Its a custom format.
I know Iām asking a lot of question but you seem to be the guy with the answers haha So every year it will take longer and longer to spin up new nodes? Doesnāt that make it unsustainable long term with more and more transactions? Is it possible to compress that file further to increase download speeds? Is there a smallest interval for fractional coins and if so do those coins have unique identifiers down to that smallest fractional value so just the last transactions of the unique identifiers could be tracked?
I appreciate any help you can offer here, Iām very interested in this tech, but I want to be more confident than āthis is a speculative gamble, choose red or blackā before I start recommending it to people.
If you want a full copy of the blockchain, then yes. Light wallets will never have this problem.
Also, this āfull sync of the whole blockchainā is currently being done in the most naive possible way of getting the chain, but has the advantage of fully validating the chain. There are relatively simple and obvious ways of improving this with a bulk download operation. The full on disk chain storage is currently 6.6Gig (and it compress to about half that size) and could be made available as a much smaller set of (compressed) files. Then initial sync speed would be determined by the time to download the bulk files.
That is one of many options.
1 Ada == 1000000 Lovelace
A single Lovelace cannot be further dividied
Sorry, I do not understand the question. āCoinsā do not unique identifiers.
If each Lovelace had a unique identifier couldnāt you hypothetically track them by just managing the blockchain ledger that only contains the last transaction for each lovelace? Rather than a full history of every transaction. That should give you a fixed size of the file that wouldnāt extend the download size of the blockchain year over year.
They donāt have an unique identifier, and since there are 45 billion Ada and each Ada can be split into a million Lovelace, there is no scheme whereby tracking the individual Lovelace is more economical than what is being done now.
That is close to how the ledger actually works. Instead of tracking each Lovelace it tracks Unspent Transactions Outputs (UTxO). The ledger only keeps track of the current UTxO set, not the history, but the history is needed to build and validate the current UTxO set.
If I give you a ledger state snapshot, how do you validate it? How do you know that I have not added extra UTxO outputs that increase my personal balance? The only way you can validate the current ledger state is by starting out at the initial ledger state (containing just the initial genesis distribution) and applying each block one by one.
I can highly recommend the book āMastering Bitcoinā By Andreas Antonopolis which is gives an in depth explanation of how cryptocurrencies work (ADA is close enough to BTC, and you can ignore chapters on BTC mining if you want) and was written to be understandable by a layman.
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Perfectly concise explanation! Iāll have to pick up the book but you answered the main questions I have been curious about. The next step is buying in. Do you have any thoughts on buying in via Kraken and transfering to Daedalus? Itās the most well known exchange I could find that looks like it will directly sell me ADA.
Any of the big well known exchanges, including Kraken, is fine. Which exchange is easiest will vary by where you are located.
Also Daedalus on its own is fine for small amounts of ADA, but when you move to larger amounts you will probably want to get yourself a hardware wallet for extra security. Its not that Daedalus is insecure, its that you are likely running it on a desktop computer with full access to the internet and a desktop computer connected to the internet is not secure.
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Yeah, I hear you there. I worked in network security at a Fortune 250 financial company before switching into a software engineering role. I run a whitelist firewall with a drop all policy on incoming and a vpn on the PC Iād be using for the wallet but Iāll be looking to invest in a hardware wallet soon.
I appreciate your help!
Soā¦ to get a little more speculative - What do you think about the possibility of ADA being worth $100 each within the next 10 years? I keep seeing wild targets of $100+ this year and Iām finding that hard to believe.
Wild targets indeed; letās cross 1$ firstā¦ baby steps
My guess is somewhere around 2-3$ this year but who can predicted 100%? Itās a wild market and everything can happen
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Ada is highly speculative. Some of its potential future value has already been factored into its current price (and that of other cryptocurrencies). Ada needs to fulfill it promise for its USD price to increase, but I think that is definitely happening. Gougen will arrive in the next month or so which will allow things like stable coins on the Cardano block chain. Value comes from utility. What is not clear is how much the current price has already factored in the near term new utility.
That probably sounds like I am avoiding the question. To a certain extent I am, but mainly because I do not have a crystal ball and cannot predict the future any better than anyone else. But yes
$100+ this year
is incredibly unlikely. I would be very happy if the price even reached $1.
In the meantime I concentrate on improving utility.
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