Growth, Strategy, and Electric Capital

Opens January 20th 2024 calling this the biggest year of growth for Cardano, using the Electric Capital developer report as a way to orient community priorities.

Frames the age of Voltaire's first pillar, democratic consent, through the proposed tripartite government of DReps, the Constitutional Committee, and SPOs.

The second pillar, institutions like the Cardano Foundation, Intersect, and IO, whose job is to turn complexity into simplicity as a budget, roadmap, and priorities.

The third pillar, constitutional representation, protecting foundational rights like deflationary monetary policy, determinism, and inclusive accountability that should be written down and hard to change.

Shows the Electric Capital dashboard of roughly 170 full-time and 490 monthly active devs, 2,796 repos, and 1.3 million commits, imperfect but trending up through the bear market.

Reads the report's ecosystem graph where Ethereum is hyperconnected and Polkadot fairly so, while Cardano, Hedera, XRP, Mina, Tezos, and Flow appear less connected.

The strategy is to grow Cardano's market-value node and connect the graph via partner chains and a Cardano service layer, where an Ethereum app can call Midnight secured by Cardano.

Embracing Parity Substrate in the partner-chain framework connects Cardano to Polkadot, and that Aleo and Mina's zero-knowledge work overlaps with Midnight for another connection point.

Intersect is building the decentralization index, a metric the venture-capital class undervalues because decentralization does not correlate with market value.

Introduces an ecosystem-value metric, noting the fundamental analysis of Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett that built Berkshire Hathaway is far harder for protocols whose value is network-based.

Relates developer activity to Alex Pentland's Social Physics idea-flow, where hyperconnected organizations prove more resilient than isolated cliques.

Money quantifies what matters, noting the US spent about 66 billion on K-12 education while spending nearly twice as much on the Ukraine war, so a budget reflects true priorities.

Asks whether the Cardano budget should fund marketing and adoption at 5, 10, or 20 million a year and where the diminishing return lies, with Intersect set to recommend a budget.

Any Cardano user can submit a governance action proposing a budget as a set of Treasury withdrawals, unlike an American citizen who cannot propose a federal budget.

Good institutions parse the Electric Capital report, correct its inaccuracies, and face the inconvenient truths for continuous quality improvement.

Lists possible improvements: biweekly hackathons, investing in Aiken and a TypeScript language, getting key dapps listed so Cardano native assets stand beside ERC-20, cross-chain hybrid dapps, and new capabilities like account abstraction and data availability.

Ethereum Foundation researchers wrongly claim Cardano has one-third rather than 50 percent Byzantine security and doubt Ouroboros Genesis, and their disbelief keeps them behind.

Ouroboros gives Cardano a direct path to shard layer one via input endorsers, while Ethereum shards through layer-2 rollups and has largely given up on layer-one scalability.

Invokes the engineering trilemma of cost, quality, and time you can never fully have all three, crediting Cardano's careful process for a remarkably stable ecosystem.

Input endorsers could ship in 2025 but would need more resources, many companies coordinating, and trading off other features, for a throughput advantage over Ethereum and Solana.

Ouroboros Genesis, invented by IO, is being implemented by the independent company Tweag on a fixed-cost contract, likely done before mid-year.

Input endorsers need prototyping to raise the software readiness level, with Duncan Coutts's company Well-Typed discussing what is required.

The repos and product function now sit at Intersect, whose committees will own the roadmap subject to the CIP process and the tripartite on-chain government.

On-chain governance of the roadmap is impossible in Bitcoin and Ethereum, which need a cult of personality or anarchy, leaving innovations like BitVM and fly client as fantasies with no hard-fork coordination.

As the muscle strengthens the conversation broadens to ecosystem growth, education, marketing, and nation-state adoption, raising whether Intersect is monolithic or an umbrella like the Linux Foundation.

A well-formed government of well-intended people is non-replicable and non-migratory, combining the best of Ethereum and Bitcoin into Cardano.

CIP 1694 discussions already produced governance key management to rotate compromised Constitutional Committee keys and an emerging accountability layer for DReps.

The Constitutional Committee is constrained by Plutus smart contracts encoding the interim constitution's guardrails, beginning algorithmically defined governance with a long-term goal of fully on-chain code.

Cites Nick Szabo's wet-code versus dry-code debate, since some things cannot be expressed in Plutus and need human judgment, and notes Mithril adds resources beyond ADA for voting.

Traces self-amending ledgers to Peter Suber's game Nomic and the Tezos community, describing Cardano's government as self-reflective and recursive, able to upgrade itself.

Other governance systems exist in Tezos, Dash, and Polkadot's OpenGov, but Cardano is first with an ecosystem-wide view including institutions and a constitution.

Over three to five years all technology commoditizes through the Smart Cow effect, like Apple and Samsung copying each other, but rule of law, high-integrity institutions, and good on-chain government cannot be copy-pasted.

Calls Cardano the first real self-amending game, changing the rules of money, consent, and identity as the last mile in humanity's evolution toward fairness.