2024-07-01
Roadmaps and Polarization
- He argues Cardano is nearly done with its original decade-long roadmap across scalability, interoperability, and governance, and that critics grow loudest precisely as completion nears.
- He walks the eras from Byron through Voltaire, claiming each goal was achieved, with Chang about to turn on the largest on-chain government in the industry.
- He revisits abandoned bets like the YUL semantic-compilation dream and RINA networking, framing them as honest iterations that still yielded best-in-class results.
- He says the next decade is not about taking market share from Ethereum or Solana but about who brings a billion unbanked people in, via ventures like World Mobile, Zengate, and RealFi.
- He casts crypto as a trust revolution against failing legacy systems, insisting Cardano is a project by and for millions, not a Charles Hoskinson project.
26 entries
On July 1 2024 he names a paradox of completion, that the closer a project gets to finishing its goals, the louder a group insists it did nothing.
Cardano was the most ambitious crypto project, attempting NASA-like formal methods and peer review in a hypercompetitive decentralized environment across scalability, interoperability, and governance.
After nearly ten years Cardano has achieved almost everything it set out to do and now leads the industry, noting Vitalik's writing on epics and slots echoes what Cardano published years ago.
Byron delivered a peer-reviewed network in Haskell and Shelley made it dynamic and decentralized with thousands of stake pools and Ouroboros live over six years, both undebatable achievements.
Goguen delivered extended UTXO with functional smart contracts that Bitcoin wanted but could not reach, now in its third language iteration with rollups and interop, with TypeScript and Rust compiling to UPLC.
Basho runs in parallel with Voltaire because its tradeoffs need government consent, and Chang over the next 180 days turns on the largest on-chain government with a constitutional committee, DReps, and constitution, with node 9.0 imminent before a hard fork at 70 percent SPO upgrade.
The new on-chain government will weigh Hydra input endorsers via Leios, zero-knowledge tech, and partner chains with a dev team ready to finish, declaring mission accomplished for Basho and Voltaire.
Challenges critics who call the scaling claims lies to point to the missing papers, code, or engineers, noting competitors are hypercentralized, reset their networks, and see 70 percent of transactions fail.
The ERC20 converter led Milkomeda to add EVM support and SingularityNET, now a billion in market cap, to migrate to Cardano, asking whether Ben Goertzel and those meetings simply did not happen.
The anticipated migration wave was cut short by the Luna and FTX collapses, a 90 percent altcoin drop, and a litigation wave, but nobody gave up, leading to the chimeric ledgers paper on combining accounts and extended UTXO.
Reflection led back to the original model from his 2016 paper on Cardano's settlement and computation layers, ideas discussed nearly eight years before partner chains or Cosmos existed, verifiable on the Wayback Machine.
He was a big believer in YUL and semantic-based compilation through Grigore Rosu's reachability logic and Runtime Verification, but a persistent capability and performance delta forced a pivot to UPLC compilers and mainstream languages like Aiken.
K-framework work continues full-time at the University of Illinois, but a large ecosystem must pick winners and losers, leaving some efforts to community, academia, or engineering, as with YUL, intent-driven networking, and Cloud Haskell OTP.
The RINA recursive internetwork architecture, an alternative to TCP/IP, was not fully achieved but inspired Cardano's best-in-class network stack, visible in its recent DoS attack mitigation, proving the value of iterating.
No project has done more science, written more code, or had a bigger impact on how cryptocurrencies are built, and that the ecosystem fails and succeeds together, evidenced by the strength of its on-chain government.
Interoperability is achieved through Minotaur, which spawned Leios and merge staking, and partner chains incentivizing trustless direct observation of hundreds of chains instead of zero-sum tokenomics, with scalability via rollups, Hydra, and Leios.
He would bet on Cardano's people, noting former IO staff founded companies like Dan Friedman's Zengate commodities exchange and Alexander Chepurnoy's Scorex leading to Ergo.
Social-media toxicity has created alternate realities, best shown by critics unable to attack the DoS win now claiming Cardano DoSed itself, since it conflicts with their view that a community member could fix it.
The next 5 to 10 years are not about taking market share from Solana or Ethereum but about who brings a billion people, betting on first-principles decentralization and a warm, welcoming community.
Cardano has the best chance to bank the billions without financial services through ventures like World Mobile, Zengate, RealFi, and Empowa, giving people agency over their money, identity, and data.
Insists Cardano is not a Charles Hoskinson project but one by and for millions who rejected the legacy system and took the hard road for ten years, and he will never let people lie that nothing was achieved.
Looks ahead to Chang, the constitutional committee visiting his office in two weeks, DReps arriving in months, and the Argentina constitution, calling it minimum viable governance that only improves from its worst point.
An aggressive community moving fast on a roadmap that is the brain trust of thousands is hard to compete with, and that interoperability makes chains partners rather than competitors, ending the age of factions.
The real fight was never Ethereum versus Solana versus Cardano but why people accept current systems, why they cannot check their votes or hold sound money, and how a small group controlled the narrative around the Biden debate.
Calls it a bulletless revolution grounded in trust-but-verify and inclusive accountability, arguing no part of society from education to law enforcement runs well because society has outgrown its inherited systems.
After a decade across 73 countries with a front-row seat, he will spend the coming decades rebuilding the world's economic, political, and social systems, with Cardano in the vanguard so no one lives under tyranny or is lied to by their institutions.