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I’ve been in the Cardano ecosystem for five years or so, maybe longer. I’ve been through the NFT craze, the native token phase, the meme coin phase, the governance phase, the DREP phase, the dumping phase, and now I’m back at the bear market phase, for the second time in a row.
There are a lot of things I wish I had done differently, or seen differently. But sometimes seeing the forest through the trees takes perspective. It takes getting off these social media apps long enough to see clearly through the rose colored glasses so many people are wearing, because everything here is about incentives, and Cardano is no different.
Stake pool operators need delegation, so they have to maintain a constant public feedback loop. Charles has paid for probably most of the devs who have ever built on Cardano, whether they still work there or already left. The CF feels like a bought out organization that has been taken over and strangled by the Swiss government. Emurgo, most likely, is just here to fuck everything up but some have to play nice based on their governance delegations. The money went to the wrong people, it landed in the positions of power, and they used it ineffectively in our own ecosystem, like supporting projects on BNB instead of on Cardano itself.
So here I am at this point in the Cardano cycle, where the original project is not even finished, and there is already a new project the founder is trying to push on everyone. Only permissioned stake pools can run validators, all in the name of institutional privacy. It is hard now to see what I came here for in the beginning. I came for self sovereign money that was not captured by the systems we live in, the Federal Reserve printing our purchasing power away. Yet when I look back, that is basically what happened anyway. They got free printed tokens from the initial coin offering and used that to develop the chain and delegated to friendly faces and names. Fair enough, that made sense to me at the time. But governance has turned into a question of benefits for whom, instead of for the whole. Nepotism
I have seen this play out in real world politics. I have been involved in real world politics. I was hoping for a better system here. Maybe that was naive, but it doesn’t feel like it should have been. Money still controls the power, and it still controls the outcome. I do not believe that will end in anything close to what I wanted this to be.
So every time I open this app, I find myself becoming more of a Bitcoin maxi. I see the founder insulting people I respect because of his own insecurities and immaturity demanding apologies instead of explanations. I see some of the worst takes I have ever read, from someone clutching pearls while the thing they built slips away. I see people I admired stay ignorant and support things they probably wouldn’t in real life if they didn’t rely on this space for their own livelihood. I’m lucky in this aspect. I don’t have to be here, but there are still people I care about deeply and as a big brother in real life I feel need to speak out. I see so many others doing the same. People who spent their lives building here, thinking this would pan out, that this could change their life, just like all of us thought. Now that it is cratering and faltering, we are stuck with the pieces, and no one wants to take accountability. Decentralization right…
They do not want to address real concerns. Instead we get name calling and insults from people who seem to not have enough life experience to know how to handle difficult moments. I have seen real difficult moments. I have fifteen years in healthcare. Seeing the worst days of people’s lives, and being able to hold space for them. I can understand the devs, the common holders, the DeFi players, the NFT and meme people more than most. I have been in almost all of those roles in this space. I get it. I played along with all of it. I spent my hard, hard earned money at the chance it could be different.
There are a lot of things I wish I had done differently, or seen differently. But sometimes seeing the forest through the trees takes perspective. It takes getting off these social media apps long enough to see clearly through the rose colored glasses so many people are wearing, because everything here is about incentives, and Cardano is no different.
Stake pool operators need delegation, so they have to maintain a constant public feedback loop. Charles has paid for probably most of the devs who have ever built on Cardano, whether they still work there or already left. The CF feels like a bought out organization that has been taken over and strangled by the Swiss government. Emurgo, most likely, is just here to fuck everything up but some have to play nice based on their governance delegations. The money went to the wrong people, it landed in the positions of power, and they used it ineffectively in our own ecosystem, like supporting projects on BNB instead of on Cardano itself.
So here I am at this point in the Cardano cycle, where the original project is not even finished, and there is already a new project the founder is trying to push on everyone. Only permissioned stake pools can run validators, all in the name of institutional privacy. It is hard now to see what I came here for in the beginning. I came for self sovereign money that was not captured by the systems we live in, the Federal Reserve printing our purchasing power away. Yet when I look back, that is basically what happened anyway. They got free printed tokens from the initial coin offering and used that to develop the chain and delegated to friendly faces and names. Fair enough, that made sense to me at the time. But governance has turned into a question of benefits for whom, instead of for the whole. Nepotism
I have seen this play out in real world politics. I have been involved in real world politics. I was hoping for a better system here. Maybe that was naive, but it doesn’t feel like it should have been. Money still controls the power, and it still controls the outcome. I do not believe that will end in anything close to what I wanted this to be.
So every time I open this app, I find myself becoming more of a Bitcoin maxi. I see the founder insulting people I respect because of his own insecurities and immaturity demanding apologies instead of explanations. I see some of the worst takes I have ever read, from someone clutching pearls while the thing they built slips away. I see people I admired stay ignorant and support things they probably wouldn’t in real life if they didn’t rely on this space for their own livelihood. I’m lucky in this aspect. I don’t have to be here, but there are still people I care about deeply and as a big brother in real life I feel need to speak out. I see so many others doing the same. People who spent their lives building here, thinking this would pan out, that this could change their life, just like all of us thought. Now that it is cratering and faltering, we are stuck with the pieces, and no one wants to take accountability. Decentralization right…
They do not want to address real concerns. Instead we get name calling and insults from people who seem to not have enough life experience to know how to handle difficult moments. I have seen real difficult moments. I have fifteen years in healthcare. Seeing the worst days of people’s lives, and being able to hold space for them. I can understand the devs, the common holders, the DeFi players, the NFT and meme people more than most. I have been in almost all of those roles in this space. I get it. I played along with all of it. I spent my hard, hard earned money at the chance it could be different.
