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Charles Hoskinson, the creator of Cardano and IOG’s CEO, was interviewed by Lex Fridman for his podcast. Hoskinson talked about the past, present, and future and this platform in a discussion almost 5 hours long.
Hoskinson played the devil’s advocate and also discussed Cardano’s potential weakness that could lead the project to complete failure. Many of these cases are very difficult to execute in practice, as Hoskinson believes, the platform has the support of a strong community, and data collected by IOG points to the healthy growth of the network.
On the top of the list, it’s self-evolution. The inventor of Cardano argued that failure to achieve this item could make the platform unable to progress iteration after iteration without depending on a third party or custodian. Without this, “the system just won’t work”, Hoskinson said.
However, IOG data points to the opposite. The platform was able to migrate from a federated model, where a centralized party produced most of the blocks in the network, to decentralized production controlled by the community. This milestone was reached when the D parameter in the blockchain went below 0.
That didn’t happen over nigh, there was a whole process with the incentivized testnet and the stake pool pioneers program, the launch of Shelley, the decrementing of the decentralization parameter. Every step of the way, people show up and had to do things, but there’s no guarantee that that would be sustainable (…).
Cardano has other major milestones to complete in the future, the deployment of its smart contract platform and the implementation of a fully decentralized governance model. In any of these stages, Hoskinson said, there is “no guarantee that we will achieve what we want”.
In that sense, IOG’s CEO called Cardano, cryptocurrencies, and any other company or project an experiment. As such, it needs the support of its community and it needs to integrate more users for it to grow in a particular direction.
Where Cardano Has Already Failed
Another potential failure scenario would be for Cardano to “evolved backward”. In other words, for it to become a centralized network run by a small group of actors. These would be determined who, how, and when any other person or entity can use the platform. It would be like “China’s social credit”, Hoskinson said.
Similarly, a dropped in Cardano’s network effect could lead the system to its death. However, Hoskinson claimed that at this point “it’s very hard in practice” for this to happen. This platform has an “unbelievable evangelism”. Thus, there is a robust number of users, he said, that will never walkway from the project and are “fanboys to the core”.
The community must be open and flexible, resistant to dogmatic thinking, and capable of discarding wrong ideas. Otherwise, the project and ecosystem could slow down and adopt a “counterproductive” position. According to Hoskinson, this happens with Bitcoin (BTC) where the community has “become toxic and maximalists”.
One of Cardano’s failures, he added, is the lack of education on people that expect the price to go up or down. The vision of the project must be above any price target. Hoskinson said:
You construct a system that encompasses the entire globe and has billions of users. Probably is gonna be a pretty valuable system (…). Unfortunately, must people on Reddit, Twitter and other channel they tend to judge your entire success on that (the price of the asset).
At the time of writing, ADA trades at $1,27 with 12.2% losses in the daily chart. In the weekly and monthly charts, ADA has 18.8% and 17.8% losses, respectively.
