Cardano Blockchain Tenets

Introduces blockchain tenets, an idea he and Aggelos Kiayias developed as a Bill of Rights encoded into Cardano's constitution to act as a North Star for the ecosystem's design decisions.

Reads from Aggelos's blog post of the 11 blockchain tenets toward a Bill of Rights, meant for all blockchains, capturing foundational rights users implicitly expect from Bitcoin and Ethereum but rarely write down.

The method: an on-chain government forks and changes Cardano through highly technical CIPs, and each specific proposal can be scored against these general accepted principles.

Presents tenet one, that transactions cannot be slowed or censored and are expediently served, a freedom-of-speech parallel where users engage in proportion to their intent.

Illustrates the hard problem when 10,000 Bobs compete for 500 block slots, since paying the highest fee may starve a poor but critical transaction like a life-or-death medical record lookup.

Points to solutions like the tiered pricing paper and intent-based ledgers to share a finite resource fairly, warning that shrinking consensus sets let validators censor OFAC-listed users as Ethereum flirts with.

Presents tenet two, that transaction cost must be predictable and not unreasonable, since every business needs predictability and competitiveness against both blockchain and legacy alternatives.

Contrasts Solana, Sui, and Aptos optimizing cheap transactions, noting Solana sacrifices predictability of whether things clear, and presents tenet three, that no one should be prevented from deploying an application.

Cites Moxie Marlinspike's critique of web3's lies, that apps have a small on-chain part and a large centralized off-chain part on Amazon that can be censored, a tenet no dApp fully satisfies today.

Iagon, Filecoin, and IPFS are pushing to decentralize more compute and storage but it is expensive, and running everything on-chain would hurt performance, competitiveness, and predictability.

Presents tenet four, that contributions are recognized and rewarded fairly, a tragedy-of-the-commons problem since an SPO is paid roughly while relaying and running Mithril and Hydra, and governance workers like DReps go uncompensated.

Says if contributions are not fairly rewarded the Alices and Bobs stop doing them, an incentives failure requiring careful protocol design to avoid a race to the bottom.

Presents tenet five, that value and data are not locked or processed without consent, a data-portability parallel to GDPR, unlike the legacy banking system's civil asset forfeiture.

Presents tenet six, that the system safely preserves value and information, covering quantum-attack resistance for key security and value preservation through stablecoin mechanisms.

Djed is not going anywhere, explaining how you lock ADA into a contract while others take the risk to mint a synthetic asset pegged to the dollar, the value-stability approach Luna and MakerDAO attempted.

Combining Babel fees with Djed enables stable fees priced in a pegged asset, and turns to information preservation and the dirty word pruning as chains reach petabyte and exabyte scale.

Uses a Starcraft-archive analogy to argue most exabyte-scale chain data is dead history, so pruning by charging rent to stay on-chain relates to who wins the storage wars, favoring rollups and SNARKs storing compressed proofs.

Presents tenet seven, that no resources are unnecessarily spent, citing the 10x transaction-size reduction from Plutus V1 to V2 and Bitcoin's deliberately thin protocol reducing expressiveness to enable many full nodes.

Presents tenet eight, that the system treats users fairly and evolves by their collective will, grounded in swarm intelligence harnessing everyone's knowledge and collective action toward positive evolution.

Presents tenet nine, that privacy of actions and data is preserved, a GDPR data-minimization parallel and a reason he built Midnight, since TradFi marries money and identity while web3 lacks identity entirely.

Regulators like MiCA in Europe, Singapore's MAS, Dubai's VARA, and Abu Dhabi's ADGM are pulling location-based smart contracts, DIDs, and regulated value transfer protocols into web3, which the tenet says must still preserve privacy.

Proposes minimum viable disclosure, where the global view sees nothing and transactions embed selective, contextual, location-dependent disclosure, a capability Cardano lacks natively but gains via the Midnight partner chain.

Cardano hybrid apps can call Midnight like an API paid in ADA to serve the roughly 2 trillion dollar real world asset wave, which needs identity and disclosure that doing it the legacy off-chain way would gatekeep.

Tenets five and nine are linked, since processing data off-chain lets a gatekeeper dox you and freeze your money, which a well-designed system must mitigate.

Presents tenet ten, carefully read as offering users tools to engage without breaking local laws, not enforcing laws, since a chain should not stop Bob from proving he paid his taxes but need not compute them.

Gives a HIPAA example where a health-record dApp must let doctors comply with the law without a government backdoor, calling this the adulting of the blockchain space that needs regulatory and dispute-resolution regimes.

Presents tenet eleven, that operation is transparent, predictable, verifiable, and without asymmetries, mandating open-source software and publicly verifiable binaries so no user enjoys unfair privileges.

Assessing a proposal by whether it improves some tenets and whether the tradeoff against others is worth it, using a UTXO rent-and-pruning CIP that violates information preservation but improves cost and resource use.

The tenets are blockchain-wide, refined from 15 years of history, and let you evaluate how Ethereum, Bitcoin, Aptos, or privacy coins like Zcash balance concerns, noting a Zcash counterfeit bug could not be publicly audited.

Governance lets the ecosystem categorize systems by philosophy rather than meaningless metrics like CoinMarketCap rank or TVL, using the tenets as an intuition pump for what makes blockchains different from Azure or Amazon.

Voltaire came before parts of Basho because some scaling changes would shift Cardano's tenet tradeoff profile, and only decentralized governance can make such a decision for everyone.

Warns that next-generation scaling like sharding and tiered pricing may reduce verifiability or deprioritize some users, raising where the rights of the minority end and the network's growth begins, a collective decision he cannot make alone.

Cardano as a swarm intelligence of thousands, and on-chain governance as turning a subconscious id into purposeful goal-directed intelligence that yearly decides what matters and where to go.

The tenets and the Edinburgh Decentralization Index are North Stars letting decision-makers double-check what a proposal really means, since approving something whose consequences are unknown is sailing uncharted waters.

He set out nine years ago to build something with ethics and human rights baked in rather than just another replaceable protocol, and hopes governance treats preserving that goal as a first-class citizen alongside competitiveness.

Calls Ouroboros Leios a phenomenal example, a one-minus-delta protocol giving all the performance blockchains need with Hydra and rollups while keeping 50 percent Byzantine security, rather than the centralized route of Sui, Aptos, or Solana.

Closes noting the Argentina convention is on schedule with 63 workshops in 50 countries, and that Mark Meckler, who has 19 US states passed for a convention, may attend to learn how Cardano runs one.