What is Running Cardano pre-Shelley

Developers
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Hi -

Know that DPoS via Ouroboros is coming down the pipe with Shelley. In the interim, how is the network running, is there any consensus going on?

Just wanted some background on how the operation was running until it gets its feet off the ground.

Thanks!

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Hi Spa,
The network is running and already using Ouroboros now :slight_smile:

The Shelley release is performance tuning and staking. Right now only ‘central’ nodes run by IOHK are doing the staking and acting as slot leaders.

Thus, consensus is still happening but with only servers run by IOHK.

There are of course lots of people running nodes (including our future pools servers for https://AdaPools.io) but everyone besides the IOHK servers are not allowed to actually sign blocks/be a slot leader atm.

Hope that helps!

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@MegaWind Thanks so much, that clarifies things a lot. Good luck on the staking pool, it seems like you guys have a lot of momentum!

Just a few follow ups having gone through the AdaPools Link

  1. Is there currently a faucet to distribute tokens to nodes or would they be purchased from the token sale?
  2. Has the minimum computational requirements been posted to be a block leader?
  3. Could you point me on Github where the protocol is posted that they’re currently running (or will that be released w/ Shelley)?
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Hi Spa,
Thanks for the feedback!

Regarding your questions:
1 - Re: ADA faucet - I’m not aware of any. The ADA rewards will be issued directly to the slot leader upon the block signing. I’m assuming the slot leader will include the reward transaction as the final transaction in the block they sign, or possibly it is included in the next block as the first transaction.
*That said - personally, I think a huge opportunity would be for Cardano Foundation or similar to run a small faucet and drip out some Ada. The reason for that is nothing gets users interested and vested in a project than when they own some of it! This is how paypal grew so fast - they gave you $10 if you would open an account and link your bank account…and I think gave you $5 for referring another user (who then got $10,etc). The same could be done in the Daedalus wallet - install and do your first transaction using Ada by getting Ada from the faucet. Now you have a new user with installed wallet and money to spend or at least pay attention to. Bitcoin also did a faucet for a while in the early days though it was just a generous dev doing that to advance the project (and one who may regret it now lol).

2- I haven’t seen anything posted regarding computational power (again to my knowledge) but from my brief forays into the source, I don’t see anything particularly difficult for creating a block.
https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-sl/blob/develop/block/src/Pos/Block/Logic/Creation.hs

It’s many, many orders of magnitude easier than say mining and hash solving… Any reasonable laptop could do it.

3 - Re: github - Adafans has postetd for you - thanks Adafans!

Hope you are doing well Spa!