2025-11-24
Preventing Future Issues: Where Good Engineering meets Governance
- A consensus bug from 2022 split Cardano into two histories last week, but the network self healed without a hard fork or manual reset.
- The three jobs are prevent, detect, and fix; detection is the weakest, so 2026 needs a canary network and a pub sub protocol.
- The on chain constitution, not raw code, is the highest law: the attacker's transaction was unconstitutional, so code is law is not enough.
- Real systems need proactive user intent, dispute resolution, and treasury funded insurance to make victims whole.
- Integrity is subjective and earned like the value of gold or the safety of airplanes, and it must be defended with marketing too.
48 entries
Frames the video on quality assurance items for 2026 after the November 2025 chain split incident.
A consensus failure created two parallel versions of history that had to be manually restarted, as Solana has done before.
Warns that during the duality bridges and DeFi assume one chain, temporarily doubling the ADA supply like a double spend.
Pi is preparing a detailed write up with coordinated disclosures on how the network self healed.
Calls it a self healing degradation of service soft fork that reconciled history while producing orphan blocks.
Bitcoin has had 3000 plus reorgs, so this is common in Nakamoto consensus, which is why bridges wait for finality.
The three words are prevent, detect, and fix; the fix here avoided shutting down and relaunching the network.
Compares a hard reset to Star Trek transporters cloning you into a fundamentally different chain, the catastrophic outcome to avoid.
Ouroboros was based on Satoshi's thinking about chain splits, and this first live test was praised even by Anatoly of Solana.
Prevention via blueprints: peer reviewed papers, formal methods, then build, deploy, and test, a strict waterfall process.
Waterfall gives high quality but slow outcomes, the main Cardano frustration, yet it is what enabled the self healing recovery.
He told Jack from Intersect the engineering firm deserves scrutiny, since the exploited bug had existed since 2022.
Admits detection is their weakest area, and they got lucky heavily monitoring the network for the Leios upgrade.
Proposes a canary network: a fast, non economic observational network that watches mainnet from many perspectives.
The canary network preserves days of mempool history and pings from independent nodes on every continent as early detection.
A signal mechanism so bridges, exchanges, and DeFi can halt and hold transactions in pending when a problem is flagged.
Pairs the canary network with AI anomaly detection that flags when pings and consensus behave abnormally.
Wants managed wallets like Lace to relay a canary mode signal, which requires a pub sub protocol.
People spent 30 hours manually calling stake pool operators, exchanges, and DAPs, work pub sub would make instant.
Blames team departures on people philosophically opposed to pub sub, and makes it a top priority for 2026.
Nakamoto and Ouroboros style protocols can self heal, but BFT protocols are stuck past the point of no return.
Proposes the canary network mint Mithril certificates and checkpoints stored on Cardano, Iagon, and Bitcoin as runes.
Star Stream adds proving, and signing these representations with lattice or hash based signatures adds non disruptive quantum resistance.
Raises the meta question of code is law versus user intent, which he only ever supported when there was no alternative.
The on chain Cardano constitution is the highest law that legitimizes governance, unlike ecosystems that never invested in one.
Reads constitution tenets: transactions not censored, predictable costs, no locking value without consent, and a 45 billion ADA supply cap.
Argues the soft fork violated the tenets by doubling supply and orphaning value, so the attacker's transaction was unconstitutional.
User intention must be proactive, not retroactive, so the system needs an intent language like the one Near has.
Intents that build a transaction and return a proof it satisfies the user, versus strict code is law leaving losers with nothing.
Argues a commercial system needs intervention when intent is unmet, to preserve the system's integrity and autopoiesis.
Uses a blackjack analogy: a fair deck honors your clear intention, but a rigged deck violates it and destroys the game's integrity.
Invokes Nick Szabo's wet code versus dry code, computers versus human judgment, and says papers and tests improve dry code.
Cardano, alongside Tezos, was among the first to give on chain constitutional wet code equal precedence to dry code.
Frames fixing as dispute resolution: restorative justice to make victims whole and punitive justice against those responsible.
Proposes the treasury buy a network insurance policy, self insure a pool, or create a real world asset paying yield until a claim is filed.
Cardano lacks a full judicial branch, so future constitutions can add dispute resolution and arbitration upheld via the New York Convention in 150 countries.
Lays out an onboarding integrity ladder from crypto anarchists and early adopters to institutions, the public, and high assurance uses.
Admits the incident damaged Cardano's integrity, which is subjective, a group's belief in durability, much like the value of gold.
Gold holds value from 5000 years of enduring belief, and blockchains are social artifacts valued for long term operation.
Runs the 2026 checklist: dry code failed, there is no canary network, and there is no pub sub, so all of it must be built.
Leios enables improving dry code, a canary network, and capturing user intention via nested transactions and Babel fees.
Declares the attacker broke the constitution and tampered with public infrastructure, reaching criminality for the requisite jurisdictions.
Cleanup of the economic harm can be paid by nobody, the treasury, an insurance pool, or the attacker via arbitration.
Uses airplanes and cars: you board because a century of work drove the probability of death down, and everyone keeps lowering it.
Cardano is still a high integrity system because it recovered without the worst case, a testament to its engineers.
Compares hostile marketing to replaying a plane crash forever, like the Hindenburg killing zeppelins despite being fixable.
The one pager with Intersect and the postmortems fight the vibe coder brought down Cardano narrative flooding Twitter.
Anatoly praised the recovery and he went into an XRP space to explain the facts, asking who does that advocacy for Cardano.