Cardano or How to Effectively Eclipse Ethereum

Noam Levenson, crypto enthusiast, writer, and blockchain investor recently wrote an article called "Cardano: Ethereum and NEO Killer or Overpriced?" on hackernoon.

In the article, he draws attention to the fact the crypto space is flooded with pump and dump projects that don’t have the development talent required to build a sophisticated - or even average blockchain project.

“How many developers are there in the world who can effectively code a blockchain project? How many developers can code quality projects in an entirely new industry, on entirely new technology? I think that number is certainly less than the 1380 cryptocurrencies posted on coinmarketcap.com”

And he’s right.

As ICO’s have made the prospect of putting millions of dollars in your pocket without any guarantees of an exceptional result - or even how that money will be spent - there’s a lot of incentive to do a crowdsale, and take the money and run.

But Levenson takes it a step further.

“So much focus has been directed towards scam projects; I think a more important focus should be placed on legitimate projects that are just done poorly. Far more people will lose money in this industry to teams and developer who just weren't very good than to criminal money grabs.” Levenson states.

Imagine you could throw together a white paper, issue a token, and then accept donations from venture capitalists that, due to the nature of cryptocurrencies, are non-refundable and untraceable.

Sounds like a recipe for fraud and corruption.

I think I’ll pass.

So how do we pick apart the bogus projects from the legitimate ones?

Cardano founder and CEO of IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong), Charles Hoskinson, who recently gave a talk at MIT on the future of blockchain technology spoke on how Cardano (ADA) confronts these problems.

“[Qualified cryptocurrency/blockchain developers] have to go to great schools like Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and CU Boulder (Hoskinson’s’ alma mater)... to learn how to do these things. And then they have to submit their papers to a conference for the computer science side or a journal for other sciences. And guess what happens? You get your paper rejected. Or if it gets accepted, it’s conditionally accepted and they yell at you. Then you have to go and show the paper off, and then they yell at you. It’s a very masochistic process.”

Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. In fact, it sounds like Mrs. Spencer’s 8th-grade math class when you knew she was going to yell at you for your homework even if you did it - but your 2’s looked like z’s and you used the wrong shade of blue ink.

It could make even the most self-controlled person want to do something like this.

Imagine you had 2 options. Go thru the rigorous academic peer-review process and submit, edit, and re-submit your paper by rather pointy-headed intellectuals whose job it is to rip apart all the work you’ve done and found every hole in it they can find. Now do that another 7 times - that’s the peer review process that Cardano has subjected itself to.

Or you can simply issue a token, do a crowdsale and have tens of millions of dollars in your pocket. And since it’s a donation, there are no restrictions on what you can or can’t do with the money.

So Cardano, why endure this academic agony?

Well, there’s an answer for that too.

“....the end result is that you actually have some degree of assurance that the paper may be right, that the claims may be reasonable, that the things we’re trying to do may be accomplishable. And that they’ve been checked by people who have spent their lives thinking about this stuff”

This is what I love about Cardano.

Among the FUD, broken projects, and straight-up scammers there is a team bringing authenticity and transparency to the space.

Cardano has raised the bar. They’ve committed themselves and their code to a severe academic process - very similar to the one endured by software designed by companies like Boeing, where human lives are on the line.

True to his mathematical roots, when Hoskinson decided to address this deficiency in the space, he determined that to build cryptocurrencies he would only use Haskell, functional programming and formal methods.

But what the heck is Haskell?

“[Haskell] is just a different way of writing code that brings it closer to math and it’s a different way of writing code that allows you to use all kinds of new tools to test and check what you’re doing to make sure it corresponds with reality” Hoskinson states.

Imagine that, a cryptocurrency that corresponds with reality. I was beginning to think it wasn’t possible what with the clamor for all the pump and dump ICO’s.

“The other thing that Haskell can do that’s kind of magical is that Haskell is really easy to work with formal verification tools”

But why should we care about formal verification anyway?

Good question….

Imagine you have 2 boxes on opposite ends of a stage. 15 feet apart from each other. One of those boxes represents your academic paper. This paper lives in a utopia of the way things should be and how you want them to be. This is the academic’s mindset.

The other box represents the engineer. This box is on the other end of the stage. The engineer wants to implement the academic’s idea and starts writing code. This gap between the two is called a “semantic gap”.

Essentially, there will always be a gap between what the academic thinks up and how the engineer actually makes it work.

“There’s a thousand assumptions, ideal functionalities that had to be turned into real functionalities for the sake of practicality, for example, you can’t instantaneously transport a blockchain to everybody right at the beginning of the launch of the network - but you can assume that to make a proof work.”

The problem is that you can often run into the issue that the thing that the academic dreamed up is vastly different from what the engineer created when trying to bring it to life in the real world.

Charles continues, “So what formal methods…..allow us to do is to close this gap and extract all the ambiguity and be machine understandable - but it’s not a full implementation. Then what you can do is use a proof of bisimulation...and show that every output is the same as that specification. In other words, it has no bugs, so as long as the paper is okay, the implementation is okay.”

So why don’t all projects use this technology?

It’s extravagantly expensive and time-consuming.

Many of the coins that have hit the market are already on a shoestring budget and committing themselves to this rigorous process wouldn’t be feasible.

We come back to Levenson’s question.

How many developers are capable of actually coding a blockchain project?

Not many.

With incentives as poorly misaligned as they are today, there is a lot to be gained from avoiding the brutal academic peer-review process of Cardano and skip to the fun part of taking venture capital and escaping to an exotic getaway as soon as the crypto clears.

But in this race to eclipse Ethereum and create a truly evolved third generation blockchain, it’s clear who will have the last laugh.