SpacePlace #145 Forking in Public

The hosts set the stage on January 29 2025, Lunar New Year of the snake, noting Ouroboros is a snake and the top meme coin Snek just hit Kraken's roadmap, as Cardano prepares to execute the Plomin hard fork and fully decentralized governance.

In a round-the-horn, Kyle says the community is maturing after a long road and he is grateful to contribute, while thanking the panel for putting up with him.

Sam recounts the governance journey since 2022 through Sanchonet in 2023, adding SPOs, DReps, constitutional committee features, smart contracts, guard rails, and vote pulsing, up to Chang and now Plomin, ready to focus next on scalability.

A panelist recalls the plan began around 2022 with Genesis-key iterations that grew into a full on-chain government, and the workshop idea was proposed to build enough consent since there was no robust voting system to legitimize it.

The panel recalls Hoskinson's ScotFest point that governance needs three balanced pillars, democratic consent, institutions, and constitutional representation, and that Intersect was formed carrying six years of expectations, making it instantly Public Enemy Number One.

The hosts note that once the hard fork initiates, Cardano becomes the most decentralized cryptocurrency by the Edinburgh Decentralization Index, beating Bitcoin, the product of thousands of people across a hundred countries over two years.

James pays tribute to Matt, keeping his photo by his morning coffee and planning to play a round of golf in his honor, then recounts how meeting Matt led him to sell his 401k, go all in on ADA, and co-found a stablecoin.

James credits Hoskinson's push-power-to-the-edges vision from the whiteboard video for inspiring him to build on Cardano without fear, and says Matt's widow Jillian was the backbone of everything Matt did.

A host reminds viewers this is just the beginning of governance, with responsibility now falling on ADA holders, DReps, the constitutional committee, Intersect, Pragma, and builders to keep pulse-checking the direction.

Martin Lang reflects on five or six years from the first testnet through Shelley's incentivized testnet, native assets, the Alonzo testnets, smart contracts, and now handing all power to the community.

Jillian shares that the governance hard fork being named after Matt is fitting since he flipped a Purdue city council seat for the student body, doubling turnout, so governance was close to his heart.

The panel describes Matt as someone who saw a problem and picked up a shovel to fix it, the literal definition of not complaining but getting to work.

Laughs says he has no regrets quitting his job two or three years ago when Kyle convinced him to work on Cardano, and looks forward to seeing on-chain elections and using AI in 2025.

The hosts speculate the first post-fork governance action, betting on a K-parameter change, an info action, or a no-confidence, while noting block size has guard rails and can only be increased gradually to protect propagation.

The hosts explain the guard-rail smart contract outright rejects impossible actions like setting block size to zero, while human analysis via the constitution filters merely bad ideas like setting fees to 5 billion.

A host predicts the first action could be a new constitution proposal or a no-confidence, noting Intersect plans to publish the constitution from Buenos Aires the next morning and millions of ADA already delegate to auto-no-confidence.

The hosts explain a no-confidence vote targets the constitutional committee and would halt all governance until a new committee is seated, and that nearly every blockchain parameter is a configurable value that can be tuned by vote.

On staking rewards diminishing, they explain Cardano's reward curve declines over 150-plus years like Bitcoin's halvings, so transaction fees must rise to offset the shrinking monetary expansion and keep staking viable.

As the one-minute countdown begins, the panel watches the fork on utxo.org and Cardano Scan, with Sam as the centralized source of truth on time.

The hard fork executes anticlimactically at protocol version 10, with community pools producing the first blocks and node operators confirming their nodes survived, as the panel celebrates testing live on the bleeding edge.

Now that the fork is live, they urge passive holders to visit 1694.io or gov.tools to explore DReps and either become a DRep or delegate to one, since delegation is now required to withdraw staking rewards.

The panel asks holders not to register as inactive dead DReps but to contribute to discussions and vote, and notes you can also delegate to auto-abstain or auto-no-confidence if you want no part or distrust the direction.

The panel replays an old clip of Hoskinson explaining that when dollar payment rails are abused, alternative systems like Bitcoin and BRICS currencies emerge as US dominance in global currency markets wanes.

Discussing an end-user bill of rights Hoskinson pitched in Washington, they explain it means legal recourse for self-custody users against bad actors who must operate under real, compliant identities.

Explaining the fork simply, a host recaps that the September 2024 Chang fork began the Voltaire age with SPOs and an interim constitutional committee during a 90-day bootstrap, and Plomin now unlocks full governance.

The hosts detail that power passed from Genesis-key holders to the seven-member interim committee and SPOs, and now a third body of delegated representatives, with every action requiring at least two of the three bodies to agree.

The panel reiterates that stakers must delegate to a DRep to withdraw rewards, warning about scammers offering fake wallet support and stressing that delegation is a safe wallet-level action.

The panel notes pool operators must also delegate their pool's reward account to a DRep, and that reward withdrawals are now blocked at protocol version 10 until delegation, regardless of amount.

Explaining delegation is like staking, they warn a stale DRep who stops participating leaves your voting power wasted, so choose someone who cares about the community, just as a stale stake pool stops earning.

A host recommends checking DRep lists on 1694.io or gov.tools and reading introductions on the Cardano Forum, noting you can read there but must delegate from a wallet.

Answering whether DReps can pool ADA into a party, the panel says they can collude to vote together like a super PAC but cannot redirect their delegators' voting power, which stays with the delegator.

The panel notes voting power can be delegated only one step, not recursively, so this is not fully liquid democracy, and offline bribery and collusion are things a blockchain cannot fix.

The panel explains DRep delegation, unlike block production, does not need two epochs, since a delegator can change their DRep or a DRep can change a vote right up until the epoch snapshot when voting power locks.

The panel notes you never need to undelegate to switch DReps or pools, just update, and that deregistering a DRep certificate to reclaim the 500-ADA deposit drops all your delegators, forcing them to redelegate.

The panel encourages newcomers to become DReps with community help, noting kit Willow became one with donated ADA, and that you can skip technical votes and focus on treasury and social matters in this self-governed society.

The panel predicts DRep types will parallel staker types, some chasing low margins, some backing ecosystem contributors, and that sophisticated delegators like Martin's should be consulted while a casual DRep's should not.

The panel clarifies DRep delegation and stake delegation are two parallel but distinct functions tied together only in that you must delegate to a DRep to withdraw rewards, costing just a normal transaction fee.

A panelist explains that switching pools by deregistering and re-registering the stake loses three epochs of rewards, so you should just move delegation, then jokes about creating Fart Coin for SPOs to sprinkle on departing delegators.

On DRep incentives, a committee member reveals one of the budget info actions includes a line for DRep compensation, likely for the top 100 to 150, while until then the only reward for being a DRep is public scorn.

The panel warns a devious budget could bundle DRep compensation next to incendiary spending to force a hard choice, and that people will build DRep directories and analytics like the Syn AI group's AI DRep to keep representatives honest.

The panel turns to treasury withdrawals as the coming drama, noting the roughly 200 million ADA a year being pulled is comparable to Catalyst, but auditing and performance tools are needed to plug holes.

The panel predicts a big exchange could acquire ADA and become a DRep, warning that entities securing TVL and voting with it are the real governance attack vector, since Binance abstained and Coinbase voted yes with their pools.

The panel argues retail will enter crypto through banks now allowed to custody assets, amassing customers' ADA and its voting power, and debates whether custodians using delegators' coins for a treasury withdrawal could be ruled unconstitutional.

The panel laments that most holders leave ADA on exchanges out of convenience, unaware they forfeit staking rewards and voting power, and that exchanges even offer higher subsidized APR to keep coins locked on-platform.

In a heated staking debate, a panelist argues the K-parameter push is a marketing tactic by pool operators, since Cardano is already sufficiently decentralized for censorship resistance with over a thousand active pools.

The panel debates a0 and pledge, noting a full-saturation pledge yields only 30 percent more per block at current a0, making pledge nearly irrelevant, and that raising K would funnel rewards to the largest-bag operators.

A panelist insists too many idle stake pools that garner no stake are the real question, but that raising the entry barrier must not shut out operators, and that some centralization is needed since block size and time are fixed.

The panel describes a Hydra-powered gaming tournament in Vegas won by a professional gamer with multiple championships, calling it a novel marketing tool from Trim that could draw the gaming industry into Cardano.

Reacting to a Hoskinson roadmap headline, the panel stresses decentralization is a tactic for censorship resistance, not the goal, and that Hoskinson no longer owns the community vision since the ecosystem is now sufficiently decentralized.

The panel frames everyone as a Cardano citizen now with Hoskinson a regular founder-citizen, expecting IO, Emurgo, and the Foundation to each pursue their own roadmaps while the community sets the pace.

A product-committee member says Intersect's product committee, functional since around September, will facilitate a community-driven 2025 and 2030 roadmap and budget alignment, no longer an IO or Charles show.

The panel envisions many specialized members-based organizations, one for open source, one for traditional-market sectors, one for VC funding, drawing in outside participants.

The panel returns to censorship resistance as the true goal, citing a remote Bitcoin miner kept running as a redundant ledger copy that can never be shut down, and that proof-of-stake lets you relaunch from your keys in minutes.

The panel closes optimistically that Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is gone and SAB 121 has been replaced, so banks working with crypto and less red tape will bring more opportunity to the ecosystem as the age of Voltaire begins.