IOHK | WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO | 06/28/2017    Our scalability goals for Cardano are greatly aided by our consensus algorithm. Ouroboros permits a decentralized way to elect a quorum of consensus nodes, which in turn can run more traditional protocols developed over the last 20 years to accommodate the needs of large infrastructure providers such as Google and Facebook . 10 For example, the election of a quorum for an epoch means we have a trusted set of nodes to maintain the ledger for a specific time period. It is trivial to elect multiple quorums concurrently and partition transactions to different quorums. Similar techniques could be applied for network propagation and also sharding the blockchain itself into unique partitions. In our current roadmap, scaling methods will be applied to Ouroboros starting in 2018 and continue to be a focus in 2019 and 2020. Cardano Computation Layer As mentioned previously, there are two components of a transaction: the mechanism to send and record the flow of tokens and the reasons as well as conditions behind moving tokens. The latter can be arbitrarily complex and involve terabytes of data, multiple signatures and special events occurring. The latter can also be remarkably simple with a single signature pushing value to another address. The challenge behind modeling the reasons and conditions of value flow is that they are immensely personal to the entities involved in the most unpredictable of ways. Lessons from contract law paint an even more problematic picture where the actors themselves might not even be aware that the transaction does not match commercial reality . We generally call this phenomenon “the semantic gap” . 11 Why should one build a cryptocurrency chasing an endless layer of complexity and abstraction? It seems Sisyphean in nature and naive in practice. Furthermore, each abstraction embraced has both legal and security consequences. For example, there are numerous activities online that are universally deemed illegal or scorned such as the trafficking of child pornography or the selling of state secrets. By deploying robust 10 There are also other independently research protocols attempting to achieve the same end such as Elastico and Bitcoin-NG 11 Loi Luu et al. discuss this gap in their recent paper on Making Smart Contracts Smarter WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 14 of 44