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From time to time, somewhere on social media, the FUD appears about the Cardano project. We can see opinions like “Cardano is just a wallet”, “Cardano never launches main-net”, “PoS will never work”, or “it’s just white-paper”. These are all opinions based on impatience, ignorance of the depth and complexity of the project, or the inability to objectively assess the matter. Often, this FUD is caused intentionally by supporters of a competing project. Just to make competitors more relevant.
Let’s look at some facts in today’s article.
Cardano is a very complex project
Cardano is the first project that is based on formal method development and it is built as a mission-critical project. The IOHK team has done thorough research on all areas related to blockchain and distributed networks. The team studied existing works and sought the best solutions to technical problems in a real environment. The team has published many scientific studies that have undergone a rigorous review and today have countless citations. The team starts production software development only after the specifications are available. The critical parts of the project are written in Haskell. Haskell is a functional programming language that doesn’t allow any side-effects.
Blockchain incorporates technological, economic, and social components. It is a system that aims to replace the current financial system and compete with the current IT giants. Such a project cannot be done just by giving you a bunch of programmers to make you a mix of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Without an emphasis on overall quality and details, such a system will never work reliably in the long term. On the other hand, such a project can be delivered in just one year. Do we need it?
Cardano took a different and more challenging path. If the team simply delivered another blockchain, it would rank among hundreds of similar projects. It was necessary to put together experts to cryptography, software security, distributed networking, threat modeling, protocol design, game theory, operating systems, designers of programming languages, economy, and of course, software architects and programmers. All these people had to work together to deliver the network that would be great in all respects. These are people who are respected experts in their field and often at the top of their careers.
If one network is to serve the whole world, it must be capable of global scalability. It must never stop and allow all people on the planet to freely engage in network consensus. Including cheaters. Such a network will be massively attacked. Cardano must endure it and continue to function smoothly. It is a more complex task than you might think. And believe me, there are not many people in the world who could fully understand that in all details.
It takes a lot of time and effort to build such a project. No existing project is capable of mass adoption and is at the same time demonstrably secure and sustainable in the long term. Cardano will be. Global, open, public, permissionless networks are brand new. There was nothing like that before Bitcoin. The first generation of cryptocurrencies suffers from technological imperfection. Often they are in the experimental phase and are improving in full operation. In the case of Bitcoin, everybody is scared to change the first layer, as there is a legitimate concern that something will fail. The second layer can improve something, but it will always creak. The quality of the project is directly related to the quality of the team and the time spent on research, experimentation, implementation, and testing. These phases can’t be underestimated or omitted. If you do, it will fire back at you later. A team will have to solve it at a time when the project strives for adoption. People might complain. We can see thousands of projects on CoinMarketCap, but few are worth the attention. In ten years, there will be maybe only three of them.
Transparency
Cardano is one of the most transparent projects in the crypto. CEO of IOHK, Charles Hoskinson, does AMA and status updates very often. Sometimes several times in one month. During AMA you can ask him literally what you want. Other team members have recently started updating us as well.
Cardano, as one of the few projects, has all its scientific works publicly available. Anyone can look into them and critically review the content. The number of works increases regularly. If anyone has doubts about the quality of the project, they can try to find some mistakes in these works. And believe me, it will be hard. You will find such gems as the solved PoS consensus problem, Extended UTxO model, proof that PoW works as is generally believed, and much more:
https://iohk.io/en/research/library/
This work by itself has already pushed the crypt forward by a great deal. So far, nobody has worked out exactly what the ledger is and how it should work, whether PoW is really safe, how to write smart contracts safely, how to create a sustainable economic model, etc. All other projects can benefit from this work.
Do not believe that? Well, we can give you one of the many possible examples. Aggelos Kiayias is the chair in cybersecurity and privacy at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in computer security, information security, applied cryptography, and foundations of cryptography with a particular emphasis on blockchain technologies and distributed systems, e-voting, and secure multiparty protocols, as well as privacy and identity management. He joined IOHK in 2017 as a chief scientist through a long-term consulting agreement between IOHK and the University of Edinburgh, where he is also the director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory.
Aggelos is one of the brains behind Ouroboros PoS. It is relatively easy to find the works in which he participated and the number of citations. Google (https://scholar.google.com/) can make the dirty work for you:
You can just open any scientific paper from IOHK, check the list of authors, and find the number of citations. You can also easily verify there is no competitor in the whole crypto.
