Thanks for clarifying & confirming Seb!
Good to know.
Thanks for clarification Sebastien.
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In respect to your response there are still the below questions I guess we could review if they make sense or not.
Please correct the thinking if it´s wrong, we have much less knowledge & understanding then anyone who is an insider.
Our baseline is the following:
- We have a fix supply of ADA (14b) locked up for staking rewards (well also for treasury purposes to pay for the evolution & maintenance of the Cardano protocol), which may be distributed over the next decade (more or less).
- We want to have a strong & scalable PoS infrastructure, from security, performance and stability point of view (having initially ~1000 pools, but possibly increasing this as adoption grows), such infrastructure has fix & variable costs depending on certain characteristics (what kind of transaction load to deal with, frequency of maintenance patch releases, level of dynamic scalability capability, etc.).
- We do want to have some operations quality incentive for pool operators, that their only parameter is not to be as low-cost as possible, but let us drive and let them consider other valuable though directly hardly recognizable & measurable qualities as well (such as running on-premise pool instead of an another AWS hosted one, secondary-security qualities, customer service (?) for users who stake with them, etc.). As a sidenote it might make sense to regularly pay independent 3rd party auditors from the Treasury to perform external audits on the staking pool operators on these secondary qualities and report them to the general public.
- We do want to have pool operators making reasonable profit and feel it´s a good investment of their time & money in the context of the opportunity cost. Even if the “bad-actor buy out scenario” is pretty unrealistic, they should still think twice whether it´s worth selling their staking pool and giving away ownership. Every staking pool has a buy-out price (the higher the better), when it gives away control to a potentially bad actor.
- How Cardano adoption will grow is unpredictable, and what this means in terms of transaction numbers and related transaction fees, which will be another revenue stream for the pool operators.
- The price of ADA is unpredictable, may vary a lot even as we seen 10-times up and down in a single year.
- The price of ADA may move irrespective of the performance of the Cardano Project and it´s adoption stage, but being tied to BTC (can´t wait when it looses that strong tie, guess as wider the adoption the looser the tie) the entire crypto market impacts it´s movement. Cardano has shown mind blowing progress in a year, while the price is the much lower with no correlation with performance, risk & potential of the Project (this should change as soon as regulation reaches a stage worldwide where we may have institutional investor enter the space).
- There are competitors in the space, who would possibly invest a couple of hundred million USD to try to compromise the Cardano blockchain (without the need to recover it in any way in the Cardano Ecosystem) so they may take a competitive advantage on the market. Cardano is by far the best tech party, being their biggest threat, which could eventually make them bad actors.
Do you think these conditions & uncertainties are better or harder manageable with the fix supply?
It would be nice to see some simulations for best-case, worst-case scenarios to verify feasibility that the 14b ADA fuel locked up in the tank is enough to carry us through most of the likely cases in good times and bad times until we reach a level of adoption & ADA price, where the transaction fees will pay off enough for staking and into the treasury for sustainability.
Such simulations would use configurable variables like ADA / USD price, Transaction Numbers, Transaction Volumes, Transaction Fees, Number of Staking Pools, Total percentage of Staked ADA, Staking Pool Avarage Operations Costs, Staking Pool Avarage Profits, Staking Rewards (OPEX) distribution per Year (from Treasury), Staking Reward percentage to Pool Operator, Protocol Investments (CAPEX) distribution per Year (from Treasury), Remaining ADA Locked up in Treasury, etc. Then there would be certain security & other qualities of Cardano defined (Cost of Economic Attack, Avarage Pool Buyout Cost, Average Pool Secondary Operational Qualities Budget, Avarage Proftiabiltiy per Pool, Level of User Incentive for Staking, etc.), which would be measured against the state produced by the previous variables in the context of a position on the timeline of N years. Obviously to define the correlations here between the variables & qualities is the complex task.
Are you in position to develop / share any such economic interactive model to play with (allow to customly configure the previous variables and see the impact on Cardano security qualities, sort of Symphony of Blockchains rich experience) and / or completed simulations for various scenarios?
Crypto is the future and Cardano is the gold standard so we are super optimistic that ADA will move to price levels, where these questions are completely irrelevant. In that context this is a theoretical, speculative and fictional brainstorming, nothing more and nothing less.
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These are some insightful questions!! Maybe an IOHK scientist can come out and elaborate it more?? 
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That would be great to clarify if these questions are valid or not.
Anyone who may respond on this? @SebastienGllmt ?