I’m a trader. This is a trading forum. I actively trade Ada.
And yes it means hello. Hello is being used as ice cube uses hello. “Hello, I started this rangers shi*t and this the me thanks I get? Hello.”
I think of crypto as a protocol. Think of it as TCP/IP or HTTP or FTP. It is a new and novel and amazing protocol. It’s the first time we have seen something that is inherently secure that’s also distributed. That part of it is amazing.
But, the protocol is a protocol and it’s very seldom the protocol being where the money is. Even if SWIFT the proprietary bank payment clearing system for international money transfers that XRP is targeting, the money is not in the protocol.
The money is in what you do with it – what markets you build with it. Ebay, Amazon, Apple, FaceBook, Google, etc. Not the protocol.
Crypto has the dimension that the protocol is used for storing and moving money. But you can dump all the money in the world into a protocol and if there’s no markets built with it, then it’s going never be anything more than a store of value with a very limited market around it – think of it as a house at the end of the cul de sac.
ADA is trying to build the best protocol with the idea that ‘if we build it, people will come.’ But, I bring up TCP/IP again. It’s not a great protocol. But it underpins nearly everything on the Internet. Why? Because it’s good enough that it works and has been modified over time to work better.
Same with VHS vs Sony video tape. VHS was not as good but the market went with VHS for a range of reasons one of which was early market adoption due to lower price than Sony’s Betamax. This was an all out war in the marketplace.
The best protocol seldom wins and when it does, it’s often due to early adoption as the market looks for a standard.
Early adoption.
So, to get back to the initial poster – there’s so much that needs to happen outside of the core protocol code that I think the opportunity may be elsewhere in the stack, just like it was for Google and Amazon and Facebook. What can you do with the Internet is the question they answered. What can you do with Crypto is the question we should be answering.
And it’s way too early to answer that question. So here we sit in a very early and speculative stage of the process.
Going to open source, there could be a reason to think of open source crypto like other open source projects like Linux or Apache web server or Python or PHP programming languages. Two big things separate the analogy. One – crypto has a huge network effects – the more people that connect to it and use it, the more value it gains. That’s not true for most software. That’s another way of saying it’s a natural monopoly like the electric company is and also like most protocols are. But it’s an odd natural monopoly in that, if you fork Bitcoin, you can carry forward all the users and integrations that bitcoin had at the time of the fork. So, if you fork AND you get all the people to start transacting using your fork, you could win the fork war.
So, will cytpo look like Linux with many many distributions of Linux? No. Linux is actually one core Linux kernel that is then repackaged by many different teams into distributions (Ubuntu, RedHat, Debian, Gentoo, etc.). The various distributions differentiate based on their focus: desktop, hacking, secure OS, etc.
Am I saying crypto will continue with a lot of forks? Yes. For a period of time, until one or two protocols take hold, forks will continue as people try to grab the mantle. I think it will be a financial consortium that decides to take the mantle and move a lot of their business to one of the protocols that will carry the day. This is happening in Asia most prominently right now.
Again, scenarios like this make for a very early and speculative time in crypto.
One new topic I wanted to touch on is that I think 80-95% of the story with ADA is a bitcoin story. As people speculate on bitcoin and crypto in general, the entire crypto space swings with it. This is not an ADA story. ADA is along for the ride. The ADA story unfolds within a 50X larger wave of activity.
Lastly, will any government allow early owners of some coin to become wealthy as though they own a portion of the global treasury? My answer to this is No. Specifically, if Bitcoin were to become the global means of exchange and bitcoin went to $1,000,000 or $100,000,000 value per bitcoin, would international governments allow this? No. It would simply be too disruptive. Think about if this happened in the next 5 years. OK. We now have 100,000 new multi-billionares on the planet. That’s not a good outcome for any nation. Then move it forward another 20 years and those billionaires have been spending the prior two decades impacting economies and influencing politics. It’s simply not a tenable outcome that a monetary ‘solution’ would allow wealth transfers in this way. The Lambo culture has it’s limits in other words.
So, long story short, Crypto is a new and important thing. Bet on the things built with it for the longer term.
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projection at its finest 
if cardano can some how hook a nation state into its solution then that would trigger significant adoption, not only within the state itself but other nation states that witness the competitive advantage and efficiencies offered by blockchain technology
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This definition of protocol is too limited and seems to fit only for the purposes of this discussion.
TCP/IP had its inception in DARPA. It’s always easy to point out flaws and criticize. It’s much harder to create. So if TCP/IP is so bad, what better protocol do you have that we can move forward on? I didn’t see too many complaining about TCP/IP when they were playing command and conquer red alert, Call of Duty, sending emails, using a search engine, sending tweets, building web pages, communicating through BBS, posting in an Internet forum, sending money, using mobile devices. So since you have so much to say about the negatives of TCP/IP what are you going to replace it with? Please do tell. What is the alternative protocol you think should have been in place instead of TCP/IP? As you can probably tell, I’m a fan of TCP/IP and what it has done.
It’s actually only as secure as you believe it to be in my opinion. The fact that if someone obtained your seed without a secondary control allows them full access and control of all your funds is crazy. If it was so inherently secure I’m sure we could trust nuclear launch codes to this. Not? Imagine someone randomly guessing the right mnemonics and generating the right seed. They would then have the launch codes and boom. Lower that to a household level and if the same thing just happens to occur, you’re broke.
Don’t need to know about Linux. I’ve been working with Slackware, mandrake, suse, redhat and the likes since they started.
Ada is trying to build the best protocol. I’ll take it that you meant IOHK. Well Larimer and team at block one are trying to do the same thing. I don’t think everyone is trying to build a second place product. Same goes for Tron, BAT, and everyone else out there.
I agree with much of what you said but for me a protocol is a protocol if accepted as a protocol within the business structures it is involved with by a majority or all of its members. It has characteristics of a protocol and if it is proprietary, it cannot be freely copied and distributed.
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I think we are probably saying a lot of the same things. I don’t plan to replace TCP/IP. That was the point I was making. First mover advantage is pretty strong and it probably applies to TCP/IP. I am a fan of TCP/IP also. I agree with you – look at all that it does and how well it does it. It’s used everywhere.
This is perhaps a weakness of Cardano. The Carando team was talking about RINA a lot earlier this year – I don’t know the current status. RINA is a competing network protocol.
My view of Cardano using RINA is that it makes an already ambitious project too much more ambitious without a requisite return. Just use TCP/IP until you hit a wall with it and only then decide how best to solve that problem as the problem will be much more clearly defined at that time and technology will have moved forward around it as well.
I am glad you mention security. The blockchain itself is secure. There are hypotheticals where it’s not but bitcoin has made it for years without having to toss its blockchain aside. More importantly, can it be made secure? I think yes. Therefore the technology has applications in my view.
Everything around crypto is not secure. That’s why the financial industry has so much investment in access control and fraud prevention. Want to make an app for approving loans at a car dealer? It’s all about credit checks, a range of trusted roles and secure services, and a paper trail (or electronic record) call it an infrastructure of trust or risk minmization. All to decide if person X merits access to money. The mechanics of the money movement are a tiny part of it but this infrastructure of access is what crypto is still in need of.
I was really using the protocol idea to make my point, not to be precise about the use of the word protocol. I think of blockchain as a new tech for the mechanics of money stores and money transfer. It is a new kind of animal. Where and how to apply it is literally a trillion dollar question.
About the other cryptos, I do think many are trying to build a better crypto. But I think some are also just trying to differentiate so that they are kings of a smaller hill.
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Nice conversation! It’s nice when things don’t get so defensive. I buy and sell Ada regularly and will hodl on the uptick but for now I’ll enjoy the firessle prices and try to make a buck of two.