It can all go to zero

After reading this, it’s easy to say “no, it won’t for Cardano”, or your pet cryptocurrency - x, y, or z. Fact is, unless you have a Crystal Ball ™, you can’t know. Maybe it will, despite all the great fundamentals, or maybe it won’t, and Cardano is here to stay.

Since there’s very little of the future we can see, kind of like a car driving at night that can see perhaps 300 feet ahead, or in the case of Cardano with its high beams, let’s be generous and say it can see 3x 300 feet ahead, 900 feet ahead, what then determines its success? IMHO, here they are in the order of importance:

  1. Integrity - doing what you said you will (“X”), doing it by when you said you’d do it, and if you fail, rather than hide or make excuses, you promptly admit your failure and re-commit to do what you said you’d do after you’ve cleaned up any mess left behind.

    Or, you can also say that you will not be doing “X” anymore even though you said you would, which basically renegs your promise. Then, like a man, take the hits and the fallout that comes from the lack of integrity.

    The alternative is to hide, manipulate, compensate with big words or other big things such as “we’ve revenue, profits, etc that can sustain us” or “we’ve the best tech” … as if any of that ever made up for lack of integrity.

    We all know when we screw up. If we by chance don’t or are unaware, there’s others who will point it out to us and we should heed their advice (e.g. accountability to others).

    No integrity, no future, no Cardano. This point has nothing to do with technology as you’ve noticed. This point is also not debatable. I mean you can debate integrity… but it’s like debating with gravity. It tends to want to go in one direction only, and wears you out when you try to circumvent it, and then you eventually agree with it anyway, but after you’ve been bruised and hopefully not killed.

  2. Passion for service

    This is where Cardano is currently taking a hit I believe. The slight non-responsiveness by people with an “io_” or “cf_” prefix in their usernames on these forums when people who aren’t stakeholders or running the project have questions, regardless of how repetitive or mundane they are (e.g. create an FAQ if questions are repetitive and pin it to the top of each category).

    I like how Charles is aware and isn’t shy to state Cardano’s advantage - a great technical team, a unique approach - Ouroboros/Praos, multitude of other academic papers translated to some nice FP code that provably works, scarcity of engineers that can follow the FP paradigm, etc. Great. These are all advantages.

    Yet, some poor Joe Schmoe who isn’t even sure why he’s investing in Ada other than the great technical posts/videos, the “sudden” creep of Cardano to the top 10 cryptocurrencies on coinmarketcap, the contagious enthusiasm of the community, will often not get his or her question(s) answered. I already saw many instances of this on the forums, and instead of being helpful, I sometimes will respond to such people with cynicism instead, only because I’m too lazy to repeat what’s been said elsewhere a 100 times over. So like all good human beings do, he or she takes that one negative experience and projects it unto the whole project, and worst case, dumps his entire ada holdings, shifting the needle down a bit.

    This really should not happen. Either EVERYONE interested in Cardano’s future matters or none do. Take a look at Rust and why it’s flourishing - yes, they have great tech - they created a language that can replace both C and C++ as a system level language, but what really makes them distinct from other projects isn’t just the tech, but their passion for service. This is reflected in their awesome documentation, examples, a responsive and caring community, particularly to newbies. There is no reason why Cardano cannot allocate a person or two to scour all their social media outposts (the forum, reddit, twitter, whatever…) full time and respond to any and all meaningful questions from anyone who is genuine about Cardano’s future and of course, we ignore the clowns, the baiters, naysayers, the rebels without a cause, etc.

    If a question is repetitive, this IOHK/Cardano person will add it to the appropriate FAQ and then instead of typing an answer, just refer the people to the FAQ as many times as needed. The FAQ can be wiki-fied so that other non-Cardano people, enthusiasts such as myself and many others here can modify it with Cardano’s blessing.

    This isn’t much to ask, and it doesn’t cost a whole lot either to have someone (like what’s her name, the attractive woman in the Dash community which evangelizes Dash like it’s the gospel) do this full time and answer questions full time. Heck, pay him or her in Ada if you must :slight_smile:.

    While Cardano’s efforts are, as Charles points out, difficult to replicate, they aren’t impossible to replicate for another established company with enough resources to a) rip off ALL of Cardano’s effort, b) replicate it, and c) market it as their own by tweaking some minor aspects of it or applying it in a “unique” way, labeling it, “their invention” in the cryptocurrency space (or some other catchy words). Cardano doesn’t run patents on their IP, which means anyone can poach it once it gains clear momentum.

    The beginning of the end of any successful project, IMHO, is when the people behind it start drinking their own Kool-Aid a little too much. I’m not saying Cardano’s there yet, but if there ever was a competitor that took on what Cardano does (e.g. IBM? Microsoft? Many like this combined?) and the playing field is evened out, the ONLY thing that will have sustained Cardano is its passion for service as being their major, if not only, competitive advantage.

    In other words, the lifeblood of Cardano would be their passion for service, caring about what makes its users/customers successful, embracing feedback in order to continually improve, being accessible to users/customers, making users’ needs, however small, a priority and in providing service that gets a “wow” out of users and/or customers.

    I’m not sure if I should have put this or integrity as #1, but it’s of -equal- if not greater importance as maintaining integrity.

    There are companies out there, and I won’t name them whom I’ve worked for - that run on a 40 year old code base (think COBOL and its ilk) to this very day as they transition to a more modern architecture/platform. What “runs” a company or any successful project in the face of outdated tech is this passion for service more than anything else. Which leads me to my next point #3

  3. Relationships

    I’ll start off by saying that I was glad, despite the backbreaking pace of progress and intensity of the schedule, to see that one of the weekly dev reports around Christmas said “devs are taking time off during the holidays.” I don’t know anyone on the team personally to attest to their character, but sometimes we can deduce it by what is being said.

    It seems to me like Cardano honors its employees’ equally as their vision for being the currency for OTB (the “Other Three Billion”). Another nugget of wisdom - not mine - that I’ve seen in successful, enduring companies, is their constant appreciation and focus on their employees to the same extent, if not more, than their users/customers. Treat the employees like family, value their time, contribution, personal needs, reward them appropriately and increase the motivation/reward appropriately over time, and guess what this translates to? Super-duper happy users/customers, and a top-notch product, along with an environment where when they wake up each day, they don’t feel like they’re going to work… they feel like they’re on a mission to better the world, while having fun.

    Needless to say, this kind of attitude toward employees can only come from the core/top of the company, Charles, et al, who are the main stake holders. There is no such thing as bottom up leadership. It’s always top down. Whatever your leader does (or doesn’t do) reflects ultimately in his behavior, regardless of whether the facts and fruits of his or her doing are disclosed or not in a timely manner. All things (or as I’d like to say, all s**t) eventually float up to the surface. Employees don’t change the direction or set the tone of a company. It’s stakeholders/leaders do. Employees will no doubt influence this all the time, and it behooves the leaders to take ALL employee input in consideration, however, the go/no-go decisions rest with the leaderships.

    It appears Cardano is scoring relatively high marks on this point, and I don’t really have much to add in way of criticism or suggestion for improvement.

  4. drive for results and excellence

    I can’t say much about this since it is palatable in everything Cardano’s done so far, particularly in their technical approach to solving the problem of gen 1 and gen 2 cryptocurrencies. Keep up the good work. Mostly this last point will be a function of the previous 3 important points.

Keep up the good work, stay accountable, honest, humble, motivated/driven, generous… and I think there won’t be going to zero for Cardano anytime soon, or ever.

Godspeed.

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My perspective :slight_smile:

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In charts

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I forgot to add - buy Ada now, while the fear is rampaging and crypto’s taking a hit.

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Full of hope. cool

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Sure it could go to “zero”…

On the other hand, if you believe in the product it’s dips like these where you double-down.

Been out of touch for 12-plus hours; let’s take a stroll through the news before we load up. Say what? These are the presumable cause of the dip?

  • It [this current dip] started with a repeat of South Korean finance ministry shutdown headlines.

  • Then Steven Maijoor, chairman of the European Securities and Markets Authority, said investors “should be prepared to lose all their money" in bitcoin…

  • That was followed by warnings from Germany’s Central Bank … suggest[ing] that any attempt to regulate cryptocurrencies would require international cooperation…

  • Then China headlines hit: Shanghai Stock Exchange has taken actions including suspending shares, requiring company clarification and asking for risk disclosure against some stocks amid speculation of blockchain concept…

China, eh? Now there’s one huge market and a lot of, uh, individuals looking to “export” their yuan.

Well, after more thoughtful pondering, “What the Hell! Damn the torpedoes, lets BUY more!”

Wait a minute! What? I can’t transfer what I have already purchased at Binance?

Damn, that’s been going on for better than three weeks. Maybe I should ponder this some more (as the pointer moves quickly away from the Buy button)…

Which is it? Zero? Or the moon?

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Up. Because my bet is that Cardano is not only creating a better future, but building a safe bridge for legacy currencies to cross over into that future, live in it, with full integrity, transparency, accountability… And it also seems like Cardano is an anathema to get rich quick types, day traders, money launderers, criminals, etc, all the markets bitcoin and its ilk derive its value from which to me is all the more reason to HODL. Words like KYC, AML, compliance, regulations, etc are the water digging the rats out of their holes on a sinking ship. :smile:

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Great Writeup! I would also say that if this current debt & death paradigm ends then it’s best to prepare for the rocky transition and then abundance so stop measuring your wealth in USD$$ and start measuring your wealth in 3 areas:
1) Real Friendships
*Get rid of Toxic People, Toxic thoughts, and Toxic Relationships
*Digital friends are great but make real friendships locally
2) Real Wealth
* Gold, Silver, Crypto’s
* Storable Food (1,000,000 Million Calories)
* Ammo/Guns (free men are armed)
3) Real Skillsets
* Learn to program
* learn to turn a wrench
* learn to cook :slight_smile:

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Bought some Ada yet? Now is the time, it’s down!

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i bought 4,000 :slight_smile:

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Couldn’t agree more. I traded USD for ADA with the hopes of never trading back. Hopefully as time moves forward others will think the same.

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Get a good position and then let’s stake are stuff in Q2! during the rewards ERA. Better than leaving our stuff in a paradigm based on debt based money.

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The decentralized economy may outpace the larger economies like the United States and China, and the ladder of human progress is laying!

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The moon - get some and let’s stake. As for the Binance piece - Charles mentioned that their was still some work to be done with the exchanges and transferring. That’s good for me because we all know this is going off like a rocket with all the flywheel effects happening from ethics, functional code, the best minds, and networking. So while the world is sleeping I’ll be stacking and then staking.

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That’s right! I am ready, whenever take off!

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Passion for service - YES YES YES

This is currently a weak point and until the professionals get up to speed it’s up to the enthusiast amateurs on the forums to fill in the gaps. Even the know-nuthinks like me! Let’s step up guys…

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New to the space, but some thoughts on what Cardano seems to need to be successful in being successful (certainly not complete, but probably a good beginning):

  • Superior product that matters: product/ service that solves real issues/ addresses real needs: reliable, effective and efficient, usable, adaptable. The type of product you pick up and say ‘ah, finally someone who’s got it right’ (think Leatherman surge, Gränsfors axes, a good Belgian beer :wink: ).
  • Trust: as in perceived to systematically fully deliver excellent service is a key part of this. The feeling users have that ‘I’m covered, it’ll be fine’. Trust is something that needs to be earned, hard and a lot of work, but easy to lose…
  • Connections and relations: this has to do with having the right product (can also be intermediate milestones), that goes out with the right message to the right stakeholders at the right moment. Microsoft didn’t become the first because of their stunning products… Obtaining, at the right time, the support and real buy-in, of key players is going to be critical for the success of Cardano. This includes the persons investing in this domain, technically Cardano is certainly on the forefront, but I feel that I read much less about it than I would like to see, I feel that Cardano is not pushing hard enough on this point… Have you heard of ‘Heineken’, how about ‘Chimay’? One is a great product, the other is widely known and accepted. Cardano needs to do both, the foundation to create this is now…
  • Accessibility: services around ADA (e.g. storing ADA, getting in-and-out of ADA), wide acceptance as means of exchange, information about Cardano. At this moment obtaining ADA involves jumping through several hoops… for me a frustrating experience, others may just drop it as there are other options out there (I wanted specifically ADA, so I persisted).

Surely missing a couple of points here, but the domain Cardano aims to claim is going to be fought over bitterly, and I assume only one or two will be standing at the end… Missing out on any of the points mentioned above will undermine the programme of getting Cardano out as a key player in the field.

:roll_eyes:

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:innocent: I study too much history, was in the military, and I prefer not to have a cartoonish view of the world. Humans are irrational, emotional, and prone to violence…and only stay sane as long as tomorrow seems like today. What people who don’t own guns must admit is that they are protected by people who do military and police. This is a fine stance as long as the stores are stocked - now see Venezuela - to each their own…but there is always a gun involved. Always. I would prefer the rational good guys to have guns, spears, and whatever pointy object necessary to push back against illogical bad guys that do.

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Can you share with us why you have a cynical view toward armed self defense, @regisg?