IOHK | WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO | 06/28/2017    monopolize the network. In fact, e-commerce violated the NSF AUP until it was repealed in 1992 . By the time businesses had the luxury of commercializing the internet, there was already a strong set of standards, principles and evangelistic adherents. This did not stop companies like AOL and Microsoft from trying to build wall gardens and creating proprietary technology like ActiveX . This foundation has not stopped next generation actors such as Google from pushing their own agendas given their enormous user bases and capitalizations. With swarms of rent seeking actors from traders to miners, cryptocurrencies are the ultimate 32 commercially motivated ecosystems. Given this foundation, evolution of the custodianship of cryptocurrencies has resulted in optimization around self-interest. For example, validationless mining is starting to occur more frequently as it improves a miner’s profit margin, yet this completely disregards the entire purpose and utility of mining. Mining centralization has already occurred with just a handful of actors in control of the majority of Bitcoin’s hash power. Like the internet, cryptocurrencies require consensus to change. But when such rapid centralization of power to a handful of brokers occurs, what happens when change is not convenient to them? Unlike the internet, the bootstrapping of most cryptocurrencies is not done through altruistically non-commercial or academic means. From inception, some group seeks to make gains and there are power brokers assigned to help ensure those gains. Founding centralization is a reality that each cryptocurrency must face in its evolution. We cannot fully escape it, but should at least try to design around gradual decentralization. For Cardano, we thought carefully about what factors promote centralization and what techniques could be applied to encourage our protocol to gradually become public infrastructure like the web. We fully admit that total decentralization is both impossible and perhaps even counterproductive. Yet certain factors can be encouraged to produce a more balanced system. First, while centralized custodianship of crowdsale funds allows for agile and rapid development of the protocol during the early days, eventually funding has to diversify and the speed of 32 See link for more information on this term WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 41 of 44