My thoughts on Midnight and Cardano working together in the medium article. Spoiler alert, its complex but remember you are in charge / control. cardano-fans.medium.com/my-m…

In a recent AMA between -> goes into answer a question (which btw is not from me but similar nickname) why Charles attacks only CF and not Emurgo. Beyond things that are said, lets try to understand what he is actually saying and some deeper in between the lines things. - if you interpret directly what Charles is saying is that CF should do commercial integrations rather than Emurgo which is not what most people in the ecosystem think but it is filling his narrative now, it even says Emurgo is a commercial arm and how all of us assumed it since 2017... - if we interpret directly what Charles is saying, it means he doesn't want Amaru and a competing node, so in fact logically taking this further Charles is against decentralisation - a rather obscure and rarely known fact is that, not mentioned in the video is that Charles wanted Intersect (which I/O owns) be the only administrator of funds of Cardano, effectively centralising it, in fact is already happened that owner of the company had to chime in and discolve Technical Seering Committe (TSC), because things were not going in the direction that the owner liked, luckily, again a rather unknown fact is that we as Cardano Community managed to allow multiple administrators, not just Intersect (for instance Pragma or others, e.g. some other DAOs) - Charles mentiones poaching of an employee, the reality is that employee would leave anyway and potentially leave Cardano Ecosystem and applied to CF, so are we back into slavery mode? What it is really about is not employee leaving, billionaires do not care about that but loosing somebody of a high Haskell knowledge and domain knowledge. So who in the world would be able to create alternative client? You know to know Haskell to read reference implementation but also you need to have domain knowledge how to even approach it. That is precious - ask Charles, if he considers ADA (2 bln ADA) as a revenue to IOG or funds to bootstrap the ecosystem? This is critical I believe - personally I believe we should have many cardano-clients, simply for developers but also not to be held hostage on the prices by a monopolistic practises (seems obviouis), whether it is Pragma with Amaru, IOG's node or Blinklab's Dino or TypeScript client (Harmonic Labs) - to say that Pragma consist of ecosystem builders, so actually the main competition is whether Charles keeps those ecosystem builder companies so busy with other lucrative tasks that they will not be able to develop alternative node (rust) - Amaru. After all if you are a business, you look who pays you and you likely take offers paying you more. It ain't fairy tale when you have bills to pay, so actually it maybe opposite, there is a danger we may not have Amaru or alternative client because companies developing it maybe over-subscribed to other requests / contracts. We need to monitor this as Cardano Community What we as Cardano Community are trying to do is to decentralising Cardano, what Charles tries to do is to centralise it and stiffle competition so have monopolistic access to Cardano Treasury. As an enterprenur it makes sense he tries it is even logical. We have Cardano because of Charles and an insane amount of work of IOG / CF and Emurgo. Cardano didn't make him poorer so yes there is element of him wanting to build alternave financial system but that does not have to be mutually exclusive with desire to earn money. That all doesn't mean we should allow ourselves to centralise everything via Input / Output and be held captive. The reason I feel people struggle is because we tend to think that if somebody did all this work then it means when we have no access to the information, we trust, and assume good intentions. Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups, I learned this in my life the hard way, whether in realtionships or flat renovation and constructions, business, contracting out a software vendors(!), etc. Especially with contracting out software vendors, the code I saw and how many times I got played is not even funny. Overall, it is better to be on the safe side and plan for worse than let yourself be exploited later like I have been many times. Even when we marry, some of us sign pre-nup. Like what? Not romantic, life is not romantic actually, a yes because we don't know how things go and even with something like love and marriage tend to do this. Don't trust, verify is a mantra after all in blockchain, so let's stick to it. The above is not a disney movie but simply more pragmatic look at the situation and simply facing reality for us as a Cardano Community. Never forget, decentralisation is not only in terms of node operations but also in terms of ecosystem funding and alternative nodes, which various sources of income to fund alternative node. As minimum we need at least 1 extra node with independent financial stream and God damn, it won't be easy because what if Leios on on Cardano-Node (Haskell) and Amaru still has no Leios? First another reference is a feature complete (main-net readiness) but then catching up is very hard as well. #Cardano