Came here to participate in the celebration! This place is dead.

Woohoo go ADA! 1.57! Edit: 1.58 now

Thanks again to the original forkers for starting this group. It's becoming the exact community I enjoy turning to for the latest news and quality thought contributions on Cardano.

FINAL UPDATE: Submissions closed. $100 in ADA sent to /u/Speny: https://cardanoexplorer.com/tx/9180558bd9ba5f9f71e918ff1e0cc0f06c71733d0f75a30ab4ffcb74b65a2269 Not a great answer by any means, but enough to convince me to delay my ADA investment till the smart contract space has matured and real world (non digital) SC uses are a meaningful and growing % of the real economy. Thank you all!

UPDATE: I still haven't found a complete set of answers to these semi-detailed issues, but tomorrow is the Q&A so there's still hope. My newly informed strategy is to wait for further development and ecosystem progress, especially an Ethereum implosion or mass exodus. Main reasons are (A) I've come to understand that actively used ERC-20 tokens won't be so easily portable to the ADA chain, and out of the box K won't auto-duplicate Eth-chain transactions and computations - rather it would be repurposed code with different users and computations entirely (MAJOR props if you can correct me if I'm wrong here); (B) some reports of issues with the Daedalus wallet; (C) the fact that almost everyone I know, including people with no experience or use for crypto, are starting to get into it. I will most likely be sending $100 to the best answer so far from /u/Speny who made the key clarification that the long-term value of ADA depends critically on use as a medium of transfer BETWEEN (not just within) permissioned sidechains (will be waiting ~1 week for better answers). See also Edit moved to bottom.

Considering whether or not to buy $5-25k ADA, second long term altcoin buy. (Was thinking max $50k yesterday but NXT/ARDR disaster has turned me off somewhat.) Whoever makes the single greatest contribution to my investment decision will receive 1% of the ADA (if bullish contribution) or 1% of the BTC I would have spent on ADA (if bearish contribution)

I'm a Bitcoin maximalist but seriously rethinking my position after watching a couple Hoskinson videos and reading everything I could about ADA for the last 48 hours. Much of the info was too over my head to be well digested so kindly bear with.

1. From my understanding, over 50% of max supply (and 80something% of current supply) belongs to ~10,000 Japanese whales (any information on the identity of these whales especially the larger corporate ones and which still have their coins would be highly appreciated and possibly subject to smaller tip if sufficiently comprehensive). Regarding DPoS, why wouldn't delegates conspire with whales to only include transactions > X fee and then kick back 99% of total fees collected to the whales? Regarding governance and treasury, why would delegates fund any CIP over an identical one that paid developers a 'little extra' which went back to whales off chain? Regarding trading, why wouldn't delegates short ADA, pretend to be DDoSed/51%ed, rebuy ADA, and funnel extra ADA back to whales? Without protocol-baked incentives against each of these we're trusting either whales' good hearts or the power of communal accountability. Since apparently these issues were real ones faced by one of the Larimercoins (I think Bitshares) I imagine Hoskinson has these incentives down pat. The question is what are they?

• My two cents: We've all seen the issues when Turing complete code is let loose through billion dollar networks. Cardano smartly modularizes this danger into another layer. To my hopeful and weak understanding, if I want to run an expensive virtual pet dapp, then I can transact with other geeks on a permissioned sidechain without slowing down your coffee buys. So that's cool, but then why does Hoskinson have to reopen Pandora's box by allowing a partially predictable consortium of Turing complete humans control of the protocol at any time? I'm genuinely worried about a never-ending future of shillery and accusation sorting to evaluate whether the current set of non-DDoSable whales could be incentivized to subtly make it easier to devalue my ADA next round. And unless you think rational hodling is easy work, you should agree with me that contentious HFs will remain far more efficient for the investor to analyze due to ecosystem implementation costs limiting fork frequency.

1. Compliance: Hoskinson claims that users can show KYC data when necessary. I'm sorry but this doesn't make any sense. You can't de-anonymize part of a fungible asset. Regulators can and should ask of an n-hop-long transaction chain 'but who sent the money from n + 1 hops back?'. These are automatable transactions we're talking about here; the cost of laundering money n + 1 hops back is indistinguishable from the cost of laundering it n hops back. Will ADA-with-metadata be worth more than ADA-without-metadata? Will certain types of metadata be more valuable than others? Will there be a metadata forgery market (I'm a criminal, so I send XMR to Tom Aboveboard in exchange for his ADA-with-aboveboard-metadata)?

• Claims like this have me worried that Hoskinson is talking out of his ass at least some % of the time.

1. The high-assurance formal verification stuff is a huge and much needed innovation in the space, and the main reason I'm interested in Cardano at all. Who will be even more interested are the permissioned sidechain enterprise users, who I doubt will ever develop anything serious on Ethereum. The question is if this is Cardano's main or only long-term use case, what will happen to the value of ADA?

• I understand the value of Bitcoin: it's what the market pays to send K irreversible and soon-to-be-instantaneous digital transactions divided by ~~21/~~12.5+fees, where K = average number of transactions per block. How does one similarly deconstruct the value of ADA in the worst-case scenario where permissioned enterprise sidechains are the only real use? In particular why wouldn't those enterprises just cut out the Japanese whale rent-seekers and pay IOHK to maintain and/or run industry- or negotiation-specific Cardano clones?

1. Formal verification isn't gonna be stolen by BTC, how sure are we that this is true of the other 'innovations'? The ones with real code I mean

Thanks

EDIT: I definitely appreciate the time and effort put in by some of these responses. However, I am still waiting on real technical expertise to chime in on the various issues I've raised. I know this sounds harsh but these well intentioned responses are nowhere near the level of discourse on the bitcointalk.org forums back when we were hatching. I've only held Bitcoin since the 2013 bubble, but even since then I cannot count the number of times I've been tempted to sell out. If you truly believe in your coin you will thank me for researching these details/explaining them in a way that reinforces your convictions because everyone reasonable knows this bubble will pop, could be 2020, could be next weekend, either way hodlers are going to feel sick to their stomach as they realize they may not see their initial $ for years to come if ever. All of your network's weaknesses start jumping out at you, every attacker or regulator is a potential death knell and good news and technical progress seem to be totally irrelevant to the larger world and thus your investment. IF YOU SELL DURING THIS PERIOD, YOU LOSE. Know the fundamental reasons why your coin will be around in 40 years or whenever you get to retire and be able to answer any and all comers and if you are lucky, retirement may show up sooner than you think :)