NEWM
Newmont Mining Corp.
stock NYSE

Well it sounds like the Hydra Doom event was premature then, either they thought they'd find traction with use cases that were not hampered by that restriction or they thought development would be farther along by the time Hydra Doom took place. Either way it just highlights some of my gripes with Cardano, first, the idea that Cardano is the only chain that isn't relying on hype, when the lasting impact of Hydra Doom is just people hyping how much TPS it did in a stress test, without noting the limitations of Hydra's current implementation, the limitations of it's full implementation(as it's closest analog is a state channel, which is not really a general purpose scaling solution), nor the technical difficulties that took place, nor the absence of actual adoption of the tech. Secondly, it exemplifies the pace of development and lack thereof on Cardano. Hydra has been in development for roughly 4 years now, as the IOHK blog noted a proof of concept in 9/17/2021. You would also think that this is an area ripe for outside investment if there was a belief that Cardano usage would increase, we have a new ETH L2 pop up every day, as teams are willing to battle for that market share, meanwhile Cardano is a blue ocean with few incumbents, yet no one is interested in developing anything outside of IOHK/Cardano.
As far as your interpretation of the community, I think that's accurate, but I also think it's far less of a positive than it seems. Almost every blockchain follows a similar path when it comes to social consensus, even if it's not 100% onchain. The same steps are taken, the same arguments are had, the same process is taken to iterate on the network. You say "we move on to the next problem to be solved" but it seems like all the problems being solved are with Cardano itself and if those solutions are all insular, then what good is it accomplishing? Improving Cardano for the sake of improvement doesn't do anything unless it also solves external problems as well. You can only praise the process for so long before the lack of results start to overshadow it.
When you say "Cardano cannot be stopped" that's also a bit shortsighted IMO, as Cardano needs a monumental increase in usage, as well as a similarly monumental increase in scaling to accommodate that usage, to be sustainable. Less than 1% of what goes to stake pools actually comes from fees([99.2% comes from the reserve](https://cardanoscan.io/epoch/574)), and the fees are already relatively high despite the low amount of onchain activity. The amount of fees literally needs to do more than 100x to cover that and there isn't 100x space to do so currently.
As far as your examples, these kinds of projects are not unique, and it's very hard to tell if they're getting any usage. Palmyra only shows "500+" downloads on the Google Play Store and it's hard to tell what NEWM is actually doing besides posting on networking and social media posts, if their business is actually successful they're doing a poor job of showing it. If there is any success story on Cardano, I haven't really seen it yet, but maybe that's just because I look at more than just the grabby headlines.
You can say I'm ignoring all this, but I think I've made it clear that I have *not* been ignoring Cardano, otherwise I wouldn't have all of these criticisms, I wouldn't be the having to educate Cardano bulls on how there is more to the story of Hydra then just "1,000,000 TPS!", I wouldn't be the only one concerned with Cardano's sustainability or its feasibility to generate usage. It's funny how often Cardano people demonize Solana as being a chain that is solely memecoins, which is patently false, but then fail to realize what little activity does happen on Cardano, is largely based around memes as well. Ironically it feels like the Cardano community ignores more of Cardano than I do. Which doesn't surprise me as my criticisms, that I think are completely valid, got me banned from /r/Cardano, along with the claim that I "persistently spread misinformation" which is laughable as my criticisms are all rooted in readily observable and verifiable data.
I don't hate Cardano, I just don't think it's a smart investment considering how richly valued it is, relative both to its competition but also taking into account its own accomplishments. It seems like some future exponential growth has been priced in since 2017 and I just don't understand what that could be or how it could happen, because in the last 8 years there should have been at least *some* hints. But time after time it's some hyped development (almost exclusively in-house), it's X hard fork or Y hard fork or it's the launch of smart contracts, or it's Africa, or it's some vague partnership with Argentina... and all of that has led to nothing beyond people on Reddit and X talking about how good it is, despite there being no lasting impact whatsoever.

Well it sounds like the Hydra Doom event was premature then, either they thought they'd find traction with use cases that were not hampered by that restriction or they thought development would be farther along by the time Hydra Doom took place. Either way it just highlights some of my gripes with Cardano, first, the idea that Cardano is the only chain that isn't relying on hype, when the lasting impact of Hydra Doom is just people hyping how much TPS it did in a stress test, without noting the limitations of Hydra's current implementation, the limitations of it's full implementation(as it's closest analog is a state channel, which is not really a general purpose scaling solution), nor the technical difficulties that took place, nor the absence of actual adoption of the tech. Secondly, it exemplifies the pace of development and lack thereof on Cardano. Hydra has been in development for roughly 4 years now, as the IOHK blog noted a proof of concept in 9/17/2021. You would also think that this is an area ripe for outside investment if there was a belief that Cardano usage would increase, we have a new ETH L2 pop up every day, as teams are willing to battle for that market share, meanwhile Cardano is a blue ocean with few incumbents, yet no one is interested in developing anything outside of IOHK/Cardano.
As far as your interpretation of the community, I think that's accurate, but I also think it's far less of a positive than it seems. Almost every blockchain follows a similar path when it comes to social consensus, even if it's not 100% onchain. The same steps are taken, the same arguments are had, the same process is taken to iterate on the network. You say "we move on to the next problem to be solved" but it seems like all the problems being solved are with Cardano itself and if those solutions are all insular, then what good is it accomplishing? Improving Cardano for the sake of improvement doesn't do anything unless it also solves external problems as well. You can only praise the process for so long before the lack of results start to overshadow it.
When you say "Cardano cannot be stopped" that's also a bit shortsighted IMO, as Cardano needs a monumental increase in usage, as well as a similarly monumental increase in scaling to accommodate that usage, to be sustainable. Less than 1% of what goes to stake pools actually comes from fees([99.2% comes from the reserve](https://cardanoscan.io/epoch/574)), and the fees are already relatively high despite the low amount of onchain activity. The amount of fees literally needs to do more than 100x to cover that and there isn't 100x space to do so currently.
As far as your examples, these kinds of projects are not unique, and it's very hard to tell if they're getting any usage. Palmyra only shows "500+" downloads on the Google Play Store and it's hard to tell what NEWM is actually doing besides posting on networking and social media posts, if their business is actually successful they're doing a poor job of showing it. If there is any success story on Cardano, I haven't really seen it yet, but maybe that's just because I look at more than just the grabby headlines.
You can say I'm ignoring all this, but I think I've made it clear that I have *not* been ignoring Cardano, otherwise I wouldn't have all of these criticisms, I wouldn't be the having to educate Cardano bulls on how there is more to the story of Hydra then just "1,000,000 TPS!", I wouldn't be the only one concerned with Cardano's sustainability or its feasibility to generate usage. It's funny how often Cardano people demonize Solana as being a chain that is solely memecoins, which is patently false, but then fail to realize what little activity does happen on Cardano, is largely based around memes as well. Ironically it feels like the Cardano community ignores more of Cardano than I do. Which doesn't surprise me as my criticisms, that I think are completely valid, got me banned from /r/Cardano, along with the claim that I "persistently spread misinformation" which is laughable as my criticisms are all rooted in readily observable and verifiable data.
I don't hate Cardano, I just don't think it's a smart investment considering how richly valued it is, relative both to its competition but also taking into account its own accomplishments. It seems like some future exponential growth has been priced in since 2017 and I just don't understand what that could be or how it could happen, because in the last 8 years there should have been at least *some* hints. But time after time it's some hyped development (almost exclusively in-house), it's X hard fork or Y hard fork or it's the launch of smart contracts, or it's Africa, or it's some vague partnership with Argentina... and all of that has led to nothing beyond people on Reddit and X talking about how good it is, despite there being no lasting impact whatsoever.