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.

1/ Today let's do a comparison between Avalanche and Cardano. While doing this comparison let's also explore why crypto market looks at coins like AVAX vs ADA through completely different glasses. Understanding perspective of others is power. 2/ There is a lot of material on the Internet going into details of both Cardano and Avalanche so in my post I will focus on less obvious things.

1/ I am quite sure that when Charles talks about sidechains and the fact that root of trust can be taken from Ouroboros - very few people understand him.
This is because crypto industry is being conditioned by those at the top to think:
- sidechains must be bad
- rollups are good 2/There is a different between sidechains, the pure sidechains have completely different validators than L1. Sidechains which take root of trust of Ouroboros are not like pure sidechains because they are run by people with established history and reputation on L1.

I see that many people in crypto lack deep research and thinking skills. Yes it is damn hard. What ends up happening is they get sucked into some community that tells them their version of the story and they believe and stay in there. The other day I spoke with an open minded person in real life about Bitcoin. He was being converted by BTC Maxis (since there is a lot of them).

BTC Maxi told them the usual, we heard it over and over again and I mentioned many flaws and issues with Bitcoin and one got this guy.

1/You see a lot of insane Cardano FUD from people that understand protocol very little or want to understand very little.

One of FUDs is very interesting and legitimate though.

Spamming network with low value transactions causing congestion.

Let's explore it. 2/First I will make a statement, given enough of funding any blockchain can be pretty much spammed insanely including the ones that have fee markets. What will happen in such case is that transactions will be processed as a Priority Queue, where highest fee to transfer is first.

The fact that SPOs are in the cloud is not a problem as long as there is on premise fail-over and ideally automation of fail-over.

https://twitter.com/janilom81/status/1524585399875645441

While it is recommended to be in private data centers with 10 mbit up and down connections, in the long run, high cost of storage in the cloud will naturally lead to such a configuration. If CPU and memory requirements stay low then only bigger disks will be needed on VPS.

I had a chat once with somebody about the whole Sept 2021 situation.

There was a big rush to smart contract release by normies but they expected bigger scalability, ledger wallet ready and many dApps rolled out.

Once this rushed happened many were depressed and VCs took notice. We were not ready to welcome those people with dApps and their expectations for a slick UX. Now is better, we have ledger app, we have more dApps. Soon Ledger Live is gonna be released by @StricaHQ

It doesn't matter, what VCs cared about was opinion of the majority not us.

A: What disappoints you the most in Cardano?
B: For me it's the most prominent OG stake pool operators running 5 - 6 pools.

A: Not the tech? Why, their pools are very well pledged, they have a skin in the game not like Binance, shouldn't we focus on them, that is Binance? B: Tech is good, evolving. Exchanges are indeed a big problem because people don't even have voting power and staking is custodial (if if it is even provided but in terms of morals and expectations exchanges are heartless corporations, I do not expect anything from them.

In #Cardano staking with non saturated pool gives you a more volatile but actually higher return(!). This is how protocol was designed.

It is not working very well for two reasons: 1) very few people know about it (lack of education in e.g. wallets, from YouTubers and all of us)
- in cryptocurrencies there are many risk-seeking investors so they will prefer ISPOs, e.g. @MELD_labs without any value (yet) taking the risk that it may have a value (speculation)

Ethereum is creating 80 kb blocks every 13 seconds, Cardano 74 kb blocks every 20 seconds, thus we have about 3,7 MB moved on the network for Ethereum and 2,1 MB for Cardano every 10 minutes. Today was a record in terms of number of payments normalised to Ethereum including many smart contract invocations, ca 40% of whole chain transactions - 510k payments and 1 mln for Ethereum.

Plutus Transactions are currently about 7 times bigger than simple transactions.