Cardano and Bitcoin can coexist and support each other

The solution already exists and you’ve all heard about it. They are stable coins. Stable coins are not speculative in nature and their value is more or less stable. However, this is exactly what people expect from a medium of exchange and a unit of account. You can keep stable coins in your wallet and if you can afford to buy a phone today, that will be true in a month or two. By holding stable coins, you don’t run the risk of the price crashing 50% in a short period of time and you wouldn’t be able to buy the phone while waiting for the market sentiment to change. When it comes to the means of payment, Bitcoin and Cardano will compete directly. Will it be sooner to pay with volatile cryptocurrencies or stable coins? For stable coins, the task is much easier. DeFi is built on the success of stable coins, and long-term loans cannot do without stability. Thus, with the increased adoption of DeFi services, the popularity of stable coins is also growing. Especially in countries where there is high volatility or where people do not have a bank account, this solution will be very convenient to use.

You can find two stable coin projects in the top 10: USDT and USDC. That’s saying something. Both projects use USD as the underlying asset. This is a straightforward and relatively easy solution, but trust in a third party plays a big role. A much better solution is algorithmic stable coins, where volatile cryptocurrencies can be used as the underlying asset. ADA, but also BTC coins, can be used as an underlying asset. The more stable coins are used, the more the value of the underlying asset will naturally increase. Algorithmic stable coins will be backed by a basket of selected commodities and currencies that are stable over the long term. Eventually, an algorithmic stable coin may be more stable than, say, the USD.

In the case of Cardano, the straightforward solution is to use ADA coins as the underlying asset. All functionality will be built on top of the Cardano infrastructure. However, BTC coins can be tokenized, so they can theoretically be used as well. At this point, the two projects can complement each other beautifully. The infrastructure and technology of Cardano will be used and at the same time BTC coins, which have a high market value. The solution as a whole will solve the volatility problem and the winners will be happy users of stable coins and, at the same time, investors in volatile cryptocurrencies.

Could algorithmic stable coins be created solely on Bitcoin infrastructure without a smart contract platform? Probably not, or at the cost of increased centralization. Creating a reliable and decentralized Oracle infrastructure, including all the economic incentives, is quite a task and employs a high number of developers. The data consumer must be a reliable algorithm that must also be decentralized, and smart contract platforms are essential here. Maintaining stable coins will require high scalability and fast network consensus to be able to react quickly to market fluctuations.

How best to use blockchain

Blockchain can make history immutable and that is one of its biggest advantages. Blockchain can thus serve as an amazing global ledger. In practice, we see that transparency is an advantage, but also a disadvantage at the same time. There are cases where people call for more privacy and are bothered by the fact that it is relatively easy to trace the wealth of individual users. For the use of BTC coins as a store of value, a transparent blockchain is not at all suitable and is rather detrimental. Conversely, transparency, or conditional transparency, can be an advantage in some cases. Especially when the blockchain is used for transparent or trustworthy accounting. Accounting is predominantly about records of economic activity and here the stability of value plays an absolutely crucial role. Accounting based on volatile assets does not make much sense. Respectively, it is certainly good to make records of movements of volatile assets like stocks or cryptocurrencies, but sales are mostly recorded at a stable value. Accounting built on a blockchain that uses stable coins is the ideal solution.

In practice, we could see, for example, factories tokenizing all inputs and outputs for accounting records. The advantage is that tokenized outputs can be sold directly to another factory and recorded as an input within the accounting. The sale of tokens for stable coins will forever be part of the accounting records. This will make the financial flows very easy to track and also to audit. Issuing tokens is also something Cardano is more suited to than Bitcoin. Respectively, if we’re talking about the use case of blockchain as an accounting ledger, Cardano is definitely a better choice than Bitcoin. It can’t be said that the two projects are in direct competition here. Cardano’s use case is much broader than that of Bitcoin. Cardano seeks to omit centralized intermediaries in economic and social processes in which intermediaries abuse their position and disadvantage end users. A typical example is the lending sector or cross-border transactions. If peer-to-peer lending is to work reliably, we must rely on a decentralized infrastructure. Smart contracts and immutable records in the blockchain is exactly what Cardano is best suited for. Bitcoin doesn’t target this use case, and its limited scalability, expensive and slow transactions at the first layer make it unsuitable for it.

Let’s not forget that second layers often don’t have their own blockchain. Their goal is to make transactions cheaper and faster without global consensus and thus without a ledger entry. To a limited extent, this may be sufficient and a final record of a series of transactions between two participants may be sufficient for accounting. The key will always be the first layer record, as only that can ensure immutability. Once centralized third parties are used for transactions, we can forget most of the benefits offered by first-layer blockchain protocols.

Global consensus and blockchain records also have another meaning, which is of course to ensure that there is no double-spend and that the number of coins in circulation has not increased. Again, it should be noted that this is what the first layers of the Cardano and Bitcoin protocols will always do best. If BTC coins are going to be held by institutions like PayPal, in essence, that company must be trusted to hold an adequate number of BTC coins. Global consensus on the first layer has huge advantages over second-layer solutions. This is where Bitcoin and Cardano compete, as Cardano strives for greater scalability and stability in transaction fees. Reducing the cost of global consensus and enabling use by a wider population is certainly a valid use case of blockchain technology. PoS is definitely more suited to this than PoW. Most of the economic activity in the case of Bitcoin will likely take place elsewhere than the first layer in near future. In the case of Cardano, the blockchain record will be more accessible to people. With higher adoption, there will be more emphasis on ensuring that the number of coins is not intentionally inflated. Cardano will have an advantage here as it will be able to look after more transactions. In the case of Bitcoin, the problem is also solvable to some extent through transaction aggregation, but the question is what the blockchain record will look like and how easy it will be to verify.

Eventually, it may prove advantageous to tokenize BTC coins and use Cardano as a second layer. It may turn out that in some cases it will be better to use Cardano rather than Lightning Network, as there will be a blockchain record in the case of Cardano. Transactions will be cheap and still orders of magnitude faster than on the first layer of Bitcoin. Cardano will offer advantages of the blockchain that the second layer will never have. Moreover, with the ability to use smart contracts. This is where the technologies can complement each other nicely. Cardano can be seen more as competition for the Lightning Network and other second layers above Bitcoin than for Bitcoin itself. However, both will find a use.

It is often argued that only PoW can provide a high level of security. What is forgotten is that any other blockchain can essentially piggyback on Bitcoin’s PoW and exploit its security. For example, merge mining between Dogecoin and Litecoin works in practice. Dogecoin thus exploits the security of Litecoin. If a solution requires the security of the PoW, it is no problem to use Bitcoin. Here too, the protocols can complement each other perfectly. Moreover, the Cardano consensus does not necessarily rely only on Ouroboros PoS and it is possible to build security on top of another consensus. Thus, the security of the Cardano network can be provided by the PoS and the actual PoW consensus can run alongside. If the community decides to go this route, the team will implement such a solution.

Tokens make a difference

Generally speaking, another big advantage of blockchain technology is the ability to own and freely handle digital assets without a third party and on a global level. Cardano can offer this in the same way as Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin only offers this for its native BTC coins. Cardano will allow you to do this with anything you can think of. So as the technology becomes more pervasive in our society and regulators finish their work, it will be possible to tokenize stocks, bonds, debts, access rights, voting rights, and many other things. NFTs are successful mainly because there is a digital infrastructure for them that wasn’t there before. Once there is the real value behind NFTs that is legally enforceable and authenticity is easily verifiable, the whole space will take on a whole new dimension. And not only in terms of use for accounting but also in terms of ownership.

Currently, you can own ADA and BTC coins via private keys. It’s a question of when and to what extent tokens will become mainstream, but that they will is probably inevitable. If bitcoin succeeds, it will be mainly due to decentralization and the benefits it brings. It is naive to think that these benefits cannot be applied elsewhere. It makes sense to buy Tesla stock in paper form from centralized authority and pay with BTC coins. But it makes much more sense to buy a tokenized share on a decentralized exchange, actually own it, and be able to sell it in an instant to anyone in the world or use it as collateral for a loan. This is not a technological problem at the moment, but mainly a regulatory problem. Technology is ahead of the regulators at the moment, as it always is, and it is only a matter of time before everything becomes clear and the exact rules of the game are set.

Cardano and ATALA Prism allow you to own your digital identity, including all associated data. Through your private key, you can own your education, health records, social media history, and much more. This expands the capabilities of blockchain and has a greater reach into the physical world. The history and immutability of records will make it harder to cheat. If an institution issues you a certificate and is still in the role of the one who ensures the authenticity of that certificate, it will be hard to forge that certificate. For example, an individual will not be able to create a fake version of a college diploma, which is now mostly issued in paper form. In a digital world, digital proof that the diploma is genuine will be required, and this will be virtually impossible to forge. If an institution issues a certificate illegally, there will be a record of it somewhere forever and it will be easy to find the culprit if the system is set up well. Do we need to have a plastic card issued by the state to be a citizen, or do we want to have a digital identity and be a citizen of the world? If we are to have non-state money, it makes no sense to have citizenship.

We do not believe in any revolutionary disintegration of states. States are here to stay in some form. We can talk about whether states will allow us to have more freedom and control over our data. The state will always need to have some control over its citizens. Issuing a digital identity instead of a plastic card is not a big change, but in a digital world, a digital identity can have many advantages. Many people in the world do not have an identity, for example, because the state has not created the necessary infrastructure. Cardano is available wherever there is the internet. So developing countries can just make sure the internet is available and everything else will be ready. People can have their digital identity and can easily install wallets and thus start sending transactions or taking loans. Greater digitization can be the path to freedom.

The use of tokens will of course place higher demands on scalability, and this cannot be done without second layers. Cardano will have a second layer called Hydra that can handle a high volume of transactions and can even perform smart contracts. The interaction between Cardano and Hydra will be seamless and very fast and reliable. Any identity verification or exchange of two digital assets in a decentralized way will be very user-friendly. It wouldn’t make sense to build this kind of functionality on top of Bitcoin. It’s not just a technology problem, it’s a community problem. Most Bitcoin proponents want to keep the first layer simple and ideally with minimal changes. No one expects Bitcoin to ever be a smart contract platform. On the contrary, for Cardano, that’s the mission.

We can see examples in practice. Ethiopia adopted Cardano to build national infrastructure. El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as the second national currency after the USD. In state-level adoption, we can already see differences in the perception of Cardano and Bitcoin. There is no objective reason why El Salvador should not adopt Cardano for the purpose of building its national infrastructure, or even for the purpose of issuing its own national currency that could have similar characteristics to Bitcoin. Both projects can find a use in the same country and work side by side.

The future is about fees

Cardano is a platform, and unless the ADA becomes a medium of exchange, it will still make sense to hold ADA coins as a means of owning part of the Cardano network and having decision rights. For BTC coins, the use is clear. It will likely be a store of value with the potential to become a medium of exchange. If the non-state money narrative doesn’t come to fruition, and it certainly won’t in the next 10 or 20 years, it will at least be a store of value. ADA coins generate a passive income that will come not only from monetary expansion but also from fees collected for use of the network. Thus, as the network succeeds, the attractiveness of ADA coins will grow in terms of speculating on price appreciation. The higher the network effect and the number of users, the more will be collected in fees received by ADA coin holders.

Any decentralized network must have a workable economic model to ensure its long-term survival. The network must generate income to pay for its maintenance, security, and decentralization to the people who look after it. This is true not only for the first layer of the Cardano and Bitcoin protocols but also for all second layers. If the second layer is not profitable enough, it will face economic extinction or centralization. Economic sustainability will certainly be an easier task for Cardano than for Bitcoin. The main reason is the higher scalability and higher demand for transactions and the use of smart contracts. In addition to native ADA coins, Cardano will also send tokens, stable coins, and use contracts. This will generate a much larger number of transactions than sending ADA coins. It is entirely possible that only a smaller percentage of the population will own ADA coins, but tens of percent will own stable coins issued on the Cardano network.

In a couple of decades, networks will be living mainly on transaction fees, as monetary expansion will be heading towards zero in the case of Cardano and Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s security is based on consuming electricity, and if the network doesn’t make enough money from transaction fees, the network will cease to be secure. Cardano’s network is built on cryptography, so most of the fees collected can be used for rewards.

It has to be said that in terms of transaction fees, all the networks are essentially in direct competition with each other. Without the fees collected, the economic viability of the networks is reduced. The competition is not only between Cardano and Bitcoin but also between Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Every fee that does not go to PoW miners will one day be missing from the security budget. So the networks are essentially competing with each other regarding adoption. If BTC coins get tokenized and start being used in the Cardano ecosystem, that’s a problem for Bitcoin, as it starts to increase the network effect of the Cardano network, not the Bitcoin network. Transaction fees will be received by ADA coin holders, not PoW miners. This is perhaps one reason why there is such a high degree of maximalism in the cryptocurrency world. However, there is no easy way out here. People will always desire to pay low fees. Moreover, if cryptocurrencies are to compete with fiat currencies, the functionality needs to be better, not worse. In the case of fiat currencies when you pay with a credit card, you pay for goods in seconds. Until cryptocurrencies can do this, let’s not expect a decentralized revolution. The first layer of Bitcoin will never be a fast and scalable payment protocol. Second layers and other networks like Cardano will be the networks that deliver the functionality needed for real cryptocurrency usage beyond the speculative aspect. How this will affect the economic models of the projects in question we can only guess. However, users will always prefer cheap and fast transactions, which at the moment plays in Cardano’s favor.

Cryptocurrencies offer us freedom

Purely hypothetically, if the only Bitcoin existed, the success of the network would be assured because it would be the only alternative to the central world order. However, competition is the nature of how humanity functions, and where there is no competition, there is some form of centralization and abuse of power. If the only Bitcoin existed, people who accumulate Bitcoin in time could become the new leaders of the world without the possibility of being deposed. Who would that be? Basically, exactly the people who are powerful now and have enough money to buy BTC coins. We cannot arrive at the decentralization of society only through decentralized money, but through decentralization at the level of projects that enable decentralization at the level of centralized institutions. People must remain free to choose the store of value, the means of exchange, and the services. Some people in the crypto community are very toxic and I cannot imagine a new elite emerging from them. The saying “Have fun staying poor” is a very arrogant way to establish freedom. Freedom is not about one possible path you are forced to take or you will remain doomed. Freedom is about choosing your path. Once one path proves unacceptable to the majority of the population, there must be an alternative. Cardano and Bitcoin are competing on the level of adoption, but that’s a good thing because it gives us the freedom to find a truly free solution for all. Ideally, projects should be looking for ways to interconnect and leverage each other’s strengths.

People are unlikely to ever agree on one solution because there will always be someone more advantaged than others. In the case of cryptocurrency adoption, it is an economic advantage. Early adopters get rich by having newcomers come in and buy coins. Adoption always gets to the point where it is more economically advantageous to bet on a different horse than the one everyone else is riding. This will be true until a project establishes itself as a medium of exchange at least in a particular territory. That may never come in the case of volatile cryptocurrencies. Investment in cryptocurrencies should remain free and people should do it for either rational or social reasons. In other industries, we don’t see, for example, Tesla fans bad-mouthing other car companies and discouraging people from buying competitors’ cars. In the world of cryptocurrencies, however, this is folklore. There will always be people that like cars that run on gasoline, diesel, gas, or electricity. It’s naive to think that one solution can be pushed through. However, this is exactly what is happening in the cryptocurrency world. People are trying to convince other people to buy the money of the future with the argument that there will be no competition. We are already seeing that part of the population prefers the PoS solution purely because it is an environmentally friendly solution. Institutional investors are also seeing this. Why should anyone tell them that they are making a mistake in their choice? Do people not have the right to choose their own path? Promoting one solution by force or by slandering the competition will never lead to freedom because the form of adoption itself is not free. People promote their own interests in an unfair and often despicable way, and this has no chance of success. Let’s give Bitcoin a chance to become a store of value and Cardano a chance to become a smart contract platform. 

Are fiat currencies and countries Bitcoin’s biggest competitor, as some people claim? Let’s give it a chance and see if Bitcoin has a chance to weaken the role of states and fiat currencies. Cardano aims to help the weakest among us and to some extent has a similar goal, only the means to achieve the goal are different. Instead of displacing fiat currencies, he wants to create his own stable currency and replace centralized institutions with decentralized versions. Both goals are ambitious, and if either project succeeds, it will be a big change for society. Why should we lower our chances because of a silly play on competition between projects? Isn’t it better to increase our chances just by having more projects trying to achieve a similar goal? In practice, collaboration is usually a more profitable arrangement than the direct competition and trying to completely annihilate the adversary.

Cardano will not disappear from the world just because a part of the Bitcoin community wants it to, and vice versa. If you think about it more, both projects target different uses and different target groups. Bitcoin at the moment is more for wealthy Western speculators who may see it as a way to protect their wealth. People from developing countries don’t need bitcoin because they have no wealth and can’t even afford to pay the expensive fees on the first tier. Often not even the first one that would take them to the second layers. Rather, these people need a financial infrastructure that allows them to interact economically with the outside world. It does not pay for banks to expand into African countries. Cardano is already there and anyone can use it for cross-border transactions, for example. 

Let’s give people the choice and do not laugh at someone for staying poor if they don’t use one particular solution. Many people are poor and the way to wealth is through expanding their options rather than buying a store of value. Let us respect the needs of all those around us and not impose our views on them only through our own selfish interests, which we hide with the pleasing words of freedom.

One project cannot cover all user needs

One project will never cover all the needs of users. For example, if you insist that we need PoW for security, don’t expect the first layer of Bitcoin to become a good transaction network or smart contract platform. If you think we don’t need tokenization, decentralized digital identity, stable coins, decentralized exchanges, or banks, don’t use them. There are people who see the point and want to build decentralized finance. Cardano and Bitcoin are fundamentally different in what the community expects from them. The Bitcoin community doesn’t want Bitcoin to be a smart contract platform and doesn’t want the first layer of the protocol, including PoW, to fundamentally change. The Cardano community is large and it is possible that at the time of writing Cardano has the third largest community in the cryptocurrency world. The Cardano community is an advocate for change, innovation, and improving the capabilities of the protocol. Both projects have a right to exist. We don’t know at this point which has a better chance of adoption. Even though Bitcoin historically has the edge, that doesn’t mean it’s automatically the clear winner in terms of adoption in the next decade. The number of active addresses is growing rapidly, and as more decentralized applications emerge, the user base will essentially only grow. Until another decade passes, we won’t know which concept is better or more viable. In the history of the Internet, we can find many examples where legacy protocols have died out and successors have taken over. Does anyone remember MySpace, for example? No, because the dominant role today is played by Facebook. Would you rather use Google or Yahoo? Most people use the younger Google. However, Google is not the only search engine in the world and it has its strong competitors.

From the perspective of users, i.e. all of us who want to build decentralized networks, competition is beneficial, and trying out different concepts is a necessity. Let’s not forget that decentralization is all about technology, and technology will always improve. Technological progress is essentially impossible to prevent. Bitcoin and Cardano will each improve at their own pace. Alongside these protocols, other projects will emerge that will offer different functionalities. This is a natural progression and evolution. In a world of evolution, no one knows in advance what will survive and what will not. People who claim to know the future are basically deliberately lying or afraid of competition. But they can’t beat evolution with their arguments. The beauty of our world is that nothing is certain and we cannot predict the future. Rather, we are in a mode of reacting to specific events or states of affairs that we are trying to change.

The world is too diverse and cryptocurrencies too young to see what has a chance to succeed. No one knows and we can only infer from history. Blockchain is a fundamental technology that has the potential to turn the world upside down. To say that only Bitcoin, or only Cardano, can do this is naive and foolish. We will be smarter in another 10 years. Until then, everything is speculation and often purely self-serving arguments. Both Cardano and Bitcoin have clear missions. Let the teams build and try to achieve their goal. That’s the best we can do. People will be the ones who choose the solutions that will be available. The obvious economic or social benefits will be what decides. And because the needs of people in different parts of the world differ, it is more than likely that multiple projects that exist side by side will succeed.

Conclusion

As you can see, we found many cases in which Cardano and Bitcoin compete, but also many cases in which they can complement each other. We can’t predict the future and it is possible things will play out differently than we think. We don’t have a crystal ball. Our team wishes Cardano and Bitcoin success. We wish people from different communities would not be so hostile towards each other and try to find ways to coexist rather than slander each other. We’ll see if the situation improves in the coming years. Those who sincerely seek freedom should consider the consequences of their behavior. Keep in mind that most of the population has only heard of cryptocurrencies but has not yet adopted any project. We cannot discourage newcomers with a hostile atmosphere between groups. Let people use individual protocols and be free to find their own way. Let’s influence their opinions without bias and objectively. Let us work together to find the best solution for all of us.