1/Maximalism typically comes out of two reasons and not mutually exclusive:
- being over-invested or only invested in one
- value system

Non maximalism, which a lot of people preach here often comes with very limited value systems and favouring money above all. 2/ Let's start with S&P 500, look at what companies are there and ask me if you can purchase it based on any decent value systems. The thing is that most don't care, since it works, value goes up.

1/ One of the things that you sometimes hear about Cardano is that we funded wrong projects in the past and not the right ones. Let's unpack this rabbit hole gets deeper than you think. 2/ Under normal traditional systems VCs do a lot of research (non web 3 VCs), traditional before they invest in product or idea. I met with somebody who has a lot of experience here and they told me they reject a lot of projects, then the ones that are selected go through funding

1/At first I was sceptical of opening a crypto bank in the US (and I still think it is a minefield of risks) but somehow in a strange world of crypto 2024 attitude to Cardano of T1 exchanges are kinda forcing us to go there.

Before you attack me, think what is going on here.
🧵

https://twitter.com/ZKDID_/status/1810255023017730547

2/
BTC - lots of organic growth since inception
ETH - see above
SOL - supporting DeFi via inflation / massive pre-mine deployed to boost DeFi + OTC deals in the US
BNB - it's obvious Binance Smart Chain is boosted
BASE - lol, no need to guess that Coinbase is boosting it

1/Reality is that Cardano should me main L1 for settlement, since front running (albeit possible is very hard), Ethereum, Solana should be really partner chains or even L2s of Cardano.

This would make a long sense except Data Availability issue, rollups need to post on L1. 2/ UTxO model makes it much harder to front run / MEV hence would be most suited for this scenario. We almost got something like this albeit without inheriting security (only as indirect inhering from public SPOs on Cardano) with Milkomeda. It actually made sense as a strategy.

1/ I am not the most happy (doesn't mean unhappy) with multi-chain is because I see Community (inkl myself) funding Cardano projects going multi-chain but I do not see projects from other ecosystems going multichain to us.

So feels one way street and exit liquidity a bit. 2/ Now before you attack me, see my point. As a founder of a project, I don't want Cardano Community to attack me on things but keep in mind incentives are not aligned. Of course not. There is a misalignment because some things we assume are in good will basically.

1/ In non DAO setting if users want one thing and "management" wants something else it means there is a lot of private information which is not shared with the users
Think of government and parties, we vote for one thing they often do another thing, we want peace, they bring war. 2/ This means there is often private confidential information, which is not shared, there is some cabal that knows private strategic information that users / votes do not know. There is assymetry of information. On top there is an assumption that many in those circle share

As sadended I am to tell you this but having spoken many developers and many blockchain devs from other ecosystems, only small portion understand the power of local state and deterministic transactions and good consequences this brings for us long term.

Need ELI5 more. It is a more complicated programming model, forcing a developer to all sorts of tricks and extensive "very senior or principal" developer knowledge.

This like:
-
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- Mutexo (@MicheleHarmonic)github.com/aiken-lang/mer…
github.com/Anastasia-Labs…

I am pro CIP-1694 but why may be interesting for you.

3 genesis org already hold decent amount of ADA so it is a next step of evaluation to get rid of genesis keys. The agile way but due to high amount of ADA this could still allow them in the short term to potentially outvote u It looks like a bad thing but it is a good thing since we moving than standing still. Many forget this is fast paced industry. Look where Etherum is based on being first to the market in such a chain with many poor design choices. As long as we can fix some issues later

1/ In crypto, just like in the food industry, the big bucks in marketing in majority of cases does not channel new comers to protocols that are good for them, it channels to protocols / blockchains that are good for the one marketing.

#Cardano 2/

As an example (there is so many of such) enter fibers, 95% of people are deficient in them, fibers are very needed to feed your gut bacteria and actually what marketing does of big corporations, it will channel advertising and money to protein where 95% of people are fine.

1/
I was supporting contigent staking but now I am no longer so sure.

However it is not for reasons you are probably thinking...

Let me explain.
@IOHK_Charles 2/
I still support it for, e.g. not overflowing pool but... other cases especially legal ones start being problematic. Once you enter into some formal relationship with a staker who says that it is just about accepting them once to a pool, maybe if you change fees, you need

1/ Voltaire requires a lot of maturity from Cardano community.

minPool fee and Contigent Staking are small fishes in the grand scheme of things.

Be like a bird and fly above to the clouds and take a bird's eye view on Cardano. What is missing, what is needed?

"I don't know" 2/ I don't know is a good answer other than only torturing only Shelley related topics.

So how can you know? Well, for this you have to talk to people.

🧵

1/ I support Contigent Staking in the current discussed form and I would disagree with Matthew's take but let me explain.

https://twitter.com/MatthewPlomin/status/1626283978004078595

2/ It was year 2016/2017 it came on us light a blitz. GDPR was introduced in Europe and company I was working at that time had to comply.

In BigData world, we had: Hadoop (hadoop.apache.org) but there was a problem Hadoop didn't support removal selective removal of data.

1/ One of the outcome of discussions at IOG and CF was the fact that running open source project doesn't mean only showing open source code.

There is a lot of thought, design, planning that goes behind the scenes, e.g. on Slack.

There is a desire and plan to start changing it. 2/ It's not an easy process because what appears to be initial plan can totally change into another plan while you are developing.

Despite efforts to document things, some things may not be at all mentioned because while they seemed obvious - they are not.

a/
Let's fact check this
1) Not true, 3 keys are controlled by Emurgo, IOG and CF and all need to sign HFC
2) Majority of SPOs may disagree to update to new node version which will mean effectively be stalled

https://twitter.com/BabalooMagoo/status/1625272392128897024

b/
Yes via Voltaire voting one optimises it because you can prevent coding it first and then failing with it.

Voltaire based voting on CIPs doesn't exist yet.

Serious question:

Why do you prefer Cardano over Monero, ZCash?

1/ If you want 100% privacy the ones above are a way to go
2/ Current system in Bitcoin / Cardano allows those that obtain addresses from exchanges to map KYC data to addresses. In IT there is a term called: "security by obscurity", which is a very well known anti-pattern in cryptography. Basically you assume that information is hidden because it is harder to get. We can have a term: "privacy by obscurity", there you go I created it.

Cardano wishlist.

Today I am sharing with you my Cardano wishlist, strap yourself in, it will get juicy. I will try to omit obvious things like Ouroboros Generis / Leios. We know sooner or later it is coming. I will focus on less obvious items. a/
1/ Mallable eUTxO sidechain / validium / rollup - inspired by Fuel V2, could be great for DeFi
2a/ Support for storing blobs on L1 for rollups + danksharding with KZG commitment
OR alternatively
2b/ One sidechain with good security paid from treasury for data availability

I went through over a dozen complaints about Cardano to see: is it true, is it being worked on, is it simply misunderstood, is it planned to be worked on.

Let's dive in. 🧵 1/ Haskell / PlutusTx / Plutarch are hard for many.

Functional programming is certainly not easy and Haskell by now has quite an esoteric syntax. On top of that Haskell / PlutusTx are often require Nix, which many devs dislike.

Verdict: fair
Alternatives: Aiken / Plu-ts, Helios

1/ Some of you are worried about minUTxO + stable coins. Imagine having to send somebody almost 1 ADA because we want to send them 1 USD. The higher the ADA price the bigger this problem becomes. 2/ First we have to begin by understanding why minUTxO has been introduced in the first place. To my knowledge it is to protect the ledger from spamming insane amount of useless tokens.

1/ Maybe I am just plain daft that it took so long but now I understood that initial goals of project Catalyst have never been to attract big, top software companies / blue chips to pitch for millions of funds but rather to:
🧵 2/
- attract software "tinkerers", think like Linux software devs (application level) but paid
- form network effect of various groups in various countries, kinda like planting 'bush fires' in many places
- create ideas / inspire ourselves and see how people vote

1/ One of the things that people confuse a lot with blockchains is that blockchains are not databases but are ledgers. Sure we can store some data there but this data should be mostly proofs, things like:
- cryptographic hash
- merkle or verkle trees, etc 2/ So where should data be actually stored? Well it depends who you ask but centralised DBs are not as horrible as they sound. If L1 stores hash / signature to centralised data, should we cannot really check what data it is but we can check if it has been tampered with or not.

UX & blockchains

I have been doing some thinking in this territory...
Everyone agrees that UX (User Experience) is very important for adoption, blockchains that have a lot of complex details visible to the users may not be massively adopted is a common perception.
🧵 1/ In my humble opinion, the best UX we have from ... modern western world banking apps. If I loose a password, I can restore my account, there is 2FA and if money is sent incorrectly to a wrong address, transaction can be reversed. That's it, nothing beats that.