Hello everyone! I have been following this forum for some time now and find it very friendly and educating, with some very interesting topics every now and then. The community is supportive which is the most important thing!
This post is probably not well suited for this forum since most people who support Cardano support its academic research as well, but I would like nonetheless to point out some things which I found myself contemplating lately, in the light of recent events. I do not claim to know any better than the next guy, but since this is a great community I thought of giving out a few words of my own.
So where to start… First of all, the statement that “academics don’t make good businessmen” is at best ignorant to the core, and anyone in the least familiar with the sciences would know better. My father is a University professor of robotics, and he and his team work very hard on multiple international multimillion dollar projects funded by the EU. Can you guess how they got the money? Yes, through a process called peer-review! So if anything, I would say that in todays world it is imperative that academics ought to be good businessmen, which they are in most cases. You go ahead and try to elaborate an invention that will benefit the society in a certain way to a group of people who have barely, if any technical knowledge or background, see how it goes…
Secondly, and this is probably the worst, is that there is this ongoing notion that academics are some kind of ideologues (mostly communists, naturally), and that their “ideologies” are preventing them from moving forward in creating a functioning product. For some reason I see a lot of people who are into EOS, Ripple and coins like those (I’m not trying to call out anyone, just an empirical observation) who seem to be deluded in this way. So lets reflect on this. When you use the words “product” and “ideology” in the same sentence it is much more likely that the word you are looking for is capitalism, and not communism. Let us be clear that I am not defending anything here, just laying out the facts. Now, if you don’t think that capitalism is an ideology we probably have nothing more to discuss, and you need some serious time to question your reasoning. While academics do in the end sort of create products, there is a great difference on the fundamental level, which is helping the society to solve existential problems, unlike capitalist, who are in it for the money, as the word implies.
I know that the world is not so black and white, there are pros and cons to capitalism as well. I guess what I’m trying to say is that people behind Cardano have fundamental core principles which they wont cross at all cost, and if you have a serious idea like theirs you better be standing on some firm ground. Cardano is like that one kid in school, everyone gets an assignment to build a house from cardboard, but this kid builds the roads, the school, the market, the police station, the fire brigade, the hospital…you get the point. All I see in this crypto world so far is everyone racing to solve the same problems, which is great don’t get me wrong, competition is great to drive innovation, but a LOT of money from people is being spent in god knows what ways. We don’t need 1500 Googles or Microsofts. Charles and the team know that those problems will be solved sooner than later, probably sooner than we think. The thing that remains is to ask the question: what’s next? And Cardano is really one of the few, if not the only one, who is asking that question.
Blockchain technology is revolutionary, and I really think that when it comes to revolutionary technologies it is great to have as many intellectuals as possible innovating in the field, the reason being that their fundamental principles and values which have been the part of the academic community for centuries are oriented towards the good of the people, there’s just no denying that. Sure, no one is beyond corruption, but for the most part they have held true.
All in all, I do see that in the future there will be more and more interest from the academic communities worldwide, and all these scammy and shady people we see wont stand a chance.
For now, let Cardano be the light in the dark, shining through the mist of the world, ready to spark a change