Hydra

Opens April 7th 2024 to address FUD claiming Hydra was quietly scrapped behind the scenes, amid a wave of disinformation he cannot trace the origin of.

Points to the hydra.family site as the source of truth, whose GitHub repo has 39 contributors, 19 tagged releases, and commits from just days ago.

The initial Hydra features are done and the team is now building incremental decommit, optimistic head closures, a modular API, rollback handling, a relay-capable mesh network, and multiple heads.

209 research papers now underpin Cardano, all open and community-driven, yet people on Twitter simply lie that the project was scrapped despite more progress than ever.

The open-source pipeline from formal papers to translational research to public implementation, with community contributors like SundaeSwap integrating Hydra into their software.

Rebuts claims that Chang and governance are not coming by showing the full governance hard-fork specification written in Agda, the highest standard in computer science.

The Agda spec is a peer-reviewed paper appearing at the FMBC workshop, contributed by IOG and university researchers, formalizing the Cardano blockchain so code can be extracted and properties proven.

The Agda spec is the first time in history a cryptocurrency has been formalized at this scale, mechanizing the extended UTXO ledger rules including the new voting, ratification, and enactment of decentralized governance.

A mechanized formal artifact eliminates the ambiguity of a pen-and-paper spec and runs as code, so the risk of bugs from the complex governance era is proven low.

Contrasts this rigor with Twitter, Reddit, and carnival-barking podcasters who claim Cardano is dead and nothing ships, like insisting a city being built does not physically exist.

The rumors go beyond marketing failures or Dunning-Kruger to malicious intent, since they persist and ignore any evidence like the active GitHub repo and executing roadmap.

People lie with numbers, citing a claim that Solana has 11,000 times more transactions while ignoring that over 90 percent is consensus overhead and much TVL is idle pre-mine.

VC coins give themselves big allotments, put them into their own TVL, run their own market makers, and reinvest profits into astroturfing adoption.

Complains Cardano's organic growth is ignored and even left off indices, and that Gemini ran a favorite-crypto poll that excluded ADA holders entirely.

The Agda formalization cannot be replicated by college dropouts hacking Ruby and TypeScript in a basement; it is post-PhD, neurosurgery-level craftsmanship few can do.

Calls the Cardano governance upgrade the largest in crypto history, spanning dozens of workshops, over two years of discussion, a CIP, an Agda spec, SanchoNet testing, and the gov tool.

Lists the parallel workstreams running alongside governance: Hydra, Mithril, the partner chains framework including Midnight, plus Ouroboros Leios and Peras.

Argues critics do not care about progress, utility, or decentralization because their real game is short-term value appreciation so they can dump on retail and run.

Those critics see a path to 150,000 to 200,000 dollar Bitcoin from the halving and want to launch and do an ICO-style dump before the surge.

An ecosystem like Cardano is dangerous to that game because its users start demanding decentralization, formal-method receipts, governance seats, and answers about 50 to 60 percent pre-mines.

Cardano's VC-free decentralized growth is a living counterexample, so critics lie that Hydra is cancelled, Midnight is replacing Cardano, and Input Output is leaving, propagated through echo chambers.

Says what angers him is not criticism of his ego but people actively hurting Cardano projects, like an investor threatening to punish a project unless it leaves the Cardano blockchain.

Cardano solves every problem given time, from Shelley to Goguen to Coinbase, so the twelve-months-or-dead framing is false, asking where else principled people would even go.

209 papers is not a buzzword but hard work translated into running code by hundreds or thousands of people across many companies over seven years, which no one would do for a scam.

The bewildering 2024 newcomer experience: Bitcoin maxis and Max Keiser, then Ethereum, then Solana tribalism, all rejecting first principles and dismissing the EDI because Cardano made it.

The people actually running the show are not the layer ones, scientists, or token issuers but a small club of centralized exchanges and stablecoin issuers who control liquidity and legitimacy.

Cannot understand why Ergo is not top 15 to 20 given its accomplishments, except that it does not get liquidity from that club.

Some projects were told to fork over 7 percent of their supply forever just for tier-2 exchange market access, which is plainly usurious.

Twitter is not reality, and reminds that the industry was born from the 2008 financial crisis, asking whether the world financial system is really healthier or more peaceful today.

Dying fiat currencies and failing central banks drive inflation, and the COVID wealth transfer from poor to rich is being set up to happen again through crypto's legacy tentacles.

Bitcoin can be controlled through proof of work, ETFs, and custodial wallets, but Cardano cannot because of on-chain governance, proof of stake, Mithril, and partner chains.

Says every video for over a decade has been about the why, the design principles for something persistent and self-evolving, and argues Cardano is past the point of no return.

Frames this as the fight of a generation as the 21st-century social contract is renegotiated amid designer babies in China, synthetic biology, exponential AI, and mass job displacement by robots.

Warns free speech is restricted by those who decide what is normal, reinforced by algorithmic governance, an everywhere-camera panopticon, and coming CBDCs.

The industry is a counterrevolution against a world where robots take all jobs and CBDCs ration your fuel and healthcare by permission, with vaccine passports as the start already rolling out in China, Europe, and the US.

Crypto's value is an alternative governance model reducing government and corporate power, worth as much as youth would be to a 90-year-old billionaire.

The real value comes from decentralized governance, high-integrity processes, and fighting for the why, so everyone can have freedom of association, commerce, and expression.

There are only two pains, regret or discipline, and projects like this demand the discipline to endure criticism and a slow process while others trivialize and try to copy the work.

Predicts criticism will pivot from Twitter to governments as Cardano grows exponentially, which is why decentralized governance is the only long-term defense against those with trillions and nuclear weapons.

Owning your own bank and self-sovereign identity was Satoshi's mission, who followed the Paul Halmos method: say what you will do, do it, then step out of the way and let the system move forward.

Thanks the Cardano community for enduring shredded VC decks, exchange rejections that will not list native tokens, a new programming model, and repeated Catalyst rejections, promising a day when it gets easier.