Will ADA Whales Ever Give Up Their Power?

I wouldn’t fork it before 2020 when all the roadmap is done and the IOHK contract expires. Until then, IOHK has time grow its team so big - you and some noob devs will be just a shady and scamy coin. You could fork btc or eth now, why do it with cardano (haskell is hard, still early development)

https://youtu.be/AepZAfvQCZ4?t=1h15m29s Here is Charles talking on Feb 16th about uneven distribution.

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Hi @citizenkosmos! No, of course not. :slight_smile: I know political and business history is filled with many examples of superior candidates and technologies (operating systems, auto engines, energy tech, medical treatments…) that were buried by better-funded adversarial marketing campaigns, but I was trying to keep that post focused on @lovelacepool’s great ideas.

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Dear All, I’ve created a separate topic that is related to many of the ideas we’ve been discussing in this thread.

That new thread also reveals the profits that the early investors have already received, which I think will help put everything in this whale thread into a real-world perspective.

I really love reading all your comments so far. This is by far the most interesting (actually, the only) online community I’ve ever been involved with. Thank you all very much.

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https://youtu.be/AepZAfvQCZ4?t=1h15m29s7 Here is Charles talking on Feb 16th about uneven distribution.

Charles is one of the most gifted, natural salesmen I’ve ever seen and I admire him in many ways. He is able to redirect people’s attention away from problems just like Obi-Wan Kenobi. However, his talent also has a dark-side and his comments about Microsoft in that video illustrate them.

Is Microsoft a Model for Fairness & Equity? In response to a question about the ADA concentration today, he pointed to Microsoft as an example of how wealth/power concentration is not always bad. Well, sure, if we don’t think having the ADA economy owned and controlled by billionaires, hedge funds, and VC firms is not bad.

Quick & Smooth Responses Are Not Always Accurate Responses. Obviously, Charles was put on the spot and he just pulled that example out of his sphincter, but I’m sure if he had more time to think it through, he would never use Microsoft (a notorious monopolist, convicted anti-trust violator, intellectual property thief, market manipulator, and competition destroyer! LOL) as an example of how to achieve an equitable and sustainable ADA economy.

The Team Doesn’t Have All the Answers. Because Charles said it so smoothly and nonchalantly, I bet virtually everybody in that room felt he is probably correct and they stopped worrying about the wealth/power concentration issue. In reality, that video suggests he doesn’t have any answers yet, which is probably why nobody from CF has provided any responses in this thread yet.

Persistent Community Engagement on This Issue Is Important. Assuming I have interpreted Charles’ comments correctly, it means the community has even more responsibility to stay engaged and help to chart our course forward. It also means that CF team is most likely watching these threads to see how strong we feel about this issue. Assuming that’s the case, we should continue fleshing out as many concrete ideas as possible because the team doesn’t have all the answers.

We All Have a Lot at Stake. If we don’t develop and propose persuasive solutions as a community, the solutions the team implements will most likely be biased toward protecting the interests of the early investors at the expense of the community’s interests. That’s the outcome in all socioeconomic systems when citizens don’t speak up and fight to have a meaningful seat at the decision-making table. Our ability to develop and propose our own solutions is what will give us that meaningful seat at the table.

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Good points. I believe an easy solution to these issues is every stakeholder gets one vote. Weather you have 1M ADA or 1.

Just like any good democracy.

:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

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So 100 ppl with 1 ada will have more stakeholderpower then 10 ppl with 100 ada each

good democracy? - nice joke:joy:

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I don’t have a problem with 5000 pools, and I also encourage it. But the careful methodical approach of IOHK suggests to me that it will be a slow roll-out of these capabilities. The test pools will be privileged to some degree, the whole “first to market” effect.

What is your proposal?

As said: I know it sounds pretty peculiar.
But maybe we have also to reflect how far away blockchains are from broad adoption in the real world? If it’s “just a piece of Software”, allowing you to catch some Pokemons or Kitties I wouldn’t care for a second. But if - at least some of this endless coinmarketlist members - will find some real (real!) use cases than this would mean: it clearly and noticeable affects people in their real life regardless if they invested and hope for gambling gains or if they have no idea what hashes, blocks and transactions are.

Let me explain it in more detail:
Would we need some mechanisms implemented in the main- or side-chains preventing the whales from having virtual tax havens? They could vote for implementing things favouring and supporting their interests. Even if IOHK at the moment knows who are the whales. As Dionysis Zindros explained in his sidechains video, whales could easily set up a temporary sidechain, move in some huge amounts and after a while back to the main chain. Then destroy the side chain and Tadaa! the perfect anonymization happened. Much better than any Mixing service you could ever imagine.
And now what? should 90% of the worlds population just “leave” and stay contented with 15% of the world’s total wealth? The upper 10% would “lovelace” this really much!

Just have a look at how the different camps of the cryptocurrencies interact with each other. If people’s opinions on vehicle brands in the 1970s and 1980s had been so childish uneducated and intolerant, it would hardly have been possible for 111 vehicle manufacturers to meet all the needs of economic development over the past 50 years. But there were some significant differences: they (car manufacturers) weren’t decentralized, anonymous and virtual.

Think about whether we really and always talk about improvements in the crypto world, or whether things could go dramatically wrong just because no one expected or wanted to hear them.

Hi @Jam35x. I provided the general framework that I think is fair and reasonable in my first post of this thread. If the community/team supported that framework, then this problem would be solved. Nevertheless, I’m still very interested in other people’s ideas, some of which might be even better than mine.

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The “problem” is this “anonymity” that all block chains bring with them. Whales could split up millions of ADA’s and turn this democracy into an autocracy very quickly.

Yep, and that’s another issue that we need to think about as we work through the solutions to the whale problem.

This is also the first time I’ve joined an online community with the intention of remaining involved, and largely because of your comments (along with my belief in the project). Still going through (i’ve got a lot of catchup, including getting through the oroborous papers), but I appreciate the insightful and respectful comments and communication :slight_smile:

Thank you for raising an important consideration I had been grappling with as I’ve tried to understand how this DPoS implementation will help with financial inclusion instead of creating more power concentration moving forward.

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@ADALove, I think you bring up some interesting points. I guess a few things to consider (these may have addressed in previous posts, but I’ve only skimmed through this thread.):

  1. Contractually obligated investor coin sales to even out wealth distribution sounds great, but what stops them from buying up coins immediately afterwards? This sounds like a regulatory nightmare.

  2. What stops someone who was not part of the ICO from coming in and buying millions of coins or 10’s of millions of coins and becoming a new whale? Do these people also have a cap on the % of wealth that they can hold?

  3. You are trying to compare cryptocurrencies to fiat currencies. The biggest struggle I see here is that throughout history, fiat currencies have not had competition. If you live in a country, you are required to operate in whatever the local currency is. Divergence of wealth is able to flourish because there is no competition in monetary options. Look at cryptocurrencies (bitcoin mainly) to begin with, would they have become so popular if we hadn’t had a huge crisis with our own currency? Most likely not.

The fact is that cryptocurrencies will have to compete with one another. If the whales try to abuse the system, people will leave and the currency will be worth less than it was. The U.S. banking system, as one example, gets away with certain practices because there is no other option. If you live in the U.S. you must conduct business in USD. I think that cryptocurrency competition brings in a completely different game theory model for whales than standard fiat currency does.

It’s a big topic and a lot of problematics. Usually the concentration is solved by the circulation. If no one is using the coin, is value will be none. As we can’t create new coins they will be forced to sell to preserve their money. There you will have a better distribution and also the weight of wales will be lesser than before. It’s like the 800K of Satoshi’s bitcoins, the value of bitcoins can grow but when he will use maybe 1% of their coins they will lose a significative portion of their wealth, as the general value of the bitcoins will be affected. Then they have only three choices:

1- Hodl and be imposibilitated to use their coins. If Satoshis sell his coins you will have a big problems and the market will be affected during a long period of time. This is the same for ADA. that’s why the cripto real wales do not sell all their coins at the same time. It will occur the same here.

2- That’s because of the market the “whales” will need to sell their coins in portions. More than 20 btc is a lot so I think this is the proportional to not make a crash and then be screwed because of it.

3- Sell big proportions of coins. From a speculative point of view it can be very profitable for the wales in term of staking coins. But not in value. As we can’t create new coins if a few wales have all the market then we don’t have a lot of circulating coins and not use of it. Money need to be spend not to be indefintly hodl. That’s why a Cardano debit Card will make this last position not productive for whales.

there are studies that demonstrate that “one person, one vote” is not the best way to determine the will of the electorate. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ranking-candidates-more-accurate/

too bad we hold voting systems so sacred that can’t apply scientific rational thinking to them.

I’ve read about it and considered it a big plus point. But it is clearly defined as an optional “feature” for interaction with regulated systems and organizations. So exactly what all of thus wo hasn’t plans for taxes and regulation borders would avoid as first in their sidechains.
I’ m really interested to hear more about theories and practical possibilities regarding treasury’s, staking, game theories, voting and so on.

Think about people and industries who don’t really care about technical chain details, personal (dis)likes of involved people, … but on reliable and calculable mechanisms.
Would you invest and rely on a system where you don’t know either the voting members, nor the short/mid/long term roadmap?
How would you (re)valuate Cardano roadmap if noticeable parts become updated with “maybe if voting…” or “unknown if supported” ?

The longer I think about it, the more it seems to me that decentralisation is not only a technical but much more a social challenge.

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Whew… That was a lot to read. At some point I started skimming over some of the insightful side-debates about political views in the real world. I’m sorry if I have missed some crucial points, but in the interest of my own time, this is my 0.000002 ADA.

Cardano, through its (to be built) governance system would have the potential to go beyond the proportional rewarding of keeping up the network (or in form of stake pools, incentivizing others to do so). See @ADALove’s excellent thread Rewarding Our Community’s Contributions for ideas on what I have in mind.

But as long as one has to buy into Cardano by using other cryptocurrencies or fiat, or running expensive hardware, the more wealthy (or financially more invested) people will simply have the higher rewards, because that is how the system is set up. There is an argument to be made that this is in fact fair. It is not optimal, so therefore I wish we could find a way to reward people who are bringing value to Cardano and its ecosystem, as one of the major pull-factors can be contributed to it’s claim to be

the first blockchain platform to evolve out of a scientific philosophy and a research-first driven approach.

I do not have an answer at this time, what those concrete incentives will be. Part of the reason though is the fact that the vast majority of Cardano has not been built yet. It is good to think ahead, but we should not fall into the trap of wasting time on thinking how comparatively little ADA we hold and that there are whales that hold so much value. I would like to see us to come up with great visions and ideas on how we can use what we have here (many people with unique backgrounds with their own dreams and ideals) and build something we all benefit from. Let’s go for the win-win.

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