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I'm always going to be tweaking on it. I learned you need at least two of whatever you are working on because it’s good therapy. If you only have one, for me, it’s part of exercise, which ties to people’s mental health and well-being. You guys know I’m a little off the rocker if I don’t keep myself steady. It’s part of having something to do, but if I don’t have it, I rush the job, and it’s a dangerous job to rush. So, that’s my excuse for when I tell the old lady I need to buy more motorcycles. You're an adrenaline junky. I know Charles is an adrenaline junky; he gets in helicopters and flies around, does all kinds of crazy stuff, gets on horses, and walks right along the edges of things that are two miles down. He doesn’t care; he just goes for it. Just being on Twitter is enough adrenaline for a lifetime. I’d rather jump out of helicopters, let me tell you. I don’t remember your spot there on Twitter doing those live broadcasts, that’s for sure.
Well, Jillian, I know you’ve got a lot going on, so it’s awesome to see you here. I’m glad you were able to make it for a little bit. What’s new with you? How are things going?
The family’s doing surprisingly well. I mentioned to you that my husband’s family is here; they’re very close to us, and it’s great to have them. They come and help with house projects and things. About six months ago, we bought this big Victorian house, and with that comes a lot of big Victorian problems. It’s good to have them close to help with that, but when they come, it’s utter chaos. So, I’m glad that I was able to step away and join you guys for a little while.
Thanks for coming out. I can sympathize with the house stuff. Do you know what year the house was built?
This one’s 1905.
Pretty good one. Yeah, I’m into old houses and house projects, so we went from a house that was 1896 to this one that’s like brand new. You know what’s funny about those houses? All of the joists underneath them are soaked with creosote, and you can smell it when you go underneath. That’s really dark in color, and those houses will be around in like 200 or 300 years. They’ll still be there, while brand new houses being built today won’t be there. That’s the pressure-treated, true pressure-treated wood.
Yeah, for sure. I just finished refurbishing a house built in 1907, and it took two years to put the whole thing back together. It’s extraordinary how much you have to do to get those things up.
What was the most unexpected hurdle you came across that you didn’t expect? Two years is a lot longer than I would expect something like that to take.
Oh my lord, it’s just like you had to start and stop, start and stop. When we were digging out an extension to the basement, we discovered that they used wagon wheels in the concrete.
Oh cool, cast wagon wheels?
Yeah, we restored it. We were like, “Oh, that’s really cool!” We found bones and all kinds of things. It used to be a turkey farm back in the day, so don’t be human bones; that’s just... please don’t be human remains.
Oh, turkey remains? We’re good. That’s the last thing you want to run into. From there, you’d have to have forensics come in, and it stops the whole site. Everything stops.
Yeah, that’d be crazy. Just make sure everything’s decoupled right. I was bidding out probably seven or eight years ago one of the old buildings here in town for a networking retrofit. We’re in the desert, so it’s dry as a bone. The foundation was a wood plank floor of this old theater, and it was just wood boards sitting right on dirt. That had been that way for probably a good 100 to 150 years or so. It was pretty impressive.
Yeah, the way they make houses now isn’t nearly the way they used to make them back then. The other part about that is how ornate they are, how much woodworking went into it, and how much real art went into putting that together—not just necessarily the bones of the house and making sure there are doors and windows and a roof.
That’s the beauty of what Jillian’s house was in Connecticut. I never got the chance to go to that particular house, but I got to see it. It was absolutely beautiful, and the way they put it all together was just amazing. The new house that they have is really cool, but they did some upgrades to it, so it has this really cool look to it, but inside still has some of the newer creature comforts that you’d love to have.
Yeah, it’s absolutely amazing. Chris’s house has all that real fancy ornate trim around the outside on the drip edge of the roof. You have to either hand-carve it or find an artisan to make it if you’re trying to restore it. That’s pretty much what I did. All the pieces that were broken and damaged around the house, I had to get on the ladder, take paper, make templates, go cut them by hand, and put them up. If you get up there and look at it closely, every piece of this trim was cut by hand. It was not cut by a machine. A lot of that early Victorian trim was cut on dies, you know, on machines, but this house was also built in 1863, so a little bit prior to the Victorian era.
So, Chris, what was that big hole you were creating up in your house? What exactly were you doing there? I know you posted something a little while back about that.
Well, when this house was built, it was done in three different stages. The room that I’m in now was the original cabin. The front parlor was added on at a later date, the back room was added on at a later date, and upstairs was added on at a later date. When they did the upstairs, they actually knocked the original chimney down. Now, it’s not extending above the roof anymore, but it’s inside the house, like the interior portion. I was trying to reduce our power bill by putting in a wood stove, and someone at some point in the distant past cut a hole up there for a stove pipe to go in for a little potbelly stove or something here in the floor. I was going to go through that, go through the exterior wall, and then run my stainless pipe up the side of the house. Well, when they took the chimney down, they completely filled that cavity with all the brick. I was like, “Well, this is going to be a spring project.” So, I did a different solution for the wood stove for the winter this year, but yeah, that’s what I was doing. It was a pain in the ass.
Yeah, the last thing you want to run into is an entire chimney filled with brick on the inside. That’d be bad, no question.
It’s funny; the longer those houses are around, the more interesting things you find. I had a farmer's market about a mile from where I live, and it was there since the 1800s. They just kept building onto it, so it’s like the Weasley’s house in Harry Potter, with all these different parts. That’s what happens when you have these houses. Sam knows; he’s up in Pennsylvania. There are a bunch of houses like that where it started off as 1,200 square feet and now it’s 4,000 square feet, but you can’t tell if it’s three or five different buildings that somebody duct-taped together. There was no building code then, there were no standards, there was no permitting, so you just built sections of your house as you had more kids; you’d add on to the house.
Yeah, I’m stepping back for a minute. Martin Lang is hanging out backstage. I’m going to let him come in and jam.
Cool, nice! Martin!
Hey guys! Martin, that’s my dude right there. If you need a dude, that’s my boy.
Hey Martin, put your D ID in the chat, man.
No pressure, no pressure.
Hey, just to cap off the house thing, if anybody gets a chance, if you’re ever in California for whatever reason, go to Hearst Castle and check out the William Hearst castle. It’s basically a huge house that they just kept building on and building on. There’s absolutely nothing he built on it for like, I don’t know, it was like 25 or 30 years or something like that. It was absolutely crazy, but some of the things in there, especially the library, if you want any ideas on how to put a library together, go to that place and take the tour. It’s absolutely amazing.
And if you’re in California and you want to really see a house that was built over a few years, go to the Winchester Mansion.
Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask about. Have you ever been there?
Yeah, it’s pretty wild—all the false doors and weird staircases that go nowhere.
You know why that was built like that, that theory?
Oh no, it’s true. She was terrified of all the ghosts of the people that had died at the hands of Winchester guns, so she was cuckoo.
Watch the documentary on that; it’s pretty crazy.
Yeah, Hearst Castle is so beautiful. I went there as a kid years ago. It’s in San Luis Obispo, right?
Yeah, it’s so cool. The billiard room is pretty good too.
Yeah, it’s gorgeous. That whole area is just gorgeous. Carmel Valley, I mean, you want to think about Carmel Hills, Carmel Valley—all the things that go along with that. That’s really truly California at this point, and there’s hardly anything out there, which is the other part of it.
So, since we’re getting down to about 30 minutes here, maybe we should set the stage. It’s officially January 29th, 2025, so it is officially Lunar New Year to begin the Year of the Snake. We’re here on a blockchain called Cardano, which is powered by the Ouroboros consensus mechanism, which is a snake. Our top volume meme coin, SNCK, just got announced to be on Kraken’s roadmap, and we’re officially about to execute the Plutus hard fork and fully embrace decentralized community-run governance.
Let’s do a round the horn and let everybody kind of say their piece. So, Kyle, you want to go first since you’re up there in the top left?
Yeah, I mean, like, what specifically? Just kind of like open mic?
How are you feeling about the Year of the Snake, the Year of Cardano? What are you most excited about after this Plutus hard fork?
I feel good. It’s been a long road. We’ve got a little bit of work ahead of us just to kind of get everybody on the same page to make sure everybody’s fed and development keeps going. But I feel really, really good about it. I think we’re maturing as a community. We’re maturing, you know, at least from the angles that I see it. It’s going to be interesting, though; we’re going to have to figure out and get a foothold of where to win. Nothing that we haven’t really said before, but I’m excited for the future. I’m just thankful and grateful to be alive and have the opportunity to contribute to something. That’s how I feel. I’m happy to be here, and thanks for putting up with me, guys.
I love putting up with your stuff, Kyle, so just know it’s entertaining.
Absolutely.
All right, Aunt, what do you got?
I was going to say, why don’t we let the guests go first? I mean, we’re here all the time anyway.
Okay, well, we were going to go around in order, and then we’re going to figure it out. I think everyone—Andrew hasn’t been here recently, so we’re going to skip him.
I can go if you want.
No, you’re done; you’re going at the end. It’s been a long time coming. If you look way back in my chat history, there are probably a few messages where I was pissed off at Charles, like, “Let us take over the network or something.” But way back in the day, we weren’t ready then; he was right. But I think we are ready today, so it’s exciting. It’s scary. I’ve been blessed to work for the blockchain for the last couple of years, whether that’s at companies or just working as an SPO. So, yeah, I’m just really grateful to be here at this time, and it’s exciting to be able to delegate to DApps. I decided that I was not going to be a DApp; I’m leaving that to other people. But I still get a vote as an ADA holder, so it’s kind of cool. It’s a neat system of governance we’ve set up, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works.
Awesome. Go ahead, Sam.
I’ve been on this governance journey now since about September of 2022. It’s been a long time coming. We’ve been working our way through little by little, piece by piece. Remember launching that in summer 2023? We brought a bunch of you guys in, and we started doing governance originally at the SPOs, then we brought the DApps in, and then we started adding the CC features. Then we did smart contracts, and we decided we needed to add guardrails, so we did the guardrails stuff. Then we did some performance improvements, and we started pulsing votes so we could get closer to being able to go live. We’re pretty much ready to cut it, and then if I remember right, it was ZP 69 that was the big controversial thing. Let’s get this last thing in, so we’re like, “Okay, to the Ledger team, can we do this? Is this possible?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we can do this.” So we did, and then after popping that thing in, we were ready to release and change this year, and then finishing up with PMAN now, coming in this new year. So yeah, it’s been a wild ride, and I’m ready to take a break from governance for a while and focus on some simpler things like scalability.
Yeah, absolutely. Simpler. It’s crazy when you think about the accomplishment. It’s a crazy thing that we actually built an on-chain government, had a constitutional convention, you got liquid democracy, you got a constitutional republic mechanism, you have an infrastructure branch, you know, the SPOs. It’s just crazy when you think about it. We drew all this out. It was a little earlier than September 2022. I think we started talking about it maybe at Plutus Fest, or actually it was before Plutus Fest. It was probably August, I think. But it was around that time frame. It’s just everything’s a blur now. But you know what started as we wanted to do a series of iterations with the Genesis keys and gradually build up to a governing system, and we kept adding and adding and adding. Eventually, we were just like, “Oh, let’s just build a whole on-chain government.” So then we said, “Okay, this is roughly the sketch of what it needs to look like to do that.”
The problem is that normally you vote for these things to get these things in, but it’s a chicken-and-egg thing. We don’t have a robust enough voting system to create legitimacy for that. So how do we construct a process that brings everybody along for the journey and gets to a point where there’s enough consensus? So then the workshop idea was proposed, and we worked on that for a while. Thousands of people participated, and some people loved it, and some people hated it. But at least it got us somewhere.
The other thing that had to be done was that we needed institutions. If you remember ScotFest, I said that for governance, you need three pillars: democratic consent, institutions, and constitutional representation, and they have to balance each other. No one side can be too strong, or else the whole system falls apart. The problem is we didn’t really have a lot of institutions that were fit for purpose to truly represent the roadmap and the development of Cardano. Intersect got formed, and the challenge intersect had about six years' worth of expectations put on its plate, and instantaneously it became Public Enemy Number One because all that pent-up rage of wanting to participate was there. So, Intersect had a lot of trouble trying to get to a point where it was decent, although I think it made enormous progress in a year. But a lot more has to be done to get them where they need to go.
We also wanted to make sure they were competing institutions because that would kind of keep people honest. You can’t have a monopoly of power for one institution, so how do you build a system where you have institutions but people can compete with the institutions? That delicate balance is really amazing to see how the community wrapped their hands around it. It’s really become something special. Today, right here, right now, as soon as the hard fork is initiated, Cardano will be, as measured by the EDI, the most decentralized cryptocurrency project in the world. We beat Bitcoin, which is a truly amazing thing for our 10-year journey. It’s the product of the hard work of thousands of people in probably about a hundred countries for two years straight. When you think about it, it’s just incredibly humbling that we went on this journey together.
Absolutely.
I kind of surrounded myself with that energy that is Matt, right? I’ve got his photo; I always have that sitting up near my coffee, so the first thing I see in the morning is Matthew’s face looking right at me. I’m grabbing my coffee at the same time, and I’m like, “Hold on a second, let me rub the sleep out of my eyes, and then I’ll get started.” The other part is that I absolutely know he loved golf, and I was looking forward to actually playing a round of golf with him. I didn’t get a chance to do that, but I will be playing a round of golf in his honor, and I’ll be thinking of him while I’m doing it.
Sometimes the drive and desire necessary to do something comes from somewhere else you don’t know where it comes from, and then you get this idea and just go do it. I think Charles epitomizes that with the fact that he just decided to leave Ethereum, which at that time seemed relatively successful, and decided, “
Two nodes survived the hard fork. That will be funny for anyone watching. Congratulations to Chris and the team at e.org! Chris, can you share? Oh man, we got blocks going right to the bleeding edge here. Yeah, watch it right now. I love etx o.org; it’s amazing.
A visualization of the first block from a community pool—oh, well, that’s a good bet, man. The operation gets it, and there we are. All right, let’s see when the first one is going to come through. Give it to me! All right, Kyle, you can have it. Slot battles earlier—Martin, that was me fantasizing about getting the first block, and then [__] got two blocks already. Nice, yeah, that was fast.
Welcome to Chang 2, boys and girls, like nothing happened. I think EU might have gone down; that was underwhelming. It just keeps on working, and it’s weird. We were expecting it to break or something. One of the reasons it was going down over the last three days—hold on, let me make sure my stuff’s up. Did you forget to upgrade your servers? No, I did not; I did a good job.
Someone commented earlier and said, “Is that some guy working on a motorcycle in the back?” So, who got the first block? Barry made the first one? Barry, that’s a choice. Good job, Alandro. Yeah, I’m on tip; I’m good. I can confirm it’s 10 Z protocol version. Yeah, okay, yeah, guys, I can confirm Note 10.2 also survived. Nice, there you go. We’re testing live; we are testing live on the bleeding edge.
The drip drops Ledger State dump is still running. That usually takes about four or five minutes to complete because I’ve been asking the team to give us smaller Ledger State dumps for about three years, and nobody’s done it yet. The third block was in battle.
Since we’ve got a good amount of people tuning in, it does stand to say now is when we get serious. It’s important if you’re just a passive ADA holder out there to go to 1694.io or gov.tools and explore your DPs. Martin here is a good choice; Kyle is also a choice. There are a ton of other great community members that are DPs.
The important thing is now you need to either become a DP yourself and participate in the on-chain governance, or you will need to delegate to one in order to withdraw your staking rewards. We need to get everybody out there, rock the vote, and get the delegations up. It’s all on us now; there’s nobody else to blame. It’s going to take the entire community getting involved and participating, so it’s a great incentive to do that to make sure that people are getting this.
Yeah, that was me before the hard fork. It’s just more of the same now; we’re all in crazy town. I want to add to this—yeah, go out, choose your DP, or become a DP yourself. But don’t become a DP just to be a DP because we don’t want dead DPs laying around doing nothing. We want to have an active community. If you’re interested in governance and you want to become a DP, please do so, but also contribute to the discussions and do your voting.
If you think governance is not for you, you can also delegate your voting power to your DP of choice. Oh yeah, and probably also, it’s fair to say if you want nothing to do with this governance stuff, you can choose to automatically abstain. Or if you really think we’re heading in the wrong direction, you can also delegate to the auto no confidence just to say that you hate everything we’re doing here and you don’t trust it. Those are valid options that you can choose, but you still must make a choice.
So get out there and give it a whirl; it’s not that hard. I did it, and I’m almost a boomer. I managed to do it, so if I can do it and become a DP and have my voice heard, you can too. It’s very simple, and it’s gotten even easier since I did it, so definitely get out there and do that.
Shout out real quick to everybody in the entire community. The chat has been blown up with the homies from the C community. I’ve seen like everybody I know—just thousands and thousands of comments. It’s been wild. Thanks for coming and hanging out, homies. We have 18,500 plus viewers already. What a crazy day!
Oh nice, well, if anybody wants to come in, we don’t have anybody waiting backstage, do we? We got a full deck? No, we’re open. Yeah, if anybody wants to come kick it with us, I guess I can drop off and let some people up. We got space. We’re not going to really talk in too much depth about governance or anything too much. I mean, we got a lot going on.
We’re going to be talking about that for the next three or four weeks hardcore. So, you delegate the Hoger? Oh dude, it’s the ZK did dude toes, bro! You got to come hang out with us, man. Wait, is Hog a DP now? Yeah, Hog’s a DP. Nice! Still hanging out in Estonia, getting all his food delivered by a little robot. That just goes to show that there is no discrimination; literally, anybody is allowed to be a DP if they’re allowed.
Totally true. Well, folks, thank you for having me. I just want to remember Matthew Pman and may his memory be eternal. Thank you all for having me up here, and see you next time. Thank you, Sam. You’ve been a huge part of this whole process. Before you go, I wish we could have done this with Charles here, but Chris, you want to do that to Charles?
We dug up an old one, but a good one. Oh yeah, this is a throwback; this is the first or second time Charles came to hang out with us. Yeah, something—I think it’s a single-digit episode. So what happens is if the dollar payment rails are compromised, and I don’t mean compromised from the outside, but compromised from the inside and abused and taken for granted, then you see alternative systems popping up.
You see Bitcoin; you see this BRICS currency; you see Saudi Arabia denominating oil trades with China and RMB. That’s not such a big deal; RMB is tied to the dollar, so it’s kind of a dollar trade anyway, but it’s not using the dollar. The US dominance in global currency markets is starting to wane, and that’s a problem.
Chris, that’s the wrong one, man. It was still—I know, but I let it play because I wanted to share it anyway. Wrong clip, but good clip. Anyway, here’s the one. You’re losing smart money. Maybe worst-case scenario, it’s going to be an investor lawsuit or something like that. If you go out there and say we have all these government deals, we have all this and that, you know you’re done.
Chris was—sorry, I’m not yelling at you. I’m sorry; I felt like such an [__]. Let me explain myself. I was so tired that night that my intention was to mute my microphone and yawn, but I turned off my freaking camera and yawned out loud. He’s like, “These [__]!” Like, “God damn!”
Chris, that was a speech with background music. Especially with the background music, I know you can hear Chris. No problem; that was awesome, man. Oh my god, very nice! Yeah, shout out to Cardano Honus there in the chat. Definitely vibes as Shelley vibes. I can totally feel that. This is like the completion—I don’t want to say the completion because the work’s not done, right?
But it’s like what we started five years ago is finally real—really real, you know? So yeah, we’re getting right ahead to a [__] bull run that’s going to really raise spirits. Don’t get me started! I know we’re a lot better off than we were six months ago; that’s for sure.
Oh, we’re doing awesome, man. As far as the bull run goes, get ready because you’ve got admin right now that is loading up with people in every aspect of our government that are pro-crypto. So, you know, wait for all the different laws and regulations that are going to come out. Some people aren’t going to hate it; some people are going to love it, but everybody’s going to enjoy the upside to this because it’s absolutely going to be amazing.
Yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting from a regulatory standpoint. I mean, strategically, I’m leaning more on the side of being more risky than risk-averse. Yeah, as far as an individual, yes, but at the same time, there should be guardrails put in place. Charles talked about this a little while ago, having to do with an end-user Bill of Rights. He actually went to Washington and talked about it, and I think he used the F-word like 12 times while he was talking about it. I’m like, I love this guy even more!
I don’t even know, you know, in front of a bunch of people there in Washington. Elaborate a little bit more on that—like, an end-user Bill of Rights. What that means for a normal person who’s not familiar with the self-custodial aspect of crypto is just having protections, right? So the idea is as an end user coming into traditional finance, if somebody has done something surreptitiously and taken something from you, you have the legal right to go after them.
The beauty of it is that those who have done that had to legally put up their real name, their real business, whatever the case may be, and then legally be compliant in order to be able to operate. From there, you have legal recourse when it comes to that. That’s extraordinarily important in blockchain; we haven’t had that. It’s literally black boxes everywhere. People are just running things until they’re not, and then they disappear.
So it’s a problem, right? And Charles talked about that a little bit, and it’s one of those things that we absolutely need because there are a lot of people that want to get involved, that want to invest, but are afraid or worried or concerned because there are these huge hacks all the time. People take advantage of everybody, so if we can mitigate some of that, that would be amazing.
Thanks, James. I don’t know, Chris, you want to think of a crazy question to ask everybody? Why you got two places up? Is that you and Anthony? That’s me and Anthony. ZK, I just sent you an invite if you want to come hang out with us.
Hold there, Mike. Yeah, sorry, I got a sick kid at home. So, Mr. Hornet, scram! Hey, Mike! Hey, Mike! Hello, hello! One, two, check, check. We can hear you! We can hear you all the way from the Arctic tundra of the north, the great white north! Come on, man!
Rush, any technical difficulties there? Maybe we can hear him, but he can’t hear us. This is great! The guy is like the Cardano governance expert but can’t work a headset on a computer. Love it! It’s like Patrick can’t take a photo. Exactly! Like, can run the premier minting engine on Cardano, can’t take a picture straight up and down to save his life.
I guess you only have so much room for tech [__] in your brain before you have to start throwing out the basics. Can you hear? Yeah, I can now! So you guys—Mike, save the hard fork! No, I was lucky. I was just very lucky, and we should not talk about this. Let’s—Mike’s not allowed to talk about it; that’s security committee stuff only for now.
Okay, here’s a community question for you, Jillian, if you want to take it. What do you think about where we’re going now in this new era of governance? I think it’s the right direction. I’ve never really had a lot to say about governance in particular. My background is in politics, but I was in campaigning, not legislation; it absolutely bores me to tears. So I’m more than happy to delegate to a DP.
At one point, Matt was considering becoming a DP, and I was like, “Please God, don’t add one more thing to your list of things.” But yeah, in general, I think it’s absolutely the right direction. I’m very excited to see where it goes and excited to see what we as a community make happen now that it’s in our hands.
Yeah, so I ended up being the DP from Yoan, by the way. Jenny made me do it. She’s here, so I’m going to step back so she can come in and jam. Are we there yet? I haven’t checked the time. Oh yeah, we’re well past it. That was like 15 minutes ago, man! Time’s coming gone; it’s over! Even I know that!
You got to make sure your nodes are still working, man. You want to tip? M is so confident in this hard fork tech that he literally slept through the hard fork. Probably, he’s got to go work tonight, so you got to give him a break. But it’s really crazy. I mean, we have forked to protocol version 10 in the test net, I think, 20 times or so.
But every time you do it on the test net, it’s like, “Okay, yeah, it’s working.” “Okay, no, this is not working.” “Okay, yeah, let’s redo it.” “Yeah, okay.” But it hits different on mainnet. It really feels like the shell [__]. This was really this new era, this new thing. Everyone rushed and registered their stake pools.
Let’s see if people are rushing now in submitting governance proposals. I hope nobody’s rushing to submit anything; actually, that would be chaotic. I have checked so far; we don’t have anything new on yet. I’ve got my researcher people, so it always notifies me as soon as a new action comes in. Shout out to NS because that’s a great tool.
I can directly speak to Mar and Stak Nuts. You’re the record holder in the firsts on Cardano. No, I already beat him to the first action, so I think he gave up on that one. But now in this new era, you can submit the info action if you want to be the first one this time again.
I think he already covered the Constitution. Somebody—these comments are hilarious. Kyle looks like he needs to clean his room! Somebody said about that. He’s got like two Ducatis in various stages of decomposition right there. So you got to give a heart a break; solid, that’s a lot of fun.
All right, B, so this was your first hard fork as a dev. How do you feel? What’s up, B? I feel like crying. I mean, oh my God, everything works! What am I supposed to do now? Those are the best kind of releases when they’re uneventful.
Yeah, but I wanted some chaos. I wanted people to be ripping their hair out and everything, like, “Oh my God, what have we done?” No, no, no, we had [music]. Trust me, somebody is a [__]; somebody didn’t update their app or something. We’re going to find out. It happened off the floor.
No, no, no, there’s always one [__], right? We’ll see in a few hours. Oh [__], this app doesn’t work, or I can’t do any trades on this wallet or whatever. So we’ll see. Adam made sure to make me know or to make sure that I checked with everybody that all our [__] was good before I started talking [__].
Yeah, like make sure you have your own house in order before you go and talk about other people not having their stuff working. So, oh yeah, I’ve been working together for a minute. So are you guys ready to be overwhelmed by governance [music] actions? Mike, what do you think the first-ever actual actionable governance action is going to be about?
Yeah, we were doing bets a little bit earlier on what the—so we know that the Constitution is slated to go out tomorrow at some time, but is somebody going to put one in tonight? Like for a K increase or change some other parameters or treasury withdrawal? What do you think? Maybe just another info action?
Yeah, no confidence. Honestly, with the people that I know who tested on Central Net, I don’t think that’s going to happen. There’s probably a handful of people right now who know how to submit a governance action, so I would guess that the Constitution is going to be the first one that’s based.
All right, so I need to go, and you have taught half of Cardano how to do this tonight, so I wouldn’t be surprised if your minions came along. Minions? Really? It’s a nice way to say it; these are good people! What are you talking about? Mike’s minions? I say that with love!
Only with love, Mike’s minions. I like it. It’ll look nice, though; the graphics will really be nice with a bunch of really filigree and other kinds of cool stuff. Do you have a script where I can just say, “Submit a new governance action,” and it just instantly works?
I do have a script—oh, sorry. The only thing that’s not currently enabled in the scripts is to submit the parameter changes because, yeah, with the governance, with the guardrail script, it’s still a bit unclear. I just wanted to wait until we have a new function in the CLI so we can calculate the costs offline, and not because currently, you can only calculate it with an online node.
But if there’s the need, I can release it right away; it’s working. But yeah, let’s see. Adam’s just itching to be the first to submit. I’m the first to submit the first, so why not be the first to submit in this next phase? But I don’t have anything good to submit, so we’ll see how I feel later on tonight.
You could do like everyone else—should the next hard fork be called the Quantum Husky hard fork? I feel like we already have one going.
Tools T LS have lists of all the DApps that are out there, so you can check the Cardano Forum. You can read all the introductions, but you can't delegate from the Cardano Forum. It's a little bit temporary.
What's up, TOS? How are you guys doing? I was just writing a message to say I've gate-crashed your party. I can't believe it! Nice one, congratulations! I'm proud of you all. You're scaring me, but this is exciting.
Can you tell us a little bit about the work you're doing in your project? I know you've done videos on why you're attracted to the ecosystem, but this is the first time I've had a chance to speak to you. You cook, and a lot of these guys cook too. Everybody shows up, and we cook together. So, what are you cooking?
Yeah, definitely! It's a pleasure to be invited up. To be honest, I've been keeping a little bit in the background. Since I turned up, I've been trying to learn about your ecosystem because it's quite large. The ghost chain rumor is quite funny because it's the total opposite of what I've been experiencing.
I'm looking into zero-knowledge decentralized DNS, and I've been on this mission. It's a bit of a unique mission; I'm trying to build a system that isn't based around a financial token. It's a free system, and I'm trying to keep away investors to protect the protocol. I've kind of gone against the grain in trying to build blockchain technology, but it's been fun.
It's been great bumping into you guys and watching what you're doing with this hard fork and decentralized governance. It ties in very much with what I'm researching and working on. I think it's perfect timing that I turned up. Whether I can pull off what I'm interested in is yet to be seen, but I think it's a fun experiment to try to include in this ecosystem.
I've been slowly meeting more of your amazing minds in the ecosystem. I know I'm a bit outspoken, which I don't think is a bad thing. It seems to be part of the Cardano community; it keeps people talking, and the community is buzzing.
Cheers! I've literally gate-crashed your party, and I'm quite proud of that. You must delegate to a DApp right now to withdraw rewards. I had one of those wallets, and I intentionally did not delegate yet just to test when it goes live. I tried to withdraw rewards from it, and it failed.
Just for clarity, you will still earn rewards being delegated to a stake pool. You don't have to rush choosing a DApp; you do need to choose one, and you should choose one. Your rewards are not going anywhere, and you will continue to get them. You just won't be able to withdraw them from your rewards account to your UTXO balance until you delegate to a DApp or one of the auto abstain or no confidence options.
Is Chris back in the show? No, he's backstage. I think we still have ten up here on this screen right now. I'll jump down. Can I make a suggestion? Am I allowed to plug the LAL DApp?
There's a group, the FAOT Trek group, that has created a Socratic pluralism DApp. It's like a group of groups doing a social experiment as a DApp group called LAL. I highly recommend people check it out because I think it's an interesting experiment in decentralized governance.
Thanks for letting me share that. Before you jump out, how do you spell that? I couldn't translate that from British. My apologies; I hope I'm giving the right name. I believe it's L-A-L. I'm so sorry if I'm giving the wrong name.
Yeah, LAL. They're doing research on this DApp, and it's very interesting. If people are questioning something different, check it out.
Thank you, everybody! Have a lovely evening. Nice to see you!
Mike, I was just saying that if Chris was here, we should probably push for some communications about people delegating. We should take the opportunity to push that they should delegate to a DApp to take their rewards because people are going to scam others. People aren't going to know how to withdraw their rewards, and others will take advantage of that.
Can a bunch of DApps that already have a sufficient amount of ADA behind them get together to delegate it towards another single DApp, almost like creating a party system?
They can collude, but they cannot redirect their voting power somewhere else. A bunch of people, like ten people with millions of ADA behind them, cannot point it towards a single DApp. They can't move it because that stake doesn't belong to them, but they can collude together to vote.
Right, like creating a super PAC?
Absolutely!
I had a question, but now it has escaped me.
Go ahead, anybody else?
I don't know if Martin's talking, but I think it's James. You can delegate your voting power only once, so one step from you to another, but not again and again.
Right, like you'd have to build a sophisticated smart contract that takes custody of the funds.
No, because I was just worried about the kind of things we have in the real world, like super PACs and stuff like that.
There's nothing blockchain doesn't fix, like traditional offline bribery and collusion. But the DApps themselves can't re-delegate, so that's one of the points people make about this not being truly liquid democracy. Normally, in liquid democracy, you can have that kind of recursion of delegating.
In this case, nothing stops if all of us were DApps voting the same way and having some secret offline meeting to figure out how we're going to vote. You're not going to fix that just because of blockchain. But I can't let Mike vote on behalf of people who have delegated to me. I would still have to cast the vote, and you'll be able to see Adam cast a vote a certain way.
If your DApp doesn't vote or doesn't vote the way you think they should, that's a good sign that you should move to a different DApp that aligns with your vision for Cardano.
Is re-delegation similar to stake pools where it takes two epochs for it to become active?
I don't believe so. Because of the way votes are tallied, I'm pretty sure you can register in this epoch and actually delegate or cast votes in this epoch. The tallying doesn't happen until the start of the next epoch.
So, if I chose to delegate to DApp A this morning and then realized it was a mistake and delegated to DApp B, I could do that, but it would only count in the following epoch?
Yes, your power will only be counted with whoever it's with during the transition to the next epoch.
I thought it was tallied before the vote during that very same epoch boundary.
There's a running tally, but it's only on the epoch boundary when we lock in a snapshot. That's when voting power is locked. You can change your vote or move your delegation right up until that point, and that will change the voting power of that entity in the next epoch.
It's not quite like block production where you have to wait two epochs because you need to get into the slot lottery, which is why you need that extra time.
So, this is good. People who delegate to the wrong DApp still have a chance to quickly move to a new DApp before the vote gets used up.
Yes, if you delegated to Kyle, you still have time to move your delegation over to Martin. It's not too late.
So, don’t delay—delegate to a DApp today!
Kyle will be the number one DApp tomorrow!
This feels really good because I usually... that's totally fine. I like the fact that Kyle's a whipping boy here. Just watch the more we tell them to stay away from him.
This is actually a whole reverse psychology guerrilla advertising campaign to drive delegation to Kyle.
If I delegate to Kyle, for example, and he doesn't vote on anything and becomes inactive, my delegation would still stay delegated to him. But if he retires, then my delegation goes away, and if I don't re-delegate, I cannot withdraw my rewards.
You'll be fine. You don’t have to undelegate from anybody. Once you're delegated to one SPO or DApp, you can simply update and delegate to a new SPO or a new DApp.
Okay, let me get complicated. If I registered a certificate on-chain to register as a DApp and I put a 500 ADA deposit, what happens if I deregister my DApp certificate—not just let it go inactive—but get my deposit back?
You lose your delegations.
Okay, now they have to delegate again to get their rewards.
Yep. For those of you thinking about becoming a DApp, there are plenty of people out there willing to help. Mike H actually helped me; he went on screen share and helped me get through some of the hurdles I had at the beginning.
I'm imagining most of those have probably been iterated. It's much easier to become a DApp now.
On the other side, when you're voting on technical things, you don't necessarily have to vote on particular technical matters if that's not your forte. It's not required of you to do that.
A lot of the technical stuff can be left to those who are DApps and understand a lot of that, while the other stuff, like treasury and social matters, comes along with our society. We just created our own self-governed society.
You can be a part of that and have a voice in a real way. I've watched people from all over the planet. Kit recently became a DApp, and people helped him not only get started but also with the ADA he needed to ensure his voice was heard from where he lives.
This is absolutely amazing that we can do stuff like that. We want to make sure that everybody has a chance to be part of this in some way, and having your voice heard is somewhat unusual, especially depending on where you live.
This might be very new and empowering, so get in there, get started, and reach out to anybody else in here, including myself. We'll be more than happy to direct you or help you as well.
In those situations where you aren't sure what you want to vote on or you don't have the technical knowledge, I would also turn to your delegates. If they have that knowledge and want you to vote in a certain way, and you are a DApp with a lot of delegation power, that's a perfect opportunity to speak with your delegates to understand what they believe is the best solution.
That's good advice in general. The types of DApps are going to parallel the types of stakers to some degree. They're going to be positioning for different reasons. Some people chase the lowest margins, some want to support ecosystem contributors, and some want ISPO tokens.
On the DApp side, you'll get groups of people who really just don't care, while others, like Martin, are sophisticated but don't want to deal with it. In that case, it would make sense for someone like Martin to reach out to his constituency because, from a high level, I would presume Martin's constituency would be more sophisticated than not.
Whereas, you know, the Bobo YouTuber guy who tweets about charts—I don't think he should listen to his constituency.
Get ready for the rise of popularity contests as well!
Real quick, there's a question here I want to hit in case it might help some other people. Mike, can you explain this? I want to fill out this question to make it clear for anybody who’s not familiar with DApp staking and ADA reward staking. These are two distinct things; they are parallel but very different.
In general, you don't have to retract your delegation to delegate. You can just delegate, delegate, delegate—just move your delegation.
Would I have to undelegate for my current SPO, then re-delegate and pay the fee?
For staking in general, no. You don’t have to if you like your SPO; you can just stick with it. You have two options, and they are different. You can stay with your SPO and delegate to a DApp or just change that delegation. It has no impact on your delegation to stake pool operators.
Once your address is registered and delegated, you've already been participating in staking. It's just a simple update to add a DApp delegation, like a simple Cardano transaction fee.
Nothing crazy, but delegating to a D and staking to an SPO are two different functions. They’re just tied together in that you have to be delegated to a DP or be a DP yourself in order to withdraw your staking reward. That’s how they are connected, but they are two different delegations. Your delegation to an SPO doesn’t need to be the same as your delegation to a D. Your D and your SPO can and probably should be two different individuals or groups of people.
I see Ken, Mr. Joyous Testimony, aka Baggy Pants, in the comments. He’s throwing up the utensils because it’s a happy fork day. We’ve said the word "fork" so many times that I’m hungry, so I’m going to go have some proof of steak. I don’t know what the rest of y’all are going to do, but thank you all for joining us. If you want to keep hanging out, by all means, but I’m going to drop. Thank you, guys, and hey, see you, brother.
This question jumped out at me when I saw it because recently I was working with a customer service issue that was completely unrelated to the issue I was trying to solve for this user. I noticed in his wallet history that when he would change pools, he was doing it fairly frequently, a couple of times a year. He would deregister his stake and then re-register to the new pool. When you do that, not only are you having to spend a little bit more, but you’re going to lose stake for three epics in between every one of those changes you make. So it’s much better to move your delegation without deregistering.
That’s why I created Fart Coin. I thought, "Oh, I can make Fart Coin," and I made it probably like two weeks after Space Coins. The purpose of Fart Coin was, and maybe it’ll still fulfill its purpose, so SPOs could subscribe to a service to sprinkle Fart Coin on their delegators that left. I’d pay for that.
I have a quick question. There is currently no incentive for being a D, unlike the incentive for staking, right? The budgets are going to come out. I don’t know if they’re super public yet, but I think it’s probably because I’m in a leadership position on the committee that I got visibility into a budget that was released. I can go ahead and say that in one of the budgets, there is a line item for D compensation. But until then, all you’re signing up for is public scorn. That’s right.
What I saw was that the top 150 was discussed during the D.E.R. workshops earlier last year to see if there was any way to compensate at least some to make it more attractive for more people. With the numbers that we have now, maybe Adam’s trying to kick me out of the top 150. That actually brings up some interesting conversation because if you have two competing budget proposals, and one gives a lot of money to D’s while the other one is just a fair amount, then which one’s going to pass?
The issue, Michael, is that what you do is you put a DP compensation package with a bunch of other items that are not necessary. You understand what I’m saying? The DFC compensation package is floated alongside a whole bunch of other items. That’s what I’m going to be digging into. I’m not stupid, you know that. If I were going to be devious about it, that’s what I would do.
If you want to check who you’re delegated to for a D, it’s going to depend on the wallet platform you’re using. For example, if you go to staking, there’s a D governance section. You can see who you’re delegated to, and if you want to abstain or express no confidence, you can do that.
To answer Chris's question, yes, that changed. It changed just today, a few hours ago, or an hour and a half ago. It is something very new, and you have to delegate to a D if you want to withdraw rewards moving forward. You will not lose rewards; they’ll stack, but you’ve got to go do it.
Another thing, because this is now a requirement, a lot of people are going to be talking about going to a D. Make sure you are doing it in a wallet that you trust. Don’t click on any links or buttons or go to websites that you don’t recognize. That’s how they get you; they’ll drain your wallet every time.
If you look at Eternal, I’ve been with Eternal for a very long time. Just go there, get your wallet extension, and within it, all you need to do is go to your account. From there, it’ll show you where you can go into governance and everything of that nature. You can even set up with your D; it’s all very natural, it happens very easily, and you’re not following any links from anywhere, which is the important thing.
It’s a wallet-level activity. You know what you delegate and choose a D just like you’re choosing to stake to a stake pool. You should be doing it in a wallet, so just make sure you do it within the wallet that you use every day and don’t click anything.
Fart Burp says, "How do I make my D bigger?" You could rub it. I don’t think you’re going to go there, but there are things you can order online from Amazon too. I think there’s some other stuff you can do as well. Some of it might come from China and take a while, not that I would know. There’s a little bit of a lead time there, so you have to take that into account.
AB, I just wanted to say if you don’t use Eternal or if you feel more comfortable using a platform to delegate, there is Tempo Vote. They have multiple options that you can use. I’ll add the link in our chat so that it can be shared. It’s a very good tool; it has a list of D’s and also governance actions in a more interactive way if you’re interested in that.
For the record, we have a couple of partners, Vesper and others, that we work with, so I just want to make sure I mention them as well. They are also great wallets to use and provide you with that same utility.
Will anyone be monitoring the D’s performance? Hell yeah, man! The Cardano community is going to have a whole new party for Cardano governance.
I don’t appreciate you calling me Karen, but sure, thank you. No, no, it’s a breed of people. They’re going to be so focused on whether someone voted on something, you know, while their mom’s dying in the hospital. It’s going to get weird, but more so, how have they been leaning? Somebody is creating a nice dashboard showing how often they are active.
If it’s something that’s being funded through the committee, we might get some nice visualizations, but I honestly don’t think it’s a monetizable thing within the ecosystem. There’s a group called Syn AI with admin, and they are getting into governance. They are also creating their own AI D rep, which is going to be interesting, so be on the lookout for that.
They will have solutions that give you data sets and things of that nature that you can view based on the D reps currently within our system and those who have voted, what they voted on, and their voting consistency. There will be a lot of that coming up too.
That’s reasonable, like analytics on how D’s are behaving. That could be a big proposal guide service or just insights. It’s also useful for the delegates because what if you delegate to somebody thinking they vote in alignment with your views, but then you realize that they campaigned one way but are voting another way?
I think people are going to build stuff that keeps people honest, showing people’s records like a D directory. I think we’ll see that, and I think we’ll probably see those funded. Expect my donation to do something like that too, where part of their page or website will have something in there as well. I can totally see Darlington spinning that up as part of his brand.
It would be interesting to see if D delegations are as sticky as pool delegations or if it’s more fluid. The gamification is where it’s going to get interesting. With stake pools, we had 1% come out. What’s going to prevent somebody with significant stake from doing a treasury withdrawal?
We haven’t really talked about treasury withdrawals much, but that’s going to be the drama. That’s why half the people who are involved with governance didn’t show up until we had treasury activity. It’s all about the treasury right now. There’s a lot of money involved. We’re trying to pull out some $200 million this year, which isn’t unusual compared to how much ADA we were giving to Catalyst for a while.
When you look at some of the overhead, it’s when you get down to what the core needs versus what’s being pulled out. You can always scrutinize. The other side of that is auditing too, right? Those who are getting treasury disbursements and what they’re doing, and the juice versus the squeeze, everything that goes along with that.
Is my audio bad? Yes, sorry, it is awful. I don’t know why exactly it is. What kind of microphone is it? A cheap one? Chris, it sounds like proximity; you’re not quite close enough.
Does it sound any better like this? Yes, if it’s close to you. I think what’s going to happen is that we’re going to need some auditing tools within it, right? Performance-based stuff as well. From what I understand, we don’t have a lot of that we’re working on right now, but as we start to get into this, similar to Catalyst, in the beginning, it was a free-for-all. We had a button where you could get instant money immediately after you got approved for your voting in the first three funds.
We’re definitely going to need a bit more of an auditing setup and also a review of those particular things to ensure we know where we’re learning on certain things that are being taken advantage of and where to fix those.
One thing I would ask for is if some suggestion comes up that will help plug the holes that weren’t accounted for, is to not do it to the Catalyst proposals that are in flight. For example, one of the things that happened around Fund 12 or 13 was the introduction of milestones. After the proposal was approved, people had to rush to figure out how to get this submitted, and it kind of messed up quite a few projects.
Would it be something that people can vote on and say, "This is how we’re going to guard the treasury," and then people say yes, and it goes into effect? Or are they going to do it while the Catalyst fund is in flight?
When you start to have certain glaring issues that are being taken advantage of, do we have a way to take immediate action that could be done very quickly to ensure that it doesn’t get taken advantage of? We don’t want to get into a committee for a long period trying to solve the problem because everybody has to be a part of it to make a good decision on what to do next.
I don’t know; it should be interesting to watch this unfold. I’ll be watching from the outside; I’m not going to get involved in the governance at all, but I’m excited for you guys.
What are everybody’s top predictions? It can be odd, weird, or obvious. Rename Cardano to Cardano Cavo? A big exchange is going to come wielding some big bag and become a D and do something funky. It’s going to get interesting.
It was also interesting in the pool votes from the exchanges because I think Binance voted to abstain, so they took the position of, "Okay, we’re out." I think Coinbase voted yes on all of their pools.
It’ll be interesting to see what they are doing. Is that an attack vector? If you think about it, because probably they’re not fully decentralized.
The vector is ultimately, I don’t think it’s going to be a people-based governance system. That’s something very special that we get to experience now as a young community. I think entities are going to come in; they’re going to secure TVL, and they’re going to vote with the TVL. That’s what it’s going to be. It’s going to be the most powerful entities maneuvering to control governance.
It’s a revenue-generating machine, and not all good people are going to come. The state distribution of it right now really depends on how that pans out. If we can have a mass event where people drive self-custody first, that’s possible, but I don’t see that happening.
I see services coming in, taking foothold, and then it takes two or three to get product-market fit. Those two or three are loading assets into a smart contract that a user doesn’t even care about if they have custody or not because they can see it on their app. Most people don’t care about privacy; they’re posting their whole personal lives on the internet.
The whole concept of self-custody doesn’t make sense until you really need it or you really get it. Most people in our space are nerds, and we really get it. We understand what’s happening in the economy.
That’s the other inflection point, right? The economy is changing pretty significantly. We may be on a weird shift. If they do some crazy stuff like eliminate income tax and do some funky things to turn it around, then an economic crisis could be averted.
But I think that’s going to be a really tall order because not only do you have to get a lot of revenue, but the debt is pretty nasty. At that point, we’re going to be able to provide products that are useful, or our industry is going to become much more tangibly useful than it is today.
Most people think they can get rich doing lazy trading, you know, trading meme coins or whatever. That’s the majority of the adoption happening. I think most of it’s going to be industrial; it’s going to be enterprise. I don’t think retail is going to come in the way we think they are.
I think retail will come in through the banks. There’s been an executive order passed; banks are now allowed to custody crypto assets. It’s only a matter of time before they start advertising those products to their existing customer base.
It’s a very easy way for people to get into crypto—just go to their bank website and buy a little bit. But it’s bank custody, right? That’s what I’m getting at. You’re going to have these entities that amass all this power.
If Cardano is successful in positioning with those entities, to me, that’s always been the vector to governance. My 70-year-old parents don’t own any crypto. If they did, they would do it through their bank.
When they do that, the banks are amassing all of this ADA they’re custodying, and that’s voting power. What happens if a couple of entities like this got together and said, "We’re going to do a treasury withdrawal with our billions of ADA that is currently under our custody"? Is that going to be preventable by the community? Would they look at it and say, "This is not constitutional"?
No, it’s constitutional. The only protection against that is don’t give them your ADA; don’t sell them your ADA. I just got off a call with the delegates where they were working on the definitions, and that was one of the things we were discussing: who actually owns the ADA and what they are able to do about it.
If this type of sentence was in there, we would be able to stop it. If you use your power by the power given to you by the people who are under your custody, that would be unconstitutional. But if that is not there, then it’s a bit funnier to discuss in terms of service.
I can sneak in my terms of service; I can put anything I want, and people are going to click "okay." I just tweak the terms. How can we? I honestly don’t think custodians should be allowed to vote just because of the vector. Isn’t that the same as an exchange?
Yes, but they are, you know, if you give them permission. You just put terms in your terms that say, "Hey, I’m going to have full power of attorney." We never wanted exchanges and other custodians to even be allowed to stake. That’s why the enterprise address existed.
They just all saw, "Well, there’s nothing stopping me from staking and taking more ADA," so they did. The same thing with the voting; there’s nothing preventing them. It’s a permissionless blockchain, so they will do it.
What if you had a cap on how much delegation you can get, similar to how much delegation you can have before you stop producing blocks? You can split it the same way into hundreds of D’s. In a permissionless chain, there really is no way to prevent that.
In fact, I think they probably should not have ever done that with stake pools, just because I don’t think it did what they originally wanted it to do. Would it help if exchanges or maybe in the future banks had a governance body that interacted within the community to make sound and educated decisions?
Yes, they could choose to do that with their existing structure. Everybody gets those little ballots in the mail when you own stock, and you get a say in their board meeting or whatever. They could do something similar.
If there’s something in particular they want to poll their community of crypto holders with, they could do that. Will they choose to do that? Probably not, but who knows? That’s why when they buy ADA or any other crypto, they leave it on the exchange out of convenience because there’s just one login to remember to get access to it.
Complacency will lead to mass power. A lot of people don’t understand that. They don’t even know that’s a thing. ADA holders or crypto holders leaving their crypto on exchanges face a huge learning curve involved with purchasing crypto and then self-custody of crypto.
Most of them understand it as storage of wealth, and that’s fine, but very few understand because it’s so new that it is actual voting power. They have no clue that having it on an exchange is forfeiting their voting power and sometimes their staking rewards.
I go through this all the time with new people. The first step is obviously the exchange interaction, buying it there, and then they’re finally comfortable with that and want to self-custody. You start bringing them down the rabbit hole slowly. Most have no idea; there’s no explanation when you go to Kraken or Coinbase or Binance.
They’re not incentivized for you to take your crypto off the exchange, so of course,
They offer a 5% rate, and then from there, they loan that money out elsewhere and make more money on it. So, there's probably something in their terms of service, like what Kyle said. Once you click that button, you agree to the terms. From there, they can leverage that particular asset for themselves and make money off it. That's the whole goal.
Well, that's exactly what happened; it's risky though, because that's what happened to FTX. In a real way, it was crazy what they did. They were buying companies to get their tokens and leverage them elsewhere. It was amazing how many people they bought to make that happen and then leverage that asset, creating a house of cards that we currently have. That's the whole point of some of the commercial paper and things like that they had. That's one of the reasons China almost went under with their housing market and things like that.
In 2008, we saw similar issues where they were literally getting loans, selling those loans to someone else, and then leveraging that asset as collateral for more loans. Next thing you know, you have loans on an asset that started with one loan, and it's ten times deeper into what they've done. It's absolutely insane some of the stuff they do.
But yeah, crypto is similar; it happens in the real world as well. In terms of taxes, my income is taxed, but the moment I buy something, I get taxed again. When the shop receives it, they get taxed. Someone made a tweet about this before; we've probably seen it in hundreds of different variations. There's a funny video of a girl crying because she just joined the workforce. She's like, "I don't get it! I don’t understand how they tax me, and then they tax everything I buy. What happens to all the money? Does it just all eventually go back into taxes?"
Hey Kyle, if they get rid of capital gains tax in the US, are you going to move back here? I mean, I don’t know if they’re going to honor that. Honestly, I don’t have any reason to stay here. You’re almost a native man; you may as well just stay. This is the guy who moved his motorcycle here like two weeks ago; he’s damn near a native.
You’re right; there’s no question. I’m happy here. If they do eliminate capital gains, I’ll be tempted to move back. If they eliminate income tax, I’m done; I’m coming back. They’re not going to eliminate capital gains, but my guess is they’ll offer a tiered setup, like 8%, 12%, and 14% on capital gains depending on how long you held it before you sold. I could see that happening; that would be a responsible way to go.
But that’s less appealing to me than zero federal income tax. If we get no federal income tax and just put it on sales tax, they’re hinging that entire zero income tax on tariffs. I don’t think that’s going to happen; it’s mathematically impossible. You have to tie it to sales tax.
Exactly. It’s a nice thing to talk about. It works well when you’re discussing it, and the public hears it and goes, "Yay!" But it’s absolutely not going to happen. Maybe over time, the overtime tax will go away, and the tax on tips will go away. There are some things they could do. It would be nice for the US to get its act together and provide crazy incentives to the entrepreneurs who have been persecuted for the past four or five years.
It’s so backwards because why don’t we figure out how much money we need to operate a proper government and then determine what kind of taxes we need to implement to fulfill that amount? It can’t be an infinite amount; you just keep paying when you have public funds available.
Who’s that? That’s their game plan in life: “I’m going to feed my family by mooching off of this opportunity.”
Valentine is here! What’s up, homie? Is he in the chat or is he going to come?
Happy hard fork, Val! Is that the French version of "plumen"?
It’s very late for him. He’s probably the founder of Token, one of the very early ones. He’s an OG, man.
Yep, OG! I’m waving to you.
Chris, what’s up, pal? I just wanted to answer a question that came in the chat earlier about why some of the D introductions are not in the Cardano Forum. They’re in GoTools. GoTools is the registry. In Cardano Forum, you have to do it yourself. It’s not incentivized the same way. It’s just a form you go in and write whatever you want to write and introduce yourself.
So, very different areas to introduce yourself.
I didn’t hear what you said, but it sounded beautiful.
Oh, I said GoTools. They probably should have explored using APIs to interface with Cardano Forum, but I don’t think Cardano Forum allows that, do they?
Anyways, when is Cardano going to submit at Puerto Rico? That’s what I’m wondering. You can go anywhere now, right? We’re not beholden to CF anymore, right?
Well, until they vote.
Wait, they’re going to vote?
Oh yeah, that’s right; they’re going to vote. They finally got engaged. They woke up from like a 600-year sleep.
Oh, but they did it like it wasn’t even a gentle grace.
Yeah, they woke up like, “What’s my boat?”
Why do you have that? That was awesome!
You’ve got to put Frederick’s head on Forrest Gump; he totally would do that.
Yes, that was like Cardano’s voting or CF voting power.
That’s my boat!
Yeah, so wait until the last minute. It’s like the race has already started, and they’re like, “I know what I’m going to do; I’m going to join the race now,” two laps in.
What are you doing, man? You just ran through a big pile of dog [__].
It happens sometimes.
Who clipped those? Who did that?
That’s totally Chris.
Yeah, it’s got to be Chris. That was awesome! We could probably revisit that bobblehead video we did way back when. Remember where Drippy drop-kicks Charles?
Oh yeah, we could probably revisit that and do like the CF dudes on one side and a bunch of IO dudes on the other side.
Yeah, that was Anthony Cardano that made that one. A cage match, man!
You know, some sort of like mud wrestling. I don’t know what. Frederick and Charles getting in there and having at it, man. Let’s go!
Oh yeah, little mud wrestling! Hell yeah, man! That should be the first governance action.
Could you imagine the amount of action on Bodega? I mean, come on, give me a break!
Okay, who have their contacts? We need them right now!
Absolutely need that to happen!
Charles and Fred, you guys better start training; you’ve got a fight coming up!
Hey guys, it was an honor to be with you through this. It’s getting a bit late here in Austria.
Hey, see you the next day!
Norway!
Yeah, see you guys.
All right, guys, let’s shut it down. Hang on, we’re at 2,832 views and counting. They were counting pretty quickly, so let’s see if we can actually break... What are we trying to get to here?
30,000!
30,000? What are you watching?
Who is watching?
Don’t worry about it! Just everybody retweet the damn space. Say something really crazy right now that’ll bring us to the top very quickly!
Yeah, it was on Twitter, so Charles retweeted it, and therefore more people saw it.
I guess, but there are only 800 views on Twitter. What are you talking about?
No, from his retweet.
Let me see if I can find it.
Oh yeah, you don’t see the live view ticker?
Yeah, that’s not live view, is it?
Is it live now, or it’s moving around? I’d assume it’s live.
Oh, it’s not; it’s decreasing because it used to be just incremental.
They may have changed it.
It used to just be incremental.
No, it’s increasing!
Hey, here’s a question for you. I know it’s increasing. You know what I’m saying; it won’t ever decrease.
All right, Bill WSE is asking, “Sorry for the new question, but if the goal is for Cardano to be decentralized, what is the logic behind keeping the K parameter low at 500?”
Okay, stop. The goal is not decentralization; the goal is censorship resistance. Decentralization is a tactic to achieve censorship resistance. We’re effectively decentralized; we have more than enough stake pool operators. I think we’ve got over a thousand operators minting regularly and 3,000 minting periodically.
So where does it stop? I mean, couldn’t we just make everyone a pool operator? Every single person holding one Ada could be a pool operator. There needs to be a profitable opportunity for stake pool operators, number one. Number two, there’s a phenomenon I’ve found, and it’s not with all the revenue we have, but when certain operators are able to sustain themselves, they can contribute more to the ecosystem.
I would say, and this is totally out of my ass, maybe 20% of stake pool operators are actively contributing to the ecosystem. Just further decentralizing it weakens their ability to contribute as well. So ultimately, we need some degree of centralization.
But the real goal of why we need to collaborate now is we’ve got a reward reserve spot that’s keeping the whole train going. Every five days, we’re giving out rewards that are coming out of this depleting reserve spot. Also included in those rewards are fees we earn from transaction revenue, right? Protocol revenue fees. That’s only about 1% of the revenue we have, but we’ve got to get those transactions up about 100 to 150 times on the revenue side to replace depleting reward reserves so we still have reserves for stake pool operators.
Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t look at redoing the whole staking mechanism entirely, but I think we are sufficiently decentralized to achieve censorship resistance. We are in a very interesting weak state because we have not achieved sustainable equilibrium. Right now, blowing the K parameter out of the water is not even a discussion I think is worth having.
To be honest, if they raise the K parameter to a thousand, for example, as one of the proposals that goes up, and let’s say it gets voted on and succeeds, that changes the saturation point of every stake pool that is currently already active.
Yeah, it’s inevitable.
So what’s going to happen is every stake pool will split their stake pool into one and two and tell the delegates to just go stake here and there. That’s not technically solving the problem either.
Yeah, it would to a degree because some of the smaller pools that are not producing as many blocks or very few blocks would start producing more. Their likelihood to produce would increase.
Yeah, and it wouldn’t affect pools like mine because even if it cut the saturation point in half, all of my pools would still be under saturation.
So you see what I’m saying? I’d still be fine, but not everybody is in a similar state. Like, somebody could be up, right?
Well, the bigger operators are just going to split their infrastructure. They’re going to support their customers; they have a customer base, their constituency. Some may choose not to, but we’ve increased K before in the past, and we didn’t see the results that everybody thought we were going to see.
Stake was sticky; it was very sticky. You’ve got to think, why do people stake to other people in the ecosystem? Some people believe in that mantra, “Oh hey, I want to help small pool operators; I want to further decentralize Cardano.” It’s a noble approach, but it’s a tactic; it’s not the goal.
Right, but there are other types of stakers that just want that zero percent margin. They don’t care; they just want the lowest fee possible.
You guys have to remember that there’s only so much hash power, so you can only get so decentralized here.
Well, that’s true too, but you know the other types of customers. You’ve got people who stake, and maybe they’re chasing ISPO tokens, but then you’ve got people who are staking to those who are contributing to the ecosystem.
There’s no amount of K that’s ever going to move that sticky stake. Those are customers who are staking to guys like Rick, myself, and Bloom Pool.
What happens is you get new competitors in the space that want to compete. I’m all about fair competition; it took me a hell of a lot of work to start minting my first blocks. It just didn’t come to anybody. Everybody’s success story has a lot of work behind it.
But there’s not a narrative against the larger threats to the ecosystem—people who aren’t necessarily contributing in active positive ways but still have a very large number of pools. I’m not saying they’re bad for the ecosystem, but you’ve got large exchanges. That’s a different vector.
Basically, the whole K narrative is a marketing tactic in my mind by pool operators that want business to come easier, free, or cheaper.
I feel like the effort they used to complain would be better used to convince the people who leave their ADA on the table on exchanges to take it out and stake it on my pool.
Yeah, that becomes harder when the exchanges are basically giving more APR on their stake than the native pool itself can give.
Yeah, it’s a very competitive environment.
So, what reduces the number of pools? I’m curious about you guys because I’ve always thought there are too many pools in Cardano, quite honestly. It’s oversaturated. What’s the sweet spot for the number of pools that you absolutely need? How do you create barriers or incentives to get there?
I’ve always advocated for not messing with the K parameter. The higher the pledge, the higher the reward, so it forces your pool operator to put all of their eggs in one basket—or as much as they can—into their pledge to reward their delegates a higher percentage.
Putting your skin in the game, basically.
Yeah, and I think that was part of the problem. I mean, because K is still there. Let me explain K.
Well, it was too aggressive. When you have zero ADA pledge or one ADA pledge versus a full saturation pool in pledge, what is it? 72 million or something like that? Your rewards per block are increased by 30%. So you get 30% more ADA per block.
That’s at a 3.89.
Right, at a 3.89, it’s not very much now. The difference is very small. You’d have to look at the average pledge, which I believe is around 250,000 ADA, and it makes pledge irrelevant.
It does right now; it makes pledge irrelevant.
But here’s where I disagree with Anthony: if you had a high K, that would make somebody like Anthony’s pool, Bloom, appear more competitive.
Right, and Anthony would do very well, and that’s okay; he’s got good skin in the game.
But what it would really do is it would significantly increase the rewards for those who have a higher pledge to saturation ratio.
The rich boys here, the ones who actually have the bags, they would suck up all the rewards a hell of a lot.
You have to have it capped at some point. Even though you would get more rewards, there’d be less for everybody else.
That’s why you’re right about that; it would cause a problem on the big bag side of things versus extracting from the small bag side of things too because all those rewards would flow to the much bigger bags.
You see what I’m saying? You’d essentially have to have a smaller window. It’d be like a mixture of K change, so your saturation level would be 30 million, but your optimization in that would be...
That’s right.
Yeah, so you’d have to mess with both of those parameters together to optimize.
Yeah, tools are what you want. If they got the saturation point down to 8 million or something, now I could see pool operators having an incentive—maybe even 4 million—to stack that.
You probably have to have it closer to like 16 million. Even if you had saturation at 15 million...
Yeah, and K was up. Just to kind of answer somebody that mentioned it, it’s impressive to hear how is it bad to have too many stake pools. We’re not necessarily talking about that so much as that some of the pools—sorry, Kyle—some of the pools are not necessarily doing what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re just kind of hanging on; they’re really not making any inroads into garnering any yield or stake. They’re not pushing into the ecosystem and doing something outside of that in order to market themselves.
At some point, you start to think, how many of those do we need on there?
I get it, you know, but at the same time, you don’t want to increase the entry level where you can’t get in, no matter where you live either. So I understand that as well.
Isn’t there also a technical reason why K has to be set at a certain level? Because we do have a fixed block size and we do have a fixed block time?
The number one reason it has to be at a certain level is so people have something to argue about. There are two things that’ll start arguments: Cardano staking parameters and politics.
How many times have I been at a big Cardano meetup over coffee talking about the K parameter? My God, we’ve had this discussion many, many times before.
But yeah, the block time and the block size... I need to check with Andrew, but I wondered back then when we had the congestion during the peak of the NFT cycle. There were a lot of transactions happening—people minting. Just one new project minting would grind the chain to a halt where transactions would take like 10 to 40 minutes to succeed.
At that point, I wondered, had we had more stake-eligible blocks, would raising K to a thousand have helped with that congestion? If we wouldn’t have, then why?
Too many.
I mean, I said this is depressing to hear. How are too many stake
0 is gone. SA 122 has just been announced. SAB 121 is gone. Now we're going to see a lot more friendly faces instead of unfriendly faces or passive-aggressive regulators who aren't giving us the time of day or telling us we're on pause. I got that when the whole Choke Point 2.0 happened when we were first starting the stablecoin company.
There are a variety of things that are going to change. We're going to see a lot more opportunities coming along, a lot less red tape, and much more support from our banking partners. They will be able to work with, use, leverage, or custody crypto assets, so expect a lot more of that coming. It's going to be absolutely amazing. That alone is going to increase your bag if you just want to talk about that.
Hey guys, I gotta go. It's been awesome, man. It's been really cool, and I love being a part of this. Here's to the age of Voler! I'm stoked for it, and I can't wait for the next few years of building here and exactly what we're going to be doing and how much we're going to impact the world with what we're doing. It's going to be absolutely amazing.
So Chris, thank you. Kyle, everybody, thank you. Thanks for letting me come in, man. It was nice to speak to you guys. Cheers! Yeah, we're in a good spot. We can go ahead and shut it down. It was good forking with all of you.
Yeah, tomorrow, a question: Is there a list of DS anywhere else? [Music] 1694 and tempo. Vote.gov.tools, I think, has the directory too, right? Yes, gov.
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