions of dollars over to the Boeing Company now we're ahead of Boeing and Microsoft and they have a much longer track record and they deploy much more serious software at the moment than we do so if you don't want to be patient then don't be patient but do not call us dishonest do not say that we're liars don't say that we don't know what we're doing furthermore I which Kay has never sold any of its EDA you never bought any ADA from me we are not a publicly traded company I which K did not do an ICO we're a service provider we build software it is not my responsibility to make you money and it is not my responsibility to see the appreciation of price of Ada if we've done our job and we built a great ecosystem millions to billions of people will come into this protocol and as an investor in card ATO myself I'd really like to see that reality happen I do not make money from delays and it is fundamentally insulting and patronizing to say that our company's doing nothing especially when we've been blatantly transparent about where we're at our github repositories are open our get issues are open we release reports all the time every month a Mirko produces a rollup of things that have been done it's very clear for anybody who has the basic ability to use google and type in IOH kake github to see an overwhelming amount of software that's been delivered to market and continues to be delivered to market and frankly if we delivered substandard things the news would be I which case incompetent they don't know how to build a cryptocurrency and look after all this waiting we got nothing so you can't win either way guys if you want the price to go up what do you think it would do to the price to release something that's not quite ready it has flaws and bugs and allow our competitors to dog pile on us and burn us to the ground would you rather wait another month or two to get something so that it actually can demonstrate the value and power and capabilities of the things that we're bringing to market or did you rather want it now in a bear market where the price probably is not going to move very much think about this honestly so the test net will come out it's not a year out it's not six months out is coming when not going to tell you because it's done what it's done and what we're going to do is we're going to move to a system where we're gonna start doing demos and we're going to start trying to move a lot of the weekly reports that I get into the public domain so this is a product management priority furthermore there was an expectation of a card on 2020 roadmap we wanted to be very careful that we avoided the old roadmap which had percentages and timers we had the percentages and timers because we wanted to force accountability to the Cardinal foundation this was during an era under the Michael Parsons leadership which was fear paranoia and a frankly no desire to contribute anything to the Cardinal eco system we felt by creating social and public accountability that every month something had to be broadcasted and progress had to be moved forward this would force the foundation to release things and make good on commitments that they had made to the Cardinal ecosystem it worked a bit but not completely and furthermore it was under the old project management system which was after careful review a waterfall system so we're moving to a different roadmap design and we're moving to one that clearly articulates what are we trying to accomplish and how are we going to get there and then we connect that with weekly reports a monthly wrap-up from product management so that'll be David Esser alongside demos which will first be done internally and then redone for public consumption and then combined with the use of test nets now these two artifacts together I think will give you guys a much clearer and cleaner idea where we at with the project some things are ahead of other things the Gogan released for example is nearly done the Plutus guys are waiting for integration we can't integrate until Shelly's out other things are still in heavy debate the Treasury system for example we've written several papers and we're building a prototype team right now and we think we can get that out in the first half of 2020 the very strong possibility but that has to be put through a process where you can see how these things mature and materialize again this is new stuff the good news is that we can do things in stages the problem with consensus and the problem this is something that aetherium is running into with caspere and this is something Algren is running into many other people are running into is it's the heart of your entire system so there's no notion of iterative deployment or iterative rollout where you can do a half consensus protocol or something because at the end of day it's either secure it's not it's decentralized or it's not and so yes you can absolutely release the system with a cradle mechanism that that basically is training wheels but then that's not the centralization and it's not a complete and fair test of if the protocol actually works or not so in some cases you do have to wait now in 2018 we had workhorse prowess and we felt that that was at a stage where we probably could bring that into production but then we decided to move the goalposts and say that bootstrap from Genesis really was something that we'd like to achieve what did that mean that meant that we had to take a step back finish a paper make sure that what we were thinking is true and then come back to the product and update upgrade from there and we've seen a lot of that happen for the sake of where we wanted to be for sidechains in the sake of where we wanted to be with consensus we have to take step backs move the goalposts a little bit and spend more time in prototyping normally you guys don't get to see products until they're close to finished Samsung for example released the s10 and it has an ultrasonic fingerprint reader guys they didn't just invent that between the s9 and the s10 it wasn't they finished the s9 and they said let's do an ultrasonic fingerprint reader this is going to be great 3d scans of a fingerprint there were years of research and development that went into that product that had been going on for a while and there were a lot of products that they had targeted they for example wanted to launch it with the note not with the s10 they missed that deadline but consumers didn't see that it wasn't something publicly discussed it was behind closed doors within their company it's quite the opposite for us guys this is an open source research and development alongside production product so you are seeing real-time R&D being done you are seeing real-time our products being built hypothesis made and validated or falsified and as a consequence certain things that we think are true six months ago turn out later on to be suboptimal or not a direction that we want to go in that happens all the time in industrial research and industrial product development I mean if there was a cryptocurrency connected to the hololens Microsoft would be the most criticized company in the world so you have to manage your own expectations and realize that this is a long-term project and this is something that's going to take years to decades to see it through to a point where we get adoption in the millions to billions I have no intention of just walking away and saying well that was fun let's go do something else I'm not dan Larimer this is my life's work it's been my company's life's work we have people wake up every single day who have put their brands the professional reputations as well as years of their productive lives into seeing this product grow what learner is not exactly a young guy and how many more major projects and endeavors do you think he has before he retires do you think this is how he wants to spend a twilight of his career on a also ran on a has-been we have accumulated in this project the best and the brightest in the world for what we seek to do we've accumulated within this project an enormous amount of organizational knowledge and wisdom and a lot of things on how not to build cryptocurrencies that takes time it takes effort ordinarily it's done in private and only after there's fruits to it does it be brought to the consumer in the cryptocurrency space we do it the other way from day one it's open so you get to see the good the bad and the ugly this does not mean that were dishonest this does not mean that we're not committed or we're not really trying we have a lot of people who have given away weekends time with family had marriage problems and other such things as a consequence of the commitment that they've put in to these projects all of us have seen things like divorces health issues death in the family missing the funerals because we really want to get this out where it is passionate about Cardno and ADA as everyone else in the world and the people who came to the I which case summit who were actually there and actually had a chance to interact with our employees from the journalists to the people from the community they saw that in the faces of everyone the definition of success here isn't a science project the definition of success here is a financial operating system for billions of people and we're just going to keep doing that so with respect to the roadmap David Esther and other people are right now writing a revision of it and we're writing the philosophy behind it and we're combining it with new organizational processes this has taken an enormous amount of time because frankly we want to manage expectations and we want to release something that's not just aspirational but also shows clearly how we're going to handle execution along those lines and something that you can follow along with from the demos the weekly reports the monthly updates and inevitably the test nets associated with these items furthermore we have many partners now we can't keep the secret that I would say even if we wanted to vacuum labs tweak well-typed a ticks predictable network solutions and others are with us a tie which Kay working hard every day and all of their work is open-source you can see it so take a step back relax things will get better and we've made enormous progress you can see the enormous progress from ledger support to paper wallets to new explorers being built in record time to formal specifications that people can read in port and frankly our company has delivered products to market outside of Cardno we've delivered them in record time as well like Icarus like mantis and now atala so we've demonstrated a track record of what we can do and how we can do it and nothing is going to solve this bear market nothing is going to solve the price issues this is bitcoins game guys and until Bitcoin goes back up until we see another surge we're all going to be in the in the bleachers the only thing that's going to change that for us is if we can decouple ourselves from the incumbent cryptocurrency community and go to the mainstream which means that we have to attend non cryptocurrency conferences we have to solve problems for people outside of our industry we have to build relationships with governments in large industries and bring real users in and create real demand or else were connected at the hip with Bitcoin and when a surge happens it happens with us rising tides and when it goes down we go down that's not a reality that we ought to live on and we shouldn't stake our fortunes on that that pursuit so that's the the preamble and I think that we have to as an ecosystem just have a bit more empathy in patience with each other we're all in this together and not everybody's out there to screw you or scam you and steal your money and frankly if I was out there to scam you think logically about what we would have done as a company and you can look at 2017 as the blueprint you cannot scam people by saying you're gonna go and do research and write papers and formal methods and bring outside parties who'd really don't like your space and are only there for the science because if you're lying if you're dishonest they won't stay they'll leave when they discover the conspiracy and somehow this has just been forgotten somewhere along the way there are some people who don't feel this and are with us a hundred percent they they get it and I appreciate that and I respect that but honestly for those who aren't you really have to make some deep decisions about where you put your money where you put your support you're probably going to become the victim of charlatans if someone says to you today right now they have a system that can solve all the world's financial problems and how all these pieces are put together they're lying to you no one does I know my news morning I met him years ago almost five six years ago now and I met him I said minnow what are you working on he said it would be really great create a standard for decentralized identity and web payments and he worked with the w3c only recently have they gotten to a point where a standard has materialized out of the w3c it's called the D ID standard that was five years of hard work building foundations building alliances getting people on board with it for one little thing not how the identity system is going to work just a standard for how we're going to reach the identity and how we'd self-authenticating a document that presupposes a web of trust and an existing identity system one component a life's work five years of brutal politics and other such things now combine them with every other part of the system and this is the only company the space that seems to have this global view and seems to actually understand how some of these pieces are being put together and if I've had any part in expectation management I'd say that I haven't done a phenomenal job of coming to you every single day and saying look guys these are best estimates this is original research there can be delays these things do take time but our hearts in the right place we have the right people we have the right processes now and boy it takes a long time to get them you have to earn them and you can see the progress it hasn't been easy we've had to rebuild an entire foundation that was supposed to be here with us every day and it wasn't with us for a long time we had to learn how to build this type of stuff we had to learn how to do good research and do research and a good time period and we had to learn how to do good communication all while other people were getting rich all while other people were doing things and we've made I think great progress so I'm proud of my people I'm proud of everybody and if you don't like what we're doing look there are over a thousand projects in the space go find another one it's ok different boats for different floats different philosophies so thank you for listening to that now let's get to the AMA the fact that you are now giving an AMA proves that there's been slight panic in your organization no panic at all actually most of my people don't care because we made our peace and we set our things but I do care because the attacks have not just been on me and our engineers but been on our Community Managers they've been on volunteers they've been on community members and really terrible nasty things have been said and you really have to take a step back and say look people have to be civil you can disagree with a being produced nothing you provide nothing and you're not going to help us get to where we need to go I can't go to a government and say we're going to go build your currency or a mission-critical system or prevent waste fraud and abuse for millions of people but then at the same time have an incredibly toxic swarm of people connecting to the products and the minute that no values extracted year one that they just on dog pile and attack people and ministers and presidents and other people and say leave so we really need to take step back as a community just chill out is attala a separate project that will not utilize ADA attala he is an enterprise Leger and I've said since the beginning of the project I also mentioned in my card on that there needs to be a spectrum of solutions from the completely open permissionless ledger that has dynamic forums all the way to the closed system that's permissioned and tightly controlled there is a spectrum there and right now we tend to look to them as different things see I'm either on aetherium or fabric but reality is that we're moving to a world where these systems achieve the same core thing they're talking about flow of information they're talking about assets they're talking about digital identities that are controlled ultimately by cryptographic credentials if you build infrastructure to use an enterprise ledger you have also built infrastructure to use a cryptocurrency wallet so if I do a project for a government for a supply chain or a local currency or a grid scale thing I do something like that then suddenly I've now given every participant in that project credentials that now will be interoperable with a cryptocurrency you've brought in millions of potential customers it's like saying selling the iPhone you have created millions of potential customers for the App Store allowing app developers now to build something for that community so I see the permission ledger space as the entry point in it for a lot of people and they just won't care in the beginning when you do supply chain with farmers they don't really care in the beginning it's just all about selling their goods and better market places for a higher price but then suddenly they have wallets and digital identities and then somebody can go to them and say guys would you like alone have you heard of Cardno there's a system now where there's ad app running on it that allows you to get a stable token or something along those lines and they say wow that's great how do I use it they say you have the infrastructure already use it you have the wallet for you have the payment system for it you have all these things you can store it on that and it's just a software update or in many cases you don't even need to do anything so that's why we felt it was really necessary to keep create a product like Atallah it provides a lot of revenue to I which K it lets us do different types of things so that we're not just a one-trick pony and we're gonna be around and frankly we're gonna keep doing research and if it's really good of course we'll put it into protocols we've built so it gives my company a longer future and allows us not to be so invested in just one thing which is important second it brings customers in for you guys not just me the iPhone App Store is kind of an open system as is Google Play and it's allowed people to build companies from Instagram to Obert to others in that ecosystem and so if we can't get to our instagrams and our ubers and our Airbnb ease until we have a situation where we have a large diverse customer base and that's what it all is going to bring us Paris here Charles new roadmap release date okay one more time on this question and yes the eye is fully recovered that was really really tough I couldn't see out of my left eye for over a week it was really horrible you never really know how bad I infections get until you get one and then you're like wow this is the worst thing in the world again with the roadmap we have a collection of people within AI which K who are now working on the card on O 2020 roadmap we made a huge amount of progress coming into the summit then we had two summits we had an internal one in an external one we we road mapped and demonstrated it in the internal summit and then we realized there was a little bit more that we needed to add and there was a few more things we needed to do because there was a high risk that had we released what we had that we wouldn't properly manage the expectations so we felt that it would be a good idea to just wait a little bit then go ahead and say oh well here here's what we have it's pretty Ian looks nice and we have a lot of great ideas that are in there and there's it's easy for us to explain where we're at with the demos the test nets the weekly releases and monthly updates and they can fit right into the roadmap structure the other thing is we just brought on board the new director of comms and he's only been on board for a little bit of time and so we wanted to give him a little bit of chance to have some feedback and input into the new roadmap we felt it'd be fundamentally unfair to commit ourselves to a particular philosophy when there's a new director and who's responsible for that so I know it's a little unfortunate but my speech kind of outlined when I was at the summit roughly how we think about these things we have clear milestones and to that we're working on this year our Shelley and Gogan and we know how to get those out and the to that next our priority for next year Abacha as Voltaire exactly how far along that road we get is completely contingent on whether the code rewrites are completely successful and that what we think is true about the architecture we've chosen and how our processes are working is true we have a lot of evidence that it is but 2017 2018 happened and and so we're a bit more cautious as an organization and we also realize that people misinterpret and amplify things in ways that are irresponsible usually for financial gain either damage our price or add up to our price are you leaving I which cable in your contract ends no I own IOH Kay it's my company there is no reason to leave it it would be crazy I built this company as the company I'd like to run for the rest of my life or unless we find somebody better to do it so I'm not going anywhere where is Pink Floyd I put the poster in the base but I just got my artwork in it took months to get painted that's bleach a vessel right behind there it's a painting for me show me Leone's your own big painting it's very heavy Cheryl's got an eye infection from wearing a monocle actually I got it from shaking hands that's the downside of being accessible you shake thousands and thousands and thousands of hands then you touch your eye and I remember that when I did a presentation at in New York d-lab there was one person there who had these red puffy eyes and in hindsight it looked like pink eye and I shook his hand and I touch my eye and I didn't realize that getting myself infected can you do are we gonna have a stable coin we need a stable coin we really do and there's a lot of different ways to build it I have like six people in my company that have come to me and said this is what we ought to do and I've had a lot of other people in the ecosystem come to me we've had a lot of regulatory discussions for example we had lawmakers from Wyoming come in we'd also talked to Kaitlyn long and the environment wyoming is such that it may be possible to actually set up an audited stable coin within that jurisdiction for use outside of the United States or in some cases perhaps even in the United States because the SEC is now issuing a new action letter that could be dollar backed but it may be better to build a bunch of utility and municipal currencies and then put them together into an SDR or basket and then use that as a pan-african currency which would be intrinsically a cryptocurrency and that could be used as a stable coin but it's a product that we would really like to do and build and it's something we have to do because you're not going to have late lending a native ADA it is too volatile it's why we don't do gold back lending all right keep coming guys let's see can we invest in Iowa K instead of cardio well if we've done our job right Colorado is a financial operating system and that also includes the sto standard I've been working with the polymath guys and we've had a lot of discussions about how do you build security tokens and what type of infrastructure is required for that so I would like to believe that Cardona would be a very appealing platform long term to host a centralized security tokens and bake within that security token enough contingencies that they can be traded only within certain domains once we've constructed all of that infrastructure in that framework in which will come naturally as a Granik revolution space it would be quite easy for us to tokenize i which k itself as a company so so I think that it would be a lot of fun assuming we could find the regulatory view and assuming that ihk continues to be an attractive company and we have long term or sustainable revenue lines especially with the enterprise side to IPO IO HK and we would definitely try to do that as a security token instead of a conventional equity well which can have a sneaking pool yes where I'll have ATS taking pools and so so we this is one of the reasons why we gave Marcus some money and we're working closely with him those digging pools that you saw me announce at the summit they will be made available for public purchase we're just going to run them through a few more iterations and so as we get closer to Maine that they'll start percolating through and you can test them on the upcoming tests that i and i which k is going to buy 80 of them and put them throughout all of its offices and different parts of the world so we get a nice geographically distributed network but it's something that we definitely want to do it and something that that we will do let's see what else we got here what are your thoughts on the development of etherium classic so we are right now writing a proposal for the etherion classic community the the financial backers who have been providing a lot of the resources for the existing clients of about a major collection of overhauls that we can do for aetherium classics that would be something that's achievable in the next one to two year time horizon should that get funded we will continue support with fermentis and scale it up to the next level we have a lot of partners that we can leverage to rapidly scale that team up that are complementarity meaning that they don't take any resources from other parts of our company and we'll hire a dedicated product and project manager specifically for that that effort should that not get funded then what we're going to do is retire meant to support at i/o HK and just leave mantas for the community and we will no longer actively develop so it's gotten to the point where it's the fear in classics communities decision whether they want us around or not we have some great ideas we think we're gonna share and if they want to fund them we'll do them and it's actually a great trial run for what we intend on doing for Cardno post-2020 we will have a Treasury before the end of 2020 I ohk will not discontinue working on Carano until the Treasury system is fully deployed because what we want to do is take another five-year roadmap so here's the next five years and propose that to the Cardinal community and we'd love for the Cardinal community to have a voice and opinion on that and for them ultimately to just decide whether they liked what we've done and where we want to go now my hope is that we have tough competition and we have lots of people come in and say no charles's doesn't know what he's doing and we can we can do it better or we can do it cheaper or we can do it faster and if that's the case then ultimately that's a victory for every single person who's in the Cardinal ecosystem because instead of just one voice and one group of people interested it's just get it done you now have basically the ability to decide what you want it's almost as if people come to you with a bunch of different homes and said you can have any one of them you want for free which one do you want you only pick one or maybe you can get two smaller ones or something like that and you get to make that decision so we of course will make our best case for ourselves and we hope that people go along with us so the proposal we do for theme classic we hope that community accepts that and we hope we can learn a lot from that process and it will give us a really natural path for how we're going to communicate what we can do for another five years post-2020 and then it's up to you is Cardno trendy more of a side chain host model the answer is yes the Cardo has always been a two layer system so this concept of the settlement system and a control layer idea so the control layers are either permissioned or permissionless and they can have arbitrary complexity and then the settlement system has basically everything that you would need for a long-term cryptocurrency so basically Cardno at the settlement layer is kind of like what I would like Bitcoin to look like had I built Bitcoin if I was Satoshi years and years ago and I had unlimited resources and money and all the engineers that I have and we could have really worked hard basically what Bitcoin would have been in 2019 would have been Cardinal we probably would have put a proof-of-work algorithm in just to create a distribution and then switch it over to Ora Boris because you couldn't actually do an ICO back then but but basically that's where we'd like to be and we're nearly done with that in terms of the conceptual design and actually the formal specification we have a total understanding of what Ledger's need to look the accounting systems behind them we have an incredibly intricate understanding of what consensus looks like in the trade offs of consensus we have a detailed understanding of interoperability we understand how to extend the UT Excel model to include pretty much as much scripting as you want but do this in a very safe way where you're predictable gas cost we have a really good understanding of what a Treasury would look like if you put in so you can sustain the ledger and have a source of capital available for the system to grow and upgrade we know how to write ap is now that are actually useful and we know basically how to get these things to work well on an exchange we've had orders of magnitude improvement and things like size on disk and also we've had a lot of improvement on memory utilization as well as speed of the system and we have a really good idea of how this will scale to enterprise clients actually what we're writing for your desktop computer is the exact same software that'll never Liron on an exchange which has thousands to millions of users and lots of concurrent transactions to get the software to scale to that level and work well every time not just once but all the time is tremendously challenging but we've figured out how to do all those types of things furthermore we're moving to a scrip a subscription model so you have that pops up and you have to have such aims and when you have these two things together that basically what it means is you don't possess the whole blockchain you don't possess the whole state of the system in fact we have research on the proof-of-work site that we've done which allows you to do chainless mining so you actually do sublinear mining it's really amazing stuff and there are analogies in the proof of stakes system that are inevitably going to roll in what does it mean it means that you just focus on the things you care about within the system because the system is going to be huge it's gonna be petabytes and exabytes of data in a massive state within the system the et Excel will be in the kicker bytes the terabytes if not larger so a lot of stuff going on you're not going to be able to store that on your phone or your home computer so this research we've done says you subscribe to the threads that you're interested in the users you want to do business with the things you want to do the transactions you care about your clique in the UT Excel and everything else you don't care too much about but you use the system as if you could see the entire system you get a cryptographic guarantee of that there are products and projects like Algrim with vault Kota protocol and others who are chasing that but frankly we're ahead of them and we've been ahead of them for a long time we actually know really well how to do these types of things the pups it's up side of things we've looked at protocols like pulled or cast and we have a raft to do it on what the team is done on the Haskell side and we have a really good idea of basically how side-chains applies to this because the reality is a side chain tells you a lot about a foreign chain but that foreign chain can be your own chain you Bitcoin is a side chain to itself because all you're doing is saying this transaction I'm getting does it exist and has it been double spent yes or no so that information is very useful those proofs are very useful and they can give you the best in class like clients and a subscription model now the other thing that hasn't been discussed and this is something that really needs to be carefully brought out in the cryptocurrency space is the notion of contingent settlement as well as metadata and betting it's a controversial topic but it's a topic that is being forced upon us for example the state of Texas is right now debating whether to pass a law that would require someone who receives Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency to know the identity of the person that they've received it from so actually means all of you could make every Bitcoin holder in Texas a criminal just by basically sending them a small transaction because they don't know your identity right so it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how cryptocurrencies work but the writing is on the wall that these systems have to be a bit more intricate and complicated so there's two components this one is the idea of permission to sending so I have an address and Bob has an address and right now the way things are I can just push a transaction to Bob with or without his consent doesn't matter but what if Bob has a specially constructed address that says you have to go and get my permission before the transaction will settle so for example let's say your exchange and a Bob is withdrawing from an exchange well the exchange would really love to have an audit log that showed they gave you your money so you pull your 100 bit point out that you've made from trading and normally they just push a transaction to you and that would be a but what if they change forces you to use a contingent address that then could be connected to an identity for example the D ID standard which is basically a you are n that post that connects to a identity document called a did document so they could say look before you're able to withdraw your money you basically have to sign the hash of an agreement that this is a withdrawal from our exchange in that you've been totally settled for this particular transaction then that hash can be embedded along with the D ID or an encrypted D ID so you can encrypt it with an audit key into the transaction itself and the transaction won't settle until that's been satisfied so the exchange gets an auditable non reputable guarantee that they can show to the regulator they can show to their third-party staff that you have consented to the withdrawal and it was you now the advantages it's an added layer of security from an exchange because you now have separate credentials the login credentials that get access to the exchange as well as the KYC credentials which are connected to your identity and these are separate so they can basically have additional security and if your account gets hacked the person wouldn't be able to withdraw from the account so there's a consumer benefit this but that very same infrastructure could be used for compliance for basically people in Texas you could populate a Texas favorite wallet that has contingent addresses and basically it says hey no one can send me any money until I have their D ID or something like that and now everybody's in compliance and there's no way to make them out of compliance so there's all kinds of primitive structures that you can build and using marlowe you can put very sophisticated financial contracts on top of these things for all kinds of financial products whatever they may be and this is portable furthermore the notion of metadata embedding basically what you're doing is saying you have some commercial understanding of the transaction between Alice and Bob and you're taking that entire understanding and you're transmitting it through a pubsub interface so you send out-of-band to bob that metadata and then they sign it the hash so the transaction has the hashes they're not reversible so they're secure nobody can know what you did but you possess a copy bob possesses a copy so if the taxman comes the regulator comes other people come you can show a time-stamped non reputable auditable immutable record that you did that that's what that transaction was about and nobody can be the wiser about it furthermore with D IDs you can encrypt the D ID and embed it within the transaction as well so again you have a time-stamped audible immutable non reputable way of verifying that that transactions connected to that identity but the encryption keys are up to the parties of the transaction to be shared with whomever they care so either you can just possess it for your own internal records you can have an audit key for a regulator the taxman whoever you care about or it can be part of a larger commercial understanding between different parties these capabilities are coming to card on oh they're actually not hard to integrate because we designed things the way we did by the way that was another reason we had slight delays because we've discovered these types of patterns as we were building the system and we said boy it'd be really cool to build these types of things and put these types of things into Cardinal and it would make Cardinal kind of a a system that could absorb a lot of the innovation that's been brought the permission leisure space or in policy groups furthermore contingent settlement also allows for receiver pays transaction fees so you see certain systems say that transactions are free well you can now absorb that with receiver pays basically say hey the receiver has to contribute some of the transaction fee and if they don't the transaction doesn't execute which case you have a free transaction at the sender side so we can absorb the credit card use case into the system as well yes I agree the Texas laws a little stupid you'll see me gone on record talking about bitlicense I've mentioned it many many many many times I just don't like regulation like this I think it's just really stupid regulation should follow the identity and the asset racket we've moved beyond regulation being global for everybody and we've moved into into the transaction from a vending machine and a 500 million dollar transaction it's it's really crazy and so instead we should move to a world where the transaction itself has metadata identity connected to it and a smart contract capability within it and then it inherits its regulatory standard from the geographies it touches the identities it touches and ultimately the amount and then you can have an auditable time stamped immutable non recruitable proof that you've complied with the regulation and then what you do is you click one button in your wallet software it bundles everything together at the end of the year and that's what you give the government in the taxman and you're done your cost of paying taxes and filing taxes your cost of compliance is automated and then the burden is on the government to write the smart contracts and the regulatory standards I'm really tired of these unfunded mandates where they say you must you shall you will you do and then they leave it to the industry to figure it out not realizing that they're costing all of us millions to billions of dollars which in turn get pushed to you the consumer alright what else do we have here this this is a great question if cardano's open-source and any other company can take and use your development how will that affect it our eighth of value tote our eighth a token value I don't want to lose money or my eighth it tokens I get this a lot where I say hey if it's open-source can't people just fork the code and take all your innovations they can fork the code at any time they can't fork you the reality is what creates value for crypto currencies are the users it's the community it's why I care so much about the communities why we have community management it's why we have a lot of people running around and so as a consequence basically if I was to for Bitcoin today and create Vic own Charles edition it wouldn't be worth very much and very few people would probably move over we'd have few maybe it'd be like SV or something but it would be a pale imitation of Bitcoin same code same innovations same design but you just can't fork that that info that's social dynamic the social infrastructure this is why it's so incredibly important that you have a treasury system and voting systems because right now here's how the cryptocurrency space works and this is why things get so toxic you have a very small group of people who are developers investors big people who are actually building stuff in the space the entrepreneurial class to developer class the infrastructure class then you have the speculators which are everybody else and they hold the currency they're fans of it may-maybe philosophically aligned with it but they don't have a voice they can't do anything they're just sitting there just hoping for things to materialize and then a subset of them maybe move into the other class when they have smart contracts or whatever but the vast majority of them are there yet they have opinions about where things should go what they should do and so the key is to give them tools to organize tools to vote tools to discuss the philosophy and direction to have teeth not just here's my opinion but also when my opinion is made manifest and gets a Democratic consent behind it then that opinion will turn into money that then can be used by the other class all of a sudden everybody in this AMA has power and actually has a voice in an opinion and you're not just talking about when is this coming out or what is that coming out you're actually talking about where do we want to go and how are we going to get there and the things we need to do to get there who's the best leader to get there you can't fork that you can fork the code and have another Treasury system but it's like saying well that big meetup group over there I'm gonna host my own meetup group and I'm gonna copy everything I'm gonna have the same banners and the same catering and the same everything and what well it doesn't mean other people are going to show up they're gonna stay the other part so so then that way it allows you have your cake and your eat it - or basically you can be open source you can be open you can you can do all these things yet at the same time you don't have to worry too much about poaching and the stealing of technology the other thing is that it gives people the freedom to compete with you in ways that make you better anything any of our competitors make we can take it's fair game and if they hire a brilliant person I get happy because I know that brilliant person is gonna write papers it's gonna write code I read that code just as much as you do with another thing and this is a side note that I was asked at the conference a lot of people said you need to stop talking about heõs and Dan Larimer and you also need to stop being as aggressive with people on Twitter guys I I once had it described when I was at university that I got two doses of brain and half a dose of common sense and I was always a bit abrasive with my personality especially through digital media there's all been a bunch of times where I've sent emails and tweets and other things where I've regretted it later on and said maybe I could have been nicer done things a little bit better and I'm learning as much as you guys are I'm only 31 and I started the cryptocurrency space quite young I was in my mid-20s and so I will I will do a better job at trying to be a bit nicer on Twitter and stop fighting with the trolls as much and I also will try very hard to not mention Yas as much as I do I just really am profoundly disgusted by certain things in that ecosystem was especially with the amount of money that they raised and some of the claims that they've made and things that they've said about us amongst other people and just the attitude that the community has that somehow they've earned the right to build all these things and do all these things and that as if they've already accomplished all decentralizing the whole world when all they've really done is just wired 21 servers together put a voting system on it and I think almost all of them run on Amazon so we live you see that and you see that outside people don't know the difference and they're being scooped into this they're putting their money into this they're building products and projects on that then it's entirely possible we can end up living in a world that could go in that direction first off AOS won't survive that world because it'll all just be run by governments not not some ledger run by a bunch of people second people won't know the difference between real true decentralization and what's being offered in that community so I have a philosophical disgust as well it would be almost I'd it would take hyper ledger fabric and deploy it and say oh look this is a great cryptocurrency and I'll control the 21 nodes and you just have a voting system you let me know if you want to switch him or not oh and by the way a large portion of the currency probably more than 51% is controlled by me and my friends so we always get to decide who's in control I mean it's like honestly guys fabric has better performance than the Neos test they also have a better architecture to read the fabric 1.