IOHK | WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO | 06/28/2017    However, cryptocurrencies seek to toss out human understanding, compassion and judgement in exchange for an uncaring digital judge perfectly bound to a constitution without consideration to fairness or outcome. Given that humans have always tried and will continue to attempt to change rules to selfish ends, it is refreshing to actually have a system that cannot be corrupted. But what happens when a user needs to blend these new systems with traditional financial systems? What happens when one needs to live in the human world? For example, property rights such as land registration live entirely in the physical world. Even tokenizing the land still requires some acknowledgement of the incumbent jurisdiction. To provide another point, a bar of gold cannot move itself. The digital judge can command its movement, but cannot force it without humans to accommodate. Hence a digital ledger can drift from reality. Thus a protocol designer needs to decide how much human reality should be permitted in his cryptocurrency. The more flexibility, the less fidelity to the absolute one should expect. The more consumer protection, the more mechanisms have to exist to provide rollbacks, refunds and editing of history. This section and the next on regulation covers Cardano’s pragmatic approach to the topic. In terms of interoperability, there are two broad groups to discuss. First, interoperability with legacy financial systems (the non-cryptocurrency world). Second, interoperability with other cryptocurrencies. Legacy Fintech is not composed of a single standard or even a common language. There is tremendous diversity in approaches, the entities responsible for settlement and clearing, business processes, and other domains involved in the accounting, transformation and movement of value. It is unreasonable to suggest that, simply because one technology is superior, the rest of the ecosystem will somehow admit defeat and upgrade. For example, many people still use Windows XP 16 years after the initial release. This sad state of affairs is equivalent to someone using the original Macintosh released in 1984 in the year 2000. Consumer behavior aside, businesses are generally even slower in their upgrade cycle. Many banks still use back ends written in Cobol. Once infrastructure is known to work and meets business requirements, there is usually little incentive to upgrade or refine software and protocols for a consumer’s benefit outside of compliance or security concerns. WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 29 of 44