Charles summed this up perfectly a while back:
“Cardano is leading the entire cryptocurrency industry in this. Bitcoin and Ethereum the other two big guys, they’ve recused themselves. They’ve said we don’t want to do on-chain governance. In the case of Bitcoin, it’s anarchy. Great, they can’t change. Which means they have to live with design decisions made by a single person more than 13 years ago and hope to god it’s still relevant 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now. There’s no way to change it. Well good luck! As for Ethereum, the founder said on-chain governance is a fool’s errand you can’t do it, you can’t achieve it.
Okay, so how do you deal with the fact that when you have hundreds of millions of users – you have to represent them? Their needs, their voice, their particular use cases. How do you make a product backlog, without making yourself king for life. Is that decentralized? Is that what we signed up for? Having a beneficent leader who lives on the mountain top? How are we any better than what we assert that we’re going to replace? The only way we’re going to get it done, is to build an on-chain government; and why they don’t do it is because they’re scared. They don’t know how. There’s trust issues. It’s hard.
2100 days plus, the Cardano network has been running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by you. The stake pool operators, never down, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Microsoft has gone down since then. Google has gone down for 20 minutes. Amazon has gone down. Think about that, trillion dollar massive corporations with hundreds of thousands of people, the best engineers, mountains of money – and they own the fucking hardware, we don’t. Just a bunch of people come together, never met each other, are running this protocol. That’s something that is very special and it should never be discounted, it should never be trivialized, and we can never allow other people in the cryptocurrency space to take it for granted – it’s a sacred thing.
So, that’s our challenge. And that is why Cardano I feel is probably going to become the the biggest cryptocurrency in the world. I think it’s going to become more than a cryptocurrency. I think it’s going to become the backbone of a new digital nation. A new society. A place where we can finally begin to trust each other again. A place where we do our voting. A place where our money lives. A place where our digital life is.”
-Charles Hoskinson, 8/25/2023