Welcome to the Mess of Voting

Opens June 28th 2020 from Colorado rotating his Waterhouse artwork, turning to a vote around the Incentivized Testnet, which he wanted to name Replicant with a Blade Runner protocol built to destroy it.

The ITN rewards were miscalculated to run out June 19th instead of the 29th, cutting the tail by ten days, prompting a plan to treat the ITN as its own currency that Cardano subsidizes.

On June 19th operators leave their pools on to signal availability, and testnet ADA holders vote through a voting tool released on June 26th on whether to extend rewards into July, with a second rent-or-not vote in July 2020, since testnet ADA is not connected to real ADA holders.

At 27.5 percent ITN participation they may not cross the hard-fork threshold, in which case the ITN dies true to the Replicant name, but crossing it gives a better July 9th voting experience.

The ITN voting mess shows how hard it is to run a cryptocurrency, since crypto is strong at staying consistent through plagues and wars like the honey badger and Bitcoin, but weak at rapid decision-making that needs great voting tools.

Stake pool operators are small business owners who will run Cardano with first blocks around August 18th, host services and interoperability bridges, and eventually run Hydra channels.

Three stages: operators voting to stay, testnet-ADA owners voting to keep the chain alive, and only then the whole Cardano ecosystem deciding, which needs two-thirds of active stake.

The most likely outcome is no even for a good idea given the two-thirds threshold, but this is the first time people are free to express themselves rather than following a roadmap asking when Goguen or Shelley arrive.

Introduces side chains, recalling his 2017 Why Cardano paper's CSL settlement layer and CCL computational layers that could look like Ethereum, WebAssembly, or Yella, in a feudal captive model or a partner model.

Cardano is imminently a multi-asset system per the published GitHub specs, raising the question of whether you pay transaction fees in ADA or in the native asset.

Paying fees in native tokens would give every ADA holder a share of those tokens plus staking rewards, like an Ethereum holder receiving Golem, DAI, and Chainlink.

The ecosystem is leaving the phase where everyone agreed on the network stack and consensus into philosophy: multi-chain or single, captive or first-class native assets, decisions the community must make slowly.

The ITN needed shepherding, like how Ethereum would suffer if its Foundation vanished while Bitcoin would not if Blockstream went under, showing Bitcoin is more decentralized in decision-making.

Governing such a system needs good voting, information flow, innovation management, and the ability to disagree without being disagreeable, the great challenge of the second half of 2020.

Cites rational ignorance, where the cost of being informed exceeds the upside so the rational choice is not to participate, extending to native-asset and side-chain decisions.

The side-chain model could be Blockstream-style captive or a partnership with communities like Hive exchanging tokens, and the ITN was already an implicit partnership paid from Cardano's inflation pool to de-risk the 2 billion dollar main network.

Goalposts are what you make them, and if they are demonstrating how hard on-chain governance and democracy are, they achieved a lot, since people now realize they are less unified than they thought.

A community of different philosophies, cultures, and values choosing to work together for common principles is unstoppable against any Black Swan, which is why so much of society is built to divide people.

US media is built for division not unification because a fractured society lets a few maintain wealth and power, and nothing is bad by accident in a big system since someone financially benefits.

Like moving information onto the internet, crypto puts reputation, identity, value, and property into the cloud, but human flaws like cognitive biases and cults of personality get replicated too, so Cardano's answer is first principles and a decentralized scientific brain that is now built.

The third pillar of governance and sustainability is unsolved since no government of 190 nor any corporation has perfect governance, so they are leaving safe harbor into a problem no one has solved.

200 years of political science offers tools like Arrow's theorem, preference voting, and delegative democracy that were pushed away because they were inconvenient to those in power, and July starts the conversation about what should exist.

Naively people think fast innovation is right, yet the least innovative Bitcoin is the market leader, so stability may beat speed, though crossing a capability threshold could unlock mass adoption of millions to billions.

Charles the founder is becoming less relevant as the community becomes more, since no one is smarter than a well-informed, well-engaged crowd, and his role is just one argument among many in the marketplace of ideas.

Solving the governance, voting, and decision problem may be Cardano's greatest contribution, a beacon asking why governments and corporations do not behave this way, while the ITN vote's outcome has no long-term impact on Cardano.