Description of the 2 biggest problems with the Cardano protocol: April 2020

English Education
1

Here is a video with some graphics, data, and a description of the 2 current biggest problems with Cardano protocol. Discussion, ideas, inputs and criticism are welcomed. Thanks!

4 Likes
2

Thanks interesting episode Rick. Regarding the staking pledge issue to prevent Sybil attacks perhaps people could work towards some sort trust metric that let them earn the right to start a pool. However this may start to introduce politics and gets away from having the protocol take care of the trust part. Perhaps having a way to put whales and stake pool owners together? The major obstacle to that is there has to be a great deal of trust between the parties because the person running the pool would need the private key of the whale’s Ada. Maybe a multi Sig type of thing or a special pledge key that could be given to a pool operator?

3

Haha, I love the line “I read it yesterday but then the day after… I just forget”. Don’t worry, we all do that. I agree the Pledge problem needs thought. A pledge of 100,000 would allow devs in, but might allow a whale to create a few hundred pools, maybe 1000, maybe more. Does Donnybaseball’s idea of multi-sig work? It sounds like it would. The whale locks up the ada in a contract and signs transactions that create the pool. The dev guy needs to sign transactions that create blocks and pay rewards etc. Maybe there are two pots of money in the contract, one for the pledge and one for the rewards and costs?

I tried to run a testnet pool and found it possible, but technical and time consuming. The ability, time, and willingness to put in effort often doesn’t coincide with the cash.

One more comment, Dash masternodes are similar. You need 1000 Dash. To create one you move exactly 1000 dash into a wallet in a single transaction. As long as you don’t move ANY of that money you can run a masternode with it, but you can let someone else do it by signing a second transaction. The rewards all go back to the wallet under a different address. Or to a different wallet nowadays. The whale pays the guy who runs the node separately. The software for the node isn’t complicated. I could explain, I have had one for years, its fine.