This is probably the hardest thing I've ever tried to participate in in my career and no one has pulled this off in the cryptocurrency space, not Bitcoin, not Ethereum, no one. It's very easy to do parts of these types of things and there's legacy models to do these types of things but to do all of this as one bucket.

Thoughts on RFK Junior wanting to back the US dollar with Bitcoin. That make a damn look it sense to me. I was there in El Salvador. I met President Bukele. We had extensive conversations and passed on the deal, gave it to other people and they decided to deploy a system, the government of El Salvador, which is private. Not very transparent.

Basically, the antithesis of Bitcoin. There's not enough Bitcoin, there's not enough capability for the US government to engage with that. To make that a sensible decision, there's no reality that the United States Government's going to back its own money with an asset it can't control. It doesn't at least own a certain amount of supply. 00:22:50 If you're going to do it, build a different crypto concept. There's plenty of ways you can tokenize real world assets and put them into an algorithmic stable coin, and the US government probably figure something out like that, but we were we are so far beyond the asset backed full reserve days of the US dollar, we lost that.

What's nice about that is this enables sidechains, light clients and all kinds of optimizations, and they are specific for proof of work. So, we wrote the paper with Dennis's Syndros and Echos thiasos. The diagnosis was still a graduate student at the time. He ended up getting his PhD and now he's a postdoc at Stanford and it always made me sad that nobody had picked up NIPoPoWs because it basically solves sidechains and efficient like clients for Bitcoin.

It's a complete solution. There's no downside at all to adopting it. You don't have to change bitcoins proof of work. You don't have to ruin Satoshi's vision, but the maximalists are so radical that they can't even understand that zero trade off things are awesome for your ecosystem. So Pushki is a brilliant engineer and he's capable of reading scientific papers and translating them. He's a great research transfer.

So, he read our paper. He used to work for us before he created ERGO and he implemented it. And this is the first main net large scale implementation of NIPoPoWs. And it's just an extraordinary thing. And it makes me so proud and so excited because I remember being with Dennis is in Greece when he was a graduate student. Watching him describe it, write it on a chalkboard more than six years to go hoping that we could find a way to convince the Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin community that this was a good idea and. Even Kim was a concept called Velvet Forks to try to bring it through.

And it just so happened that now it's in market and there's an actual chain running with it on main net. So, it's definitely a huge win and it makes me real happy. And so, congratulations to the ERGO community. It's really nice to see how you continue to innovate. You continue to push forward. It's one of my favorite projects and it's a spiritual successor in many ways. I think to the original intent of Bitcoin and so much wonderful thought. And to serve of actually the NXT community and the crypto community, then scorex and then it worked its way to ergo and one after another, innovation after innovation.

Color coins waited 10 years for that to be a thing on Bitcoin. It never happened. Now you have native multi-asset. Where do you think we got the idea from? For you. And now you control it.

More importantly, it's also a principle that everybody plays by the same rules. See, that's what makes Cardano so special. And that's what makes Bitcoin special. Ethereum special and other great protocols is this idea that everybody has to play by the same set of rules.

The reason you like Bitcoin, the reason you like Cardano, the reason you like crypto is that you are so frustrated with people lying to you and changing social contracts on you and screwing you behind your back, that you want something that a person can't change.

Adam Black doesn't get to wake up tomorrow and say you know, I think Bitcoin absolutely needs to have 22 million coins. You see, they just can't do that. That's why people like these protocols, can't change them after they get enough social momentum.

The idea is that once things are where they need to be, and if we can get 1694 of a line based on the Community vote and Cardano hard forks to adopt that, it would be really cool to actually have the lab measure Cardano and see where our decentralization sits in relation to Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies like Ethereum.

There's no greater example of that than when we have our moment where we get to measure Cardano’s decentralization against the rest of the cryptocurrency sapce and I think it's going to be a wake up call for all of them because while the Bitcoin maximalists and others will ignore this and just believe it's some random thing and it should be dismissed as the academic waste.

I firmly believe in a better future, and I do believe we're going to win. It's going to take a long road and we're going to have to deal with the fact that there are many obstacles. The last 14 years have been really challenging if you think about it. We've had Bitcoin declared dead, probably more than 300 times. We've had famous economists. Like Paul Krugman declare that everything we do is folly, and only by tomorrow will people wake up and realize when Bitcoin goes to 0, crypto goes to zero and everybody will just move on.

Going back here, he says because Charles prefers to right-click, save an NFT, and use it as a profile picture instead of giving value and ownership to the NFT. So, guys, Cardano's like Bitcoin in that it's a decentralized protocol. Nobody owns it, nobody controls it.

Because somebody needed to do it in the ecosystem and we thought it was a good role, but we were never compensated, we were never given that mandate, and there is no official party to speak on behalf of Cardano as an entry point. Like Bitcoin, it's a completely decentralized ecosystem and people have to decide how best to participate in it.

Like Bitcoin before it, Cardano is a fully decentralized ecosystem which means no one controls it, no one curates it, no one's in charge of it, no one wakes up every day and says, "I will take care of you." If you want that, there are other ecosystems that seem to provide that. Cardano is open and if you want something done, you do it.

There's consensus at the lab that the first will be Bitcoin and that makes sense as a reference point. But I would hope that Cardano is in the top three or five that are measured just so that we know where we stand as an ecosystem. For better or for worse, and then that can be a shining North Star for the governance of Cardano to improve wherever we stand.

Better than Bitcoin, worse than Bitcoin, the same as Bitcoin. So that we can always make the ecosystem more resilient and understand where points of failure are and improve those points of failure where and when those make sense. Some requires technological innovation; some may require some inefficiencies to be introduced into the system.

And because it's been built in a very particular way, it may be abstracted to a point where you can use it for any UTXO wallet, if you load a certain parameterization into It, meaning that you could conceivably, in the long arc, use this as a Bitcoin wallet system or a Litecoin wallet system. In addition to being useful for Cardano and so forth.

This is antithetical to completely libertarian open cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum or ADA but might be something you'd want to do if you are an issuer who's trying to have a regulated product, but you want to take advantage of the decentralization of the system. Now, why would you want to do that?...

So, if you're having a discussion about compliance, you're also having a discussion about identity. You're also having a discussion about privacy, and when can you deanonymize things? Who can do that and what are the conditions to do those things, the security token world is going to live on these types of rules, not on the traditional crypto rules that we are used to with Bitcoin, where or you don't have one particular direction with maximizing freedom, minimizing your exposure of your personal information and removing all barriers to comments, you're going to be putting up artificial walls there.

We already have a principled cryptocurrency, it's called Bitcoin. It's very principled and within the next 3 to 5 years. It will have smart contract capability and sidechain capability and be quite performant. There are literally hundreds of millions of dollars R&D and engineering money with multiple companies, all around the world working very hard to get Bitcoin to a very solid-state...

Certain things won't be changed. The consensus algorithm won't be changed, and a lot of things are going to have to be pigeonholed in that we make Bitcoin sub optimal for a large host of applications, so that is position where if you can take those things, that it's likely not to be competitive with a particular IoT and one of those things better...

So, I love these questions. Charles. Why was the max supply of ADA of 45 billion chosen instead of a smaller supply, considering Bitcoin is 21 million.

45 millions of them and it's worth 1000 times more than ADA. So instead of four cents worth a lot more. Would you say wow! That's that's the currency for me. Well, you can just do that. You take your ADA, and you move the decimal point. in Bitcoin you can do the exact same thing you say. No, there's not enough Bitcoin in circulation. So instead of having 21 million Bitcoin, let's have 21 billion Bitcoin...

And and we'll call them Milli Bitcoin. There you go, militz. And now we have 21 billion. We moved the decimal points and it's worth 1000 times less.

I don't get to control Bitcoin. I don't have a voice. If I disagree with what a very small group of people are doing the odds of me changing their minds or influencing that process it's very small and if I can do it, the odds are most other people can't do it.

And as a consequence, it dramatically increases the situation where minorities will say screw this, we're done. We're voting with our feet and let's create Bitcoin Cash, or Classic or Gold or whatever the heck the latest fork flavour of the week is going to be.

It's incredibly important to understand that when Shelley comes out, Cardano is basically on same footing with every other major cryptocurrency in the space, and that it is fully decentralized to be 50 to 100 times more decentralized than Ethereum, Bitcoin and EOS....

And sending hundreds of emails with advice and well wishes and sometimes constructive criticism. That's the sign of a healthy, vibrant community, and it's one that I've only seen once before, not with Ethereum, but with Bitcoin itself.

I had a great chance to go talk to the guys at Tangem. Now these are these are pretty cool. So these are actually full Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets and those little chips, right there are actually NFC trusted hardware modules and basically to use them. It's really nifty. I'll show you guys.

Then when you talk about open-source project, that's more like HyperLedger fabric or Bitcoin and these projects are saying hey, there is no leader, there is no custodial company that runs everything. There's no beneficent dictator for life.

There's about 10 years of history in the cryptocurrency space and there's a lot of projects that focus a lot on governance From Dash to Tazos and there's good models to learn from, and my belief is that this does not not not be USP. This ought to be a best practice. Like like the Bitcoin improvement proposal of the Ethereum improvement proposal.

EOS has 21 and Bitcoin has a roughly 10 ish major pools that control things. So we'd be 100 times more decentralized than Bitcoin and about 50 times more decentralized than EOS just on the stake pool level. But voting will be easier.

What do I think about the BCH fork? You know, years ago I I heard about all the, you know, the the the fray between Roger and the Bitcoin core devs and...

There's a great piece of research by Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer back in 2013 that actually modelled propagation of blocks throughout the Bitcoin network. And you know that the research concluded that, you know, you could have larger...

As a result I kind of stayed out of it, but then it got so furious that it split into Bitcoin Cash and to Bitcoin. What really bothered me was the existence of Craig Wright in Bitcoin cash. I think the guy a sociopath and a fraud. I saw him in Rwanda. It was one of the most distasteful situations I've ever had in my life.

I don't know what kind of a human being thinks this way or approaches life this way, or builds legitimacy by lying and saying is Satoshi, but there's certainly some people who follow them and the fact that they welcomed him into the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem with open arms, you know, say hey, we have Satoshi, look how smart we are and we have the best people.

Steal people's money or you haven't biased it in some way where you can skim off the top. OK, so that's just a standard and it's a standard we've had since the very beginning. Satoshi didn't release some closed binaries of Bitcoin and say, trust me. The code was right out there, and people could see it read it. And that's how cryptography is done, and that's how good wallets are done so, it's incredibly important for Yoroi to be open source for people see the source code...

So right now, if we look at the structure of Bitcoin, a very strong argument can be made that if this small group of people, less than 10 who own mining interests, mining pools and mining capacity are basically in control of more than 51% of the hash.

There are exchanges, there are checks and balances, and when the system has been pushed too far in one direction, there's always the opportunity to fork. When people have philosophical disagreements, the two most prominent examples of that are Bitcoin Cash interfering Classic.

So, given the threat of force in the event that people don't do their job, and given that there is diversity amongst developers and diversity amongst all of the actors, from that perspective, one can make the argument that Bitcoin, for example, is a decentralized protocol.

The truth is probably somewhere in between where it gets interesting is when you start talking about services that exist in parallel or on top of the Bitcoin network or blockchain as a whole.

Remember, not too long ago, about 10 years ago, it was very easy to shut down the Bitcoin network, you just simply could shut down Satoshi's single mining node and the network would die, so networks that people use in in our environment tend to become more resilient over time.

So something like the Bitcoin Network at that time it took quite a. Bit of time for such a block to propagate in a matter of minutes. So when you have things like that, you kind of have limitations of of the network stack related to the block size.

And Bitcoin suffered from the same issue, with transaction fees for when Bitcoin was, you know, $0.10. So you know, Bitcoin fees can go up and down ADA to fees can go up and down.

It's just kind of like the Bitcoin Foundation to Bitcoin. Cardano is already decentralized. Enough to not really need the foundation. So as a consequence, if they never become productive, it was kind of a tragic loss to the ecosystem that we weren't able to efficiently use the money and but it doesn't kill us and I feel that our will overcome.

So you can take hashes of all those records and embed them, kind of like what Factom has done for Bitcoin and embed them into the Cardano blockchain so it acts as an auditor of the auditor.

Charles, talk to me about ways to make offline transactions besides crypto hardware. It's easy to do an offline transaction. That's always easy to do. I can take a transaction even with Bitcoin, sign it and put on the flash drive. Hand it to you so. Here you go, It's all yours.

There's not a master slave relationship. It's a firewall relationship, meaning that it's easy to move assets to and from. On the 1st generation of sidechains we launch, will be custom tailored for K-EVM and IELE, as this is for interoperability with those smart contract paradigms, but later versions will include more generalities, so we can wire our system together with things like ETC and Ethereum and future versions of other protocols or potentially even Bitcoin, depending upon where their upgrade path sits and your cryptocurrency as well, just follow an open standard.

Just because you can get Alice or Bob to mitigate to your system, Alice and Bob won't stay there if your system doesn't offer a compelling great experience for your customer, second, we tend to compete in different circles. Most people chase the Western developed world. I tend to chase the developing world and have a pan African strategy and Emurgo has an Asian strategy and the types of customers we're dealing with, many cases this Is the first cryptocurrency that they've ever dealt with. So we are their Bitcoin.

The advantage of that is we could take the Haskell wallet backend that's built on verified formal code. Really, really good Haskell code and connect it to the rest client and then the rest client could have API compatibility or you could actually take that with some modification and potentially connect it to a Bitcoin wallet or you know, a Monero wallet or whatever that has UTXO accounting system, that's parametrizable and also it means that the lower back end can then have an independent release cycle to everything else.

And the reality is that since the very beginning, Cardano has always been Federated Ecosystem and it does not require a foundation to be successful, just like Bitcoin didn't need the Bitcoin Foundation for it to reach its levels of success, Cardano no more needs a Cardano Foundation.

Now we did lose some resources as the money put into the foundation is unfortunately inaccessible to the community but the good news is that we did gain some extra money, thanks to the appreciation of Bitcoin and so as a consequence we are fully funded to handle these additional services and tasks that we didn't anticipate.

The reality is all cryptocurrencies, regardless of where they come from, whether they come from a strong centralized foundation or an organic movement distributed from proof of work like Bitcoin, do eventually require some form of governance to decide how to spend funds available and where to go. For example, when to fork, how to fork, what technology to adapt?

You cannot go from $250 Bitcoin to $20,000 Bitcoin, where the foundations, the fundamentals of the space, haven't materially changed too much and then have an expectation that that's a stable equilibria it's going to go back down. And there's going to be a recession and we cans are going to come out and what's going to happen is the same thing that's happened anytime you have a contraction and a very exciting marketplace.

And these fruits will allow us to move and give ourselves finality when we need it, to give ourselves sharding through our both hydro when we need it to really understand the needs of the network stack. And then how we actually add side chains into that, maintain the state of many systems concurrently or being able to move value between many systems to build up to those amazing applications that everybody wants to have does require really years of effort, solid foundations, good proofs and a large amount of missteps. Bitcoins been around for nine years and we're just starting to see some goodies coming bitcoins way and they'll eventually get there and it's going to be a big change for the space.

Charles, on Reddit, people have been discussing the actual function of the ADA token. Can you elaborate? ADA, as a token, serves many features. It embodies traditional cryptocurrency features that Bitcoin encompasses. It's a store of value and can be used as a means of exchange, easily teleported around the world. That's a basic necessity.

And in you know, we have time and materials. You have cost to do these things, so here's a grant proposal. Can the Community vote on that? Second, it gets people more engaged in the direction philosophy and focus of the platform. When you own Bitcoin, Bitcoin just does its own thing. It's its own protocol.

You really aren't as a Bitcoin holder, no matter how much you have, deeply engaged in the governance of the system, unless you choose to be and you have to put a lot of effort to do that. And it's very controversial, whereas if you actually have voting rights connected to that, then you'll see these funding proposals come up and then you have to ask yourself, well, what do I think?

I remember when I first entered space. There was just Bitcoin, and we had a lot of forks of Bitcoin. Things were pretty stagnant. So, a Litecoin and feather coin and name coin and these things. And so, you take the name of the game was you take the GitHub repo, your fork it you change something, you put some good marketing on it.

So Litecoin is the silver to bitcoins gold and then feather coin comes out where the copper to the silver right and that's where we're at and then suddenly, you know this innovation comes out and says, hey. Ethereum and NXT actually got to give the NXT guys credit. They were actually the 1st in my view, major innovation and bitshares was pretty innovative too.

Do you really need a blockchain like we have an enterprise product coming out where we say we want to have a blockchain with blockchain and we want to do for data what Bitcoin did for money and and so the fundamental assumptions are being challenged.

That's one of the reasons why Satoshi limited Bitcoin script.

...amount anonymity. So if I'm sending a transaction between Alice and Bob A&B, can we obfuscate? How much was sent like a confidential transaction? Now, why would you want to do that? Because again, it creates a target surface. You know, if you're an observer, you might not necessarily be able to link Alice to A and Bob to B, but you can watch for large transactions and say boy billion dollars worth of Bitcoin just moved.

In other cases, like with Hal Finney who was in Bitcoin very early, he was able, because he knew he was going to die and he knew he was declining, to protect himself and his family as best he could. But even they were actually victims of ransom attacks, and scammers and other such things, and they had great preparation.

You know, it's not dramatic where we're going to 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.

So like the early days of Bitcoin, Etherium classic kind of feels like.

So of all the experiences I've had, the ETC definitely feels like 2011 Bitcoin all over again and that.

Does Iowa have enough funding to take project completion? Yes, we do. We we're very smart with our Bitcoin that we got, we digested it and we're fully funded till 2020 for the Cardano project.

When I first joined Bitcoin, we were like a dollar, and then we went to $30. Then we went back down to a dollar and then we had the $4.00 and then we went to 256 bucks.

It's like, yeah. And what happened everybody when we went from $30 Bitcoin to $1.00 Bitcoin, that was pretty painful too.

Tokens so you can have Bitcoin or ADA, whatever it might be.

What are your thoughts on Bitcoin maximalists and their perspectives on the crypto space?

You know, the interesting thing about Bitcoin maximalism is some people were Bitcoin maximalists like Eric Voorhees kind of wasn't a Bitcoin maximalist.

That and a lot of that was a reconciliation of the reality that all coins are not a threat to Bitcoin.

You chop up the pie differently and they all coin gets some and Bitcoin.

You're bringing in people who weren't in the Bitcoin space into the cryptocurrency space, and you're capturing them with an altcoin.

Well, now that they're in altcoin, they tend to like crypto and if they have a good experience with it, they're probably going to buy Bitcoin too.

Unfortunately, there are some people in the space that still think that Bitcoin is the only legitimate way of doing things, and they're very irrational and they say proof of stake is the only consensus algorithm.

And the only source of truth is Bitcoin.

And unfortunately, these people, these Bitcoin maximalists, 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 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.

The success of Ethereum kind of was the end of Bitcoin maximalism in my approximation because it proved you could have legitimate options that weren't clones of Bitcoin that had totally new innovations and brought completely new ideas.

There's a particular person who's a big community leader in the Japanese Bitcoin community.

He he runs the Japanese Bitcoin meet up group in Tokyo and he believes the Earth is flat so flat Earther.

Scaling it, 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 going to try to apply them.

System and at that point, Cardano is is basically what Bitcoin wanted to be and we know we got it right as long as we don't have a Cardano classic or a Cardano cash or something like that.

And if you look at Bitcoin, that's the case.

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 analysis, the architect of our side chain solution is mostly ignored by Bitcoin core.

We sneaky like when we funded dandelion, we had to hide the fact that I, HK was involved so they could sneak dandelion in through the back door, you know, but for the most part, they're unapproachable, you know, to give some credit that Bitcoin cash guys, at least we could have a conversation with them.

Bitcoin could use that.

Some people bought Bitcoin at 1200 and had to watch it go all the way down to 250.

I was saying this before the markets went up. I was saying this at $500 Bitcoin. I went on Bloomberg and said it and I warned people that we're probably going to have a collapse. Then we went up to $5000. I said the exact same thing.

This is a time honored process. It's existed for decades, and it's allowed us to build modern cryptography, so all of the security you take for granted with e-commerce, you know, all the cryptographic primitives that we use in crypto and Bitcoin and in the cryptocurrency space. And some way we're connected to this process. It's a very efficient process too.

So basically the idea is if you have a Bitcoin, you can have a Bitcoin.

That's not a problem, but then if you choose to use that Bitcoin in a particular way, like sell it through an OTC transaction or in person on local bitcoins, or if you use it to buy drugs, or if you use it in.

Google is a multinational company, one of the largest, most powerful engineering companies in the world. They have some phenomenal scientists working at Google from world famous cryptographers to infosec people. If Google is going to do a cryptocurrency, they don't need to partner with me, they don't need to partner with Ethereum or Bitcoin or anything else. They're just going to go ahead and do their own thing.

That said, Google is a good patron of open-source technology, and many of their employees do invest their weekends and at least one day a week on contributing to some open-source project. Google has a very large internal cryptocurrency and blockchain mailing list, and a lot of their employees love this space. In fact, Mike Hearn, one of the most famous Googlers, originally a core developer of Bitcoin, shows that there's certainly a lot of interest in the company there. So we felt it'd be an excellent opportunity to tell them what we're working on and if any of their employees or affiliates want to make open-source contributions, we'd just welcome it, but I don't think there's going to be a partnership anytime soon with Google.

OK, so for example, let's say that you receive a sidechain transaction, so something from Bitcoin to Litecoin. So when it goes from Bitcoin to Litecoin, so if you're Litecoin, those nodes need to know two things, two characteristics about that particular transaction. One, they need to know that the tokens that you're sending over exist. So there's an existential question. Is this real Litecoin or Bitcoin that you're sending over to Litecoin, for example.

Second, they need to understand that you haven't double spent those tokens. So how do we know that you've taken legitimate Bitcoin and you haven't also sent it to Dash, or you sent it to Ethereum or something like that? So, there is an existential question, and then there's a non-existence of a double transaction.

There's a lot of challenges. Their governance challenges and that it's doesn't have a leader. There's a very decentralized group of people, kind of like Bitcoin, who are doing different things and each and every one of them kind of has a vision and a different idea.

Also, like Bitcoin, there's no centralized source of funding. There's no one who has this like ICO pool of money or free mind, who then gets to decide who gets funded, even if they're beneficent and give you grants, there's still no one there, so there has been some attempts to create some capital aggregation, but we haven't quite seen that materialize in a way that would be productive for everybody yet but it doesn’t say it wont happen.

So that's what Bitcoin solves, and most cryptocurrencies based in that paradigm where they say I have an asset. And I need to figure out who owns it, and I need to have a large catalog of bespoke type transactions that allow me to move that asset between people. That can be contingent settlement style transactions, like multisig for example, and they can be arbitrarily complicated things that are like event-based transactions or things like that. So there's a whole basket of that stuff there.

Bitcoin only covers a small sliver of it, and that's one of the original biggest frustrations that I had and others had with Bitcoin was It only covered a sliver of this beautiful, rich financial ecosystem. So what we decided to do is say, all right, why don't we build an accounting ledger that allows you to represent the types of assets and those types of transactions in the most efficient and parallelizable way possible? 00:20:29 So, you can get these to scale long-term performance, but then you can also do everything that Wall Street is used to doing. So, we created a domain-specific language called Marlowe. We also created a general-purpose programming language that was functional that Marlowe embeds in called Plutus, and we really rigorously thought about the UTXO accounting model. We also came up with a method to issue assets within that model that's interoperable with the Ethereum-style account.

So, that’s awesome and that’s gonna to kind of finish what Bitcoin started. Then you have the Ethereum-style computational model, which is replicated on some notion of distributed computation. But what if these programs are stateful? You send messages to them, they wake up, they do something, they output something, and you can chain them together. There are all sorts of crazy things you can do.

Furthermore, your settlement time is constrained to the settlement time of the entire network. So if you have 10 minute block times, for example if Bitcoin, you have to wait 10 minutes for the state of the game to update. So you have to wait 10 minutes for you to see the next round in the game or something like that.

Like if you think about it as decentralized exchange, do you particularly care that the order book and all of these things are preserved forever and the blockchain and you live within those constraints No, most people don't. They just say I want to go from like coin to Bitcoin and I want to know I can't be front running. It's a fair marketplace and so forth.

Another one is: What do you think it will for alltcoin or to decouple Bitcoin. So basically, what cryptokylie is asking is, will we forever be in a paradigm where Bitcoin and all altcoins are linked together and when Bitcoin goes up, altcoins go up when Bitcoin goes down, altcoins go down and and basically Bitcoin is leading the pack and it's completely in charge oof this stuff.

What's going to end up likely occurring is Bitcoin is going to pull back because of its rate of evolution and become a digital commodity. It's going to become digital gold and it's going to be an anchor in the system, a gateway drug into the system with a high degree of liquidity, lots of Fiat pairings. Good exchange access and then once you're in Bitcoin, eventually Bitcoin will be capable enough to reasonably communicate with other cryptocurrencies.

So there's kind of like services. There'll be other digital commodities that have different characteristics about them to compete with Bitcoin, and then you'll have dapp tokens and these things. So they'll be this web of value that happens the web of blockchains.

You'll have the digital commodity class of cryptocurrencies. They'll probably be clustered with each other and when Bitcoin goes up, they'll try it you know rising tides, they'll go up, but it will not have as dramatic of effect on infrastructure tokens.

For example, if you look at Ethereum and Bitcoin, the coupling over time has already started to naturally decrease. And when Ethereum goes up or down, or Bitcoin goes up or down, they don't impact each other as much as you'd think. They still do bitcoins, still a Goliath, and Bitcoin usually is the kind of the Canary in the coal mine.

The Bitcoin maximalist question is an interesting one. I've been in the Bitcoin space as an investor, miner, and an observer since 2011, back when Bitcoin ranged from one to four dollars and had already experienced a collapse. The community was incredibly small then; I once signed up for a meetup group in Colorado, and I was the only one who showed up.

These two groups complemented each other quite well, with many libertarians emerging from the Ron Paul movement. After our loss in 2008, we needed a place to vent, and creating our own money was an exciting idea—it was a form of protest. However, neither group foresaw that the cryptocurrency space would expand so tremendously. Today, many are revising history and reinventing themselves to align with the new narrative of Bitcoin's success.

I professionally entered the space in 2013 and it was a very different space from 2011. In 2013 we started seeing Bitcoin actually being worth something. It was the ecosystem was worth about a billion dollars. The market cap had really accelerated a lot. There was a ton of interest in it, and people started legitimately talking about Bitcoin businesses.

This I mean BitPay was originally set up because the guys who ran it were traders and they wanted to come up with a scheme to get themselves more Bitcoin cause they were long on it. You know, they didn't think too much about. Hey, how do we build something to kill PayPal or Visa? They can’t tell you that but that's what they started it as was in 2013. There were really people serious about saying, well, no, we actually think this cryptocurrency thing could change the world.

Well, here's what happened The Ethereum and the ICO Revolution changed the narrative and stole the entire spotlight that Bitcoin had.

And it was equally Likely when you ran into a taxi driver and you were talking about cryptocurrencies that they held Ethereum then they held Bitcoin, and a lot of people actually believe that Ethreum could actually supplant Bitcoin one day, so there was a reaction that said, "Hey, no, Bitcoin is the only thing. Everything else is useless. It's all a scam because of a premine.” Because of this, logic just went completely out the door, and it almost became like a cult.

And unfortunately, because of that, we've seen a lot of the best people leave Bitcoin and go elsewhere. Either they've left the space entirely, or they've created altcoins and done their own thing, working on their own projects. Also, we really just don't see a lot of innovation coming out of Bitcoin these days, which is tragic because there's a lot of great ideas.

They're having a party about the notion of adding Schnorr signatures into Bitcoin. This is a 20-year-old piece of cryptography. I don't have parties about putting 20-year-old technology into my system. I don't wake up and say, "Boy, I put PGP into my wallet, hazzah, look how innovative I am.” You know it's, it's, it's absurd. So, I think Bitcoin maximalism.

The Wright brothers can be the greatest geniuses in the world, but nobody in their right mind would build a commercial line off of the Wright brothers' plane and to say that somehow Bitcoin was so magical. That it, in its original design, is going to somehow serve as a global payment system, a global commodity, a global smart contract system is absurd.

It's absolutely absurd. It's provably wrong. Furthermore, it is really starting to show its vulnerabilities. A recent paper that came out in March of 2018 written at Cornell University measured the level of decentralization in the Bitcoin network, and it indicated that there are less than 20 major nodes in the system that control 80% to 90% of the total hash power, depending upon the range that you look at.

So unfortunately, I think Bitcoin maximalism is going to continue. But I think its consequences are going to make Bitcoin less and less relevant. The market capitalization of Bitcoin will continue to erode or stay stagnant relative to the altcoins. And Bitcoin may even lose the top one slot, and maybe that's going to be psychologically a wake-up call for people to become a bit more aggressive with innovation.

The other thing is that you can't have a Bitcoin cash every time you have a disagreement. It was very painful for the space, and it's caused a lot of emotional harm and been very disenfranchising for a lot of people. So, I would hope that moving forward, they find a way to innovate more.

For me, we find our ways to make contributions to Bitcoin where we can, because I still love Bitcoin, I still hold Bitcoin. We put some money into a paper called Dandelion that was written by a professor named Promote, amongst others, at the University of Illinois, and it looks like Dandelion will be adopted by Bitcoin as a bit so indirectly, IOHK has some contribution to Bitcoin core.

And we're glad to see that there is still some innovation there. We still do learn from ideas that Blockstream has presented. Russell O'Connor's work on simplicity, for example, was very elegant and really helped us think through some ideas about Plutus. We would hope that the Bitcoin core developers take some of our work more seriously, in particular, work on sidechains, and in particular our work on UTXO wallet design.

Unfortunately, that just doesn't seem to be the case. But that is what it is. So maximalism, in my view, is bad. Maximalism, in my view, will slow down the ecosystem and in my view, will make Bitcoin much less competitive. And we live in a Darwinian environment, so it doesn't really matter, because that will not slow down the cryptocurrency space. That will not slow down my innovation or Ethereum innovation or other actor's innovation. And we're just going to keep going till someone gets it done.

And if Bitcoin wants to be mosaic, it can be, and it'll certainly be a great historical footnote if it wants to be Chrome, it can be as well. That's up to the people who guide that ecosystem and for them to make those choices. But I will remind them that we really can't move so slow that you're looking like a monopoly, and unfortunately that seems to be the pace that they're moving at.

Gives you a much more reliable network topology and it allows you to start building some meta infrastructure like payment channels and these things. Given that these actors exist but you don't want them to be too few. Like Bitcoin, where there's only a small collection of mining pools that. So, what you can do is you can build a model and that model can be parameterized in a game theoretic way to kind of converge to what you think is a reasonable set of delegates.

So, it could then be traded on the global Bitcoin exchanges that we see, like Bitstamp and Bittrex and Binance and the rest of the guys who don't have specialized licenses or are pursuing those. And then you wouldn't need to do all the things you need to do with an IPO or a normal securities offering or any of these normal exemptions.

Who would you rather punch in the face, Daniel Larimer or Roger Ver? Well, Roger is actually a pretty cool guy. I've never had a fight with him, and I like Roger. I mean, I have disagreements about Bitcoin Cash and other things, mostly about the purpose of it. But at the end of the day, I've never really viewed him as a bad actor, and it's, you know, it's sort of often tell about Roger one time, yeah. Years ago, he said. Hey, let me show you something special. And he went to a Barber shop, a coffee shop and a restaurant all back-to-back to back.

And in each case, he got them to accept Bitcoin. That's where Roger came from. He's that good, and he's pretty magical in his ability to get people to adopt things, I think that he perhaps hasn't fully thought out the consequences of Bitcoin cash or the consequences of the ecosystem he's built, and also it's incredibly regrettable that he's working with or associating with Craig Wright, who I believe is a sociopath. It's a bad act. But at the end of the day, I don't have any issue with Roger. The other thing is Roger is really good at martial arts, and he can kick my ass. So I really want to punch that guy in the face. As for Daniel Larimer? Dan is Dan. So, let's see what else?

My hope is that at the end of the day we fare well, but we'll find out and we'll do our best to try to convince people in that jurisdiction that ADA should be part of the marketplace. It would be extremely unfortunate to just have Ripple, Ether and Bitcoin because those are safe tokens for whatever the hell the reason, but we might end up in that reality, or we might end up in a reality where Japan is a world leader which lists hundreds of tokens that has tons of innovative projects. The jury is out on which side is going to happen and we'll let you know as we learn.

Second, did he even bother to take a look at the other things that we've done, like, for example, does he know how to build a UTXO wallet? Well, he forked Bitcoin. Satoshi came up with that. Did he? Well, we didn't know how to build one. So we figured it out. And we wrote a formal specification for those things.

But once we've solved something and we're confident about that, that's granite, it's bedrock. And we're starting to really seize great fruits being produced. At this point, we're very confident that or Ouroboros Genesis is a wonderful consensus algorithm to run a cryptocurrency with. And what you'll see, our delegation and our incentives paper, these three things together are everything that you would need to run something much better than Bitcoin, much more performance than Bitcoin. And it doesn't cost billions of dollars a year to run.

I can't spoil the surprise but come August there's going to be something announced that's awesome for the light client, the mobile client and the ATM type client. So, look out for that in terms of Cardano ATMs in Japan, there was a third party partner that that was keen on doing that and they wanted to deploy 50 ATMs prior to 2020 and they've already deployed some Bitcoin ATMs in the jurisdiction.

We're really keen to investigate an open source ATM design for Africa and we think that there's a lot of innovation that can happen there to create a low cost ATM in the two to $500 price range. Because if you're talking about cryptocurrency adoption amongst the people who don't have it, they need a cashing cash out point. So yes, you can send Bitcoin or ADA or ether to a maid from a maid in London to her mother in Manila. Well, what is the mother going to do with it?

And if left to their own devices and you said all the drama of the sale, the size of the offering, the incentives behind the offering, if you were just to do an airdrop of Bitcoin and say this is Tezos, I think a lot of people would look at the project very positively and they would say that there's a lot of really interesting things here.

And there's a track record there and there's definitely a mass market, whereas EOS and Tezos and much, much smaller. So the first comments that I think is they were overfunded and as a consequence of the overfunding, people don't talk about the technology, the vision, the mission, the goals, the dreams like we did with Bitcoin. Because there was no money in the beginning with Bitcoin, we he had was dreams and a mission.

I understand how difficult this is. We live in a space that tends to measure things in terms of days and weeks. And most of our competitors tend to deal with forked code so they don't start from scratch. They start from Bitcoin, or they start from Ethereum or from Bithares.