Hello.
I am definitely a beginner when it comes to Cardano and I have a lot of questions. I posted these questions in my introduction post, so rather than post them again here is a link to my original post.
I would be super appreciative of any help you could provide in answering my questions (with citations where possible).
Thanks so much,
Daniel
Hi Daniel - Glad to have you aboard!
I am glad that you are willing to fully engage in the educational piece (price of entry) necessary to fully appreciate this project and also become a contributor to the community conversations.
I would first watch this video by Charles Hoskinson which will help give you the big picture:
Third Generation Blockchains
I would then go through this link piece by piece:
Cardano Introduction
After you do that, i would look up Charles Hoskinson and go through interviews he has had with the cryptocommunity (try to go through them in a calendar order because new information pops up…i.e. watch interviews from October of last year till present in order).
Then come engage with this wonderful community!
Kind Regards,
Murph
Hey Murph,
Thanks very much for responding and providing me with a couple links. I won’t lie, I am already a big fan of the Cardano project after seeing several interviews with Charles Hoskinson. Cardano and IOHK stand out as especially interesting and believable among projects in cryptocurrency.
As much as I appreciate the general direction you are pointing me towards, I am really looking for direct responses to my individual questions. I know it seems lame that I am asking for members of this forum to do the heavy lifting for me, but answering these questions by myself take me 10’s of hours and the finished product would be way less true than if members of this forum answered them for me.
If you were able to take a crack at answering any of the questions I would be in your debt.
Get on it!
Hi Dan - I hear you. I’m sure you can understand that some of these questions can be solved through the link i gave you. Other questions require asking domain experts in various forum channels which would require a level of effort that is more valuable to you than it is to me all things considered. You came to the right place as far as the forum but you will have to be the quarterback in orchestrating the answers. I will take a look and see if i can direct you to the correct areas to ask these questions and you can project management it from there.
Murph
Thank, Murph. Any help you could provide in connecting me to the right folks to answer my questions would be perfect. I noticed that the “Cardano Introduction” link is full of great info and will probably be heavily cited in responses to my questions. I don’t know how influential my podcast and coin reviews will ultimately become, but the time you take to help me will help introduce Cardano to my audience.
Guys, before anything else we should still wait for an official answer to the other post:
Cardano Foundation may be glad to answer the questions and provide all the info, but it’s up to them to decide.
If you know other members of the Foundation on the forum - tag them in the other post, please.
Why would there be a official answer?
Thats not how it works, either you setup a interview where you ask questions, or you go find your answers around. I mean no one from the team has time to sit here on the forum providing simple answers to people, with questions and information that is easy accessible…
I mean asking if Cardano is a POS or POW? I mean come on… I mean its fine that this dude has questions, and if anyone wants to answer them thats fine… But there wont be any official response to them lol.
Hey Daniel,
I’m not an expert. I’d say I’m an enthusiast who is actually most interested in real world use cases for the Cardano stack. In saying that, IMHO some of the granularity in your questions is not really applicable yet being that the Cardano team are building this from scratch using high assurance methods - everything from peer review to building their own Haskell-inspired functional language - Plutus. Most other efforts are hard forks of bitcoin or similar as I understand it. So my read is that they are intentionally doing things like not being on too many exchanges, while they are building out the system. So that would affect volumes traded - but not necessarily interest in trading. Liquidity questions can also be misleading because of lack of transparency on the exchanges. I could round trip trade all day long on those exchanges without retribution. You’ll get some answers to these questions like - it’s POS, and Scalability, Interoperability and Governance as the problems they are trying to solve as a 3rd gen, but it may be a little early for other aspects. This is just an opinion. Maki or Jon Moss may be a good place to start to address some of this, or at least provide some structure.
I hope that helps.
C
Hey, C!
I totally get your concerns expressed about liquidity and how Cardano differs from most of the other projects out there. I do not plan to roast ADA because of trade volumes. I promise.
My goal when creating the set of questions was to help me understand a wide variety of projects in as much depth as possible (so I can share the answers with my listeners). I know that the questions I ask will not be the perfect set of questions to highlight the best parts of every project. It is part of the reason I added question “25. Are there any important features of ADA or the platform utilized by ADA that I failed to ask about and you believe it is important to share?”
Thank you for your response.
Use case: ADA in the SL will be used for purchase, staking, voting, and a universal token that can be used as a medium of exchange for all others (at least that is what I get from the interviews that I have seen). The Computation Layer (CL) will be able to hold numerous different tokens in it. In fact, the ERC20 token will be compatible out of the gate with the ADA token. Unlike Tron or EOS, ADA is not an ERC20 token. However, developers will be able to bring their DApps that were constructed around an ERC20 token over to the Cardano CL. Due to their side chains research, other currencies will be able to be used on the CL as well. Bitcoin would be able to purchase a crypto kitty (or anything else) on the Cardano CL and utilize the low fees and high speed of ADA. When I also say voting, I mean voting for the treasury model, for countries to have secured elections, etc.
Speed and Scalability: Cardano/ADA plans to scale similar to that of torrent (the more popular you become, the faster your platform gets). Currently ADA is capable of doing 250TPS and it is being capped around 15TPS by the developers due to their not being a direct need to do more than that right now. However, it can be bumped to 250 very easily. Once the CL goes public, then the platform can grow organically to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands TPS.
Sustainability: ADA plans on being sustained by their treasury system. There will be a small percentage (of the already small) fee that is taken and given to the Cardano treasury. There is where the funds can be voted on as to how they are distributed. Want to make an amazing DApp on Cardano? Sweet, publish your idea, and general business outline with how much capital you need to the treasury. Then the community will vote if they want to grant you the funds to build it for the community. There will not be a need for an ICO anymore and it will be much harder to fraud people out of their money. IOHK will also be publishing what they want to do research and accomplish on the treasury platform as well - and the community will vote on it. However, this will likely not take place until after the Goguen phase because the whole system needs to be established and growing before completely letting it go.
Liquidity: I guess I could take this two ways, the ease of extracting ADA into fiat soon, or the amount of money that cardano currently has to develop their project. I’m going with the former. ADA will be EXTREMELY liquid. The foundation is already working on getting ATMs set up in Japan and Korea for ADA and paper wallets are almost completed - it says 33% on the roadmap, but they are expected possibly in the next 4-6 weeks. ADA will also be, once again, designed as a universal token. This isn’t saying that it will drown out all other tokens, but that it will be able to just be friendly with the other hundreds of tokens that currently can’t talk with one another. This will all be able to be done through the Daedalus wallet. The wallet looks like it will be designed as almost a store for DApps to live in and users can choose which ones they want to use. Daedalus will also be used to move your BTC, ETH, LTC, or whatever into ADA. or your LTC into BTC (once again, that is just what I am getting from the interviews and I am not a developer for the company).
Decentralization: The goal is to have between 100 and 500 stake pools available for the community to choose from. The treasury voting would then primarily be done by these pools, but obviously the different countries elections would be held in a separate sandbox that would not be influenced by the general stake pools. Registration for test stake pools is going on right now and ends on 30 April. After that, they will test the staking in a closed environment to triple check for bugs and establish a sense of general UI. This will also give them an idea as to what else the community might want from the developers for the pools. Shelly will be released throughout Q2 and Q3 of this year. It is my personal belief that stake pools will go live to the public around July and smart contracts on the CL will go live around September or October. The DApps will be able to be developed in any computer language through IELE and IELE will take that language and translate it to PLUTUS. PLUTUS is the language for the ADA smart contracts.
If I got any or all of this wrong, I’m sure the community will let me know though. That too is something that I appreciate 
Also, I went back and looked at your original post and thought I would add a couple more things. The volume per day will increase due to them starting to open up to more exchanges. The average volume just increased by almost double when they added the Upbit exchange with ADA/KRW. There are plans to add in several more exchanges soon and I look for the average volume to increase to about 100-120M per day in the next couple months due to the volume of exchanges.
Also, anyone can stake their ADA and there is no minimum for staking. However, if you do not have much ADA then it is recommended to join a pool. Another feature I like with the pools is that the distribution of rewards will be automatic and that the people in the pool will not have to trust the person running the pool to distribute their rewards correctly - or at all. The fees are minimal, but are necessary to deter certain types attacks on the system. For example, EOS (not trying to talk smack, just being honest) is subject to DDoS attacks through people just transferring 100,000 pennies per second through multiple accounts. This could jam their system for a long time, since there is no fee.
Along with decentralization, IOHK is the current research group for Cardano and ADA. IOHK is slotted to have the contract for a five year term until it needs to be voted on again by the community (2020). At that point, there can be multiple firms that elect to be the research engine behind ADA, but it will be voted on by the community. Therefore, if IOHK does great until 2030 but starts to get surpassed by google, microsoft, IBM, Apple, Intel, Amazon, or whomever, then that can be voted on then by the community every 5 year contract.
A cool feature about having multiple layers in this currency is that games like Royale (a poker game) can take place and only have to settle once, when the player wants to leave the table. It would also allow other games to take place and do so securely with just a minimal fee at the end. I think this is amazing for the E-sports league that is gaining in popularity and looking for ways to ensure that people aren’t cheating.
Any additional specific questions, just message me.