Cardano Past and Present Challenges

This post I wanted to cover some past and present challenges in Cardano.

Disclaimer: I support Cardano since 2017 but I am not a machine and I reflect, reflection is not a bad thing.

I tweet every day like crazy positively about Cardano and there is a lot to be happy about but there are some things that I wish were better. Some things are “gone with the wind” but other issues can still be fixed.

I believe this blog post is supposed to make us stronger and now be afraid of “inconvenient truth”.

Byron Reboot was way too long
It took two years from 2018 — 2020 to rewrite badly written Haskell code. We always knew there were two teams working, one fast, one slow but what was a surprise that it took so long to realise code was badly written…

Identify earlier that fast Haskell team produces unmaintainable code that will cause rewrite down the line and should have stopped them earlier on.

Do not annoy devs fired up with prehistoric version of KEVM to go and play to devnets because you will just frustrate devs and waste their precious time.

Release official blog post about Mamba and what benefits will this bring, what problem does it solve?

Change Emurgo’s leadership team somehow, if we cannot do this as community, this is seriously messed up. Since when is it good to have some entity / government that cannot be replaced (voted out)?

Cardano users should support developers, e.g. donate to them but also bring developers in (friends / family). As an example Cardano Fans (CRFA) stake pool wrote an open source app to help to minimise costs and help with regular donation process. Even regular small ADA contributions could help a lot. Contact us for support — (fanscardano@gmail.com):

Slow uncovering of the “truth”
There is nothing that IOG or any organisation supporting Cardano lies about. I believe there is sincerity but.. some challenges are hidden in scientific papers. For many people concurrency challenge was a shocker and while there are solutions and eUTxO is very parallelizable, it took many by surprise, another great example of what took people by surprise was Sundae Swap ISPOs (Initial Stake Pool Offering), people thought less known SPOs will have some chance but actually by design it was always about well known SPOs because Cardano’s way to of doing “sidechains / scooper / off-chain batchers” FOR NOW is by using Ouroboros SPOs as trusted parties for scoopers / off-chain batchers. Naturally the most known (often multi-pool operators) will be most trusted. I am hoping this is challenge that we can overcome for future ISPOs but also that over time when we get Hydra L2 with some extensions then we will not need Scoopers or off-chain batchers (at least for order book style DEXes).

Mention to the community what are technical challenges openly but not in a sense of FUDing but rather that some solution needs to be found. This could also be a good thing because some community members in the spirit of decentralised brain could start looking for solutions (research) or even start implementing them (development).

Solution should be education and community push but for sure not raising a0 (PLEDGE param) as some suggest (!!!). Raising pledge is like trying to put up a fire with gasoline!

Stop delegating to almost useless pools like multi pool operators: 1PCT and avoid delegation to 0% pools like fire.

Try to communicate better and make it clearer to manage expectations, e.g. via blog posts.

What is the most risky in BASHO era: input endorsers + DAG (is science on DAGs clear?), blockchain pipelining ala Algorand, how many TPS can Cardano realistically pull off on L1 considering blocks have to propagate within 5 secs, will it be possible to implement all Hydra L2 extensions in a reasonable timeframe (until end of 2022) and will Hydra L2 be secure enough, last but not least, will Hydra work for all DeFi use cases — also those that require global state synchronisation, will it be possible to easily integrate off the shelf ZkRollup solution with Cardano?

#BUIDL but also correct FUD on twitter, others read messages and lies can be corrected with *FACTS*. Fighting FUD on negative price action or from VCs is exhausting for all of the Cardano community.

All people voting on Catalyst need to understand what phases Cardano is in and listen to the domain experts.

Bring DCF to live as quickly as possible and work on education for Cardano community that dev tooling is important. No advanced products will come out quickly without dev tooling.

Manage expectations for the community, mention this is very early R&D, there is a risk of incorrect and overly inflated expectations of the Cardano community for something like Glow programming language.

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