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by rawtxapp 1895 days ago
PoS is yet to be proven, I'm really hoping eth2 shows that it actually works, because the other ones with PoS aren't that heavily used or tested in adversarial ways.

When it comes to money and value, the utmost important thing is security, that's the tradeoff that Bitcoin makes and that's what people are buying into. Everything else is secondary.

2 comments

cardano is completely distributed PoS 46 billion market cap (5th largest crypto) - I'm not sure what you mean by "yet to be proven"

it also theoretically supports 1MM tx/second - to put that into perspective VISA does somewhere in the ballpark of 2k tx/second (but theoretically can do much more than that I'm sure)

As much as I like Cardano and as much as I have faith that it will succeed, I think you might be overstating what has been accomplished so far.

- The network is decentralised and running Proof of State.

- The network is not currently running automated peering. Block producing peers are manually selected by stake pool operators at the moment. This doesn't necessarily make the network more centralised but it exposes certain risks. A node update (and I believe a protocol update as well) will be coming out in the next 2-3 months that will transition SPOs to running automated peering.

- The network currently sits around 250-300tx/s max.

- A near term (next 6 or so months) protocol revision will be raising that limit to around 1k tx/s.

- Hydra (isomorphic state channels) allows 1k tx/s to be processed per state channel (which then periodically checkpoints against the network) and was demonstrated to maintain these performance metrics up to 1k state channels.

So the network is decentralised and it is doing very well however it is not currently capable or currently theoretically capable of handling 1MM tx/s. It can however handle an impressive amount of transactions compared to many other decentralised networks at the moment. The protocol revisions that will allow close to the stated 1MM tx/s are completed with corresponding papers (containing formal proofs and simulations to support tx rate and security claims) already accepted to or well received at cryptography conferences.

Cardano is doing very well and moving at a solid pace however overstating where the project is and what it is capable of will only serve to undermine outside perception of the project.

No, Cardano is still centrally coordinated, with an intention to go actual PoS some day.
I'd be curious what you mean by centrally coordinated and not PoS?

There are certain ways that Cardano is not yet fully decentralised to be sure but the network is operating as a proper decentralised PoS network.

The network has been transitioning from Federated nodes to Decentralised nodes (transferring by about 2% every 5 to 10 days) for the past few months. The d parameter (marking the transfer from 100% federated(1.0) to 100% decentralised(0.0)) ticked down to 0 at the end of last month and block production is fully decentralised.

Where it is still centralised:

- Peering between block producing nodes is currently manual however automatic peering will be enabled before the end of the quarter.

- Development is largely controlled by the Cardano Foundation, IOG, and EMURGO. This isn't unusual in the decentralised software space however the plan is to transition to handling development/feature contracts via on-chain voting and treasury disbursement (and this is already being trialled through Project Catalyst as a decentralised accelerator program) within a year or so. All feature integration and HFC event mechanics however are properly decentralised.

Thank you for providing technical details.
Not anymore, it's fully decentralized since recently
no it's not, where would you even come up with the idea that it was?
That's all still in the "research" phase.
45 billion market cap is "research phase"? Exactly what would make it move out of "research phase" then?
What would be the criteria for saying 'eth2 works' in your view ?