Wednesday, August 11, 2021

2021/08/10 - The Ergo Team AMA hosted by Bitcoin.com - Q/A Transcript

Hi everyone, thought I'd share the Bitcoin.com AMA in a readable format that took place recently. Enjoy!

Hosts & Participators:

  • Bitcoin.com Team:

    1. Antonio - AMA Co-ordinator
    2. Danish - Danish Chaudhry - CEO of Bitcoin.com

  • Ergo Team:

    1. kushti khusti - Alex Kushti - Co-Founder and Core Developer of the Ergo platform
    2. Glasgow - Mark Glasgow - Head of Community Management
    3. Armeanio - Joseph Armeanio - Ergo Foundation Business Developer

Starting Questions:

Question 1:

  • Antonio > To the Ergo team: What are your thoughts on blockchain adoption and what can Ergo do to continue to make this technology more accessible to the mainstream public?

Answer:

  • kushti khushi

    Ergo community is making a lot of efforts to clarify things around the cryptocurrencies. Please refer to Ergo Manifesto. Still, first principles matter! From technical perpective, the protocol is already capable for different known efficient on-chain scalability, offchain, and cross-chain solutions

  • Glasgow

    Ergo has been focused on building a concrete base these past years and build up solid foundations and financial tooling for the people. We strive to make Ergo more accessible each day and utilise our community in full to do this. Just this past week a community member has been organising a ‘Women in Crypto’ group to bring more women into the scene. And the Local Exchange Trading System (collective bartering) will certainly help there imo! More concretly, iteratively building up our tooling and systems to be usable and friendly to anyone and while giving them financial autonomy.

  • Armeanio

    Blockchain is an evolving technology. Personally, I think there are three areas that need development to push the development curve. The first is practical use cases for the common person. In Defi especially we need to position ourselves to produce functional tools at a lower cost than the traditional finance community. The second is user-friendly development tools and educational resources, I do think a part of this will be solved simply due to the technical capacity of younger generations. As building and interacting with blockchain becomes a widely adopted skill set I think we will see an influx of developers. The third is user-friendliness. User interfaces are always extremely important.

Question 2:

  • Antonio > To Danish: What in your opinion makes Ergo’s smart contracts different?

Answer:

  • Armeanio

    Personally, I am a fan of the concept of multistage contracts due to the lower cost/ computational processing involved since much of the logic runs off-chain. This aligns well with the first adoption goal mentioned above. It is cost-competitive.

  • Danish Chaudhry

    Ergo has many differentiators which make it shine amongst others in the sphere, the cryptographic statements (via their sigma-protocols) are truly a unique Ergo advantage. Let’s compare a project like Waves, which just has Bitcoin-like multi-sig. Ergo is also about UTXO. It is harder to do contracts in the UTXO model, but UTXOs are more friendly to off-chain and privacy protocols (also fewer safety issues). Ergo will develop lots of different new privacy-preserving dapps, and also should be a great showcase of its capabilities.

  • kushti khushi

    Ergo contracts are centered around protecting money with logic, not to be a thing per se. That's why we're talking about smart (or contractual money). After all, public blockchain means cryptocurrency, and cryptocurrency means that contracts are on top of money. Ergo continues Bitcoin ideas but with no Bitcoin Script limitations.

  • Antonio

    Cool beans guys! Thanks for jumping in @kushti_ru @Armeanio too!

Question 3:

  • Antonio > Next one.. to the Ergo team: The highly anticipated ErgoDEX release is coming very soon. What makes this DEX so special?

Answer:

  • kushti khushi

    ErgoDex allows for AMM pools and orderbooks co-exist, with a trade between possible in a single transaction. Moreover, there are known widgets on top of the DEX already discovered, such as tokensales with buyback guarantee, a stablecoin (DexyUSD) etc.

  • Glasgow

    There's several things that make ErgoDEX unique.

    For the unaware, ErgoDex is a decentralised exchange that will run natively on top of both the Cardano and Ergo blockchain. This means that it'll either ADA or ERG as the base token when needed. Compared to other DEXs on Cardano, ErgoDEX has the unique advanced of having developers that have been working on a live eUTXO blockchain for the past 2 years. (eUTXO or - the extended unspent transaction output model is based on the same research from IOHK that Cardano used when developing it's chain). This shared model allows ErgoDex to explore shared liquidity, trustless swaps and other cross-chain goodies once deployed and Cardano's smart contracts are live.

    Last but not least, the developers have shown they are taking every opportunity to develop a platform that prevents plutocracy at every opportunity. Instead of selling large parts to private investors - ensuring ErgoDEX remains truly decentralised. Something that is often forgotten these days.

    You can see the roadmap here: https://ergodex.io/ and a initial public beta will be launching shortly!

    For a more detailed breakdown see: https://ergoplatform.org/en/blog/2021-07-21-ergodex-a-cross-chain-workhorse/

  • Armeanio

    The ErgoDex has unique tokenomics and liquidity mechanisms. The future plan to port assets between Cardano and Ergo will offer benefits and tooling of both ecosystems.

    Cardano’s Voltaire project is something I really respect and watch closely. The powerful privacy tooling of Ergo also offers benefits for users that wish to enhance the privacy of their positions.

  • Antonio

    Awesome guys, it's like we're receiving answers from all aspects of the business: Tech/Marketing/Bizdev :) It's great!

Question 4:

  • Antonio > Next one, to Danish: If you had to give one piece of advice to individuals about how to make the most of their crypto and to companies about how to bring crypto into their business models, what would your advice be?

Answer:

  • Danish Chaudhry

    great question @antoniobileci

    Blockchain technology opens up many possibilities and opportunities for us to create solutions that can be highly disruptive and potentially very lucrative. Those can indeed improve on existing systems, so I always advocate for people to educate themselves, join conversations and never stop learning. Regarding businesses, we have seen very known payment providers like paypal or square starting to accept btc payments so my advice would be to keep an eye on the space and explore if adding crypto can add value to the business model

  • Armeanio

    I think the best way to look at crypto from a corporate perspective is to see it as a fractionalized open-source software license. Cryptocurrencies are tools for business and commerce. There are many crypto projects that offer a variety of tooling.

    Ergo is involved in the BPSAA and the tooling ranges from decentralized VPN's to decentralized content storage and management. There is a large range of commercial applications available just in that small group.

    The distributed nature of the technology is hardened to disruption and the consumer market access is greatly magnified, especially as we move into a multichain world.

Question 5:

  • Antonio > Onto the next one, to the Ergo team: You recently hosted a Hackathon. What kinds of projects came out of that venture? What aspect of development is Ergo the most excited about? Are there plans for another Ergo Hackathon?

Answer:

  • Glasgow

    Here are the results from our last hackathon - more info in this blogpost (https://ergoplatform.org/en/blog/2021-06-19-ergohack/), We should have the Raffle launching live shortly after going through some more development and testing - which also produced some great documentation for developers, and everyone is of course anxiously awaiting to see what ErgoTeam has in store for us.

    ErgoTeam was developed by the community developer and will allow for a simple joint-spending approach while retaining complex threshold signatures ensuring the security and anonymity of its users.

    Last but not least, pushing for decentralisation at every point is one of the things that makes the Ergo community so great. The SmartPools team had some great discussions and put out a research paper (https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/846). Leading to another community member offering to help fund this venture.)

    We have one or two more Hackthons planned this year - but I'll let kushti or Armeanio expand here :) Given the influx we seen last time (and how many stuck around). These events help us to continue to build up our dev tooling and guidance, and bring more people in to build ontop Ergo and see what it’s really about. Once people do, they tend to stick about.

  • kushti khushi

    the hackathon was highly successful in regards with attracting devs, we got first wave of newcomers few weeks before the event. Six projects submitted results. ErgoRaffle will be launched over the mainnet in coming days, maybe more in future. We are going to have another hackathon definitely, this Autumn!

  • Armeanio

    Hackathons are idea incubators. The truth for solutions and tooling is that often the individuals on the ground have the clearest perspective of the problem/solution and tooling needed to solve said problem/solution.

    My perspective is that the greatest asset in a cryptocurrency project is the community itself.

  • Armeanio

    Hackathons are a great way to use that asset to drive growth and evolution.

  • Antonio

    ๐Ÿ˜Š fantastic to hear that it was very successful, looking forward to hearing more on the rest coming later this year!

Community Questions:

Question 6:

  • Ff

    Do you have any real world use cases that never implemented on any project and can change the world?

  • Glasgow

    As far as I’m aware - Ergo is the only blockchain talking about Trustless LETS.

    A local exchange trading system — or ‘LETS’ for short — facilitates exchange between members by providing a local currency and a directory of offers and needs. LETS allows people to create value within their community, and barter collectively - exchanging their skills and services in return for skills and services they would have otherwise paid for.

    Read more here : https://ergoplatform.org/en/blog/2021-07-01-lets-start-the-discussion/

Question 7:

  • Pakija

    How is this project different from the rest of the other outstanding projects currently in the market?

  • Glasgow

    The Ergo Manifesto should provide some insight here :)

    https://ergoplatform.org/en/blog/2021-04-26-the-ergo-manifesto/

    Ergo builds advanced cryptographic features and radically new DeFi functionality on the rock-solid foundations laid by a decade of blockchain theory and development. It complements tried and tested principles with the latest peer-reviewed academic research into cryptography, consensus models and digital currencies.

    Ergo is a unique Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrency and DeFi platform, building on the first principles of Bitcoin. With a research-driven but practical development model, Ergo has prioritized useful features without compromising on security. The platform's smart contracts are built on the extended UTXO (eUTXO) model with a unique data input concept, offering a radically different approach to provide robust, flexible cryptography and easy, safe scripting on privacy-centric Sigma Protocols (non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs). Storage rent (~.13 erg every 4 years) for long-term survivability, ultra-efficient light clients, and NiPoPoW technology. Too much to cover! ๐Ÿ˜‚

Question 8:

Question 9:

  • Daniel

    Can newbies with little cryptographic knowledge be able to successfully Use , trust & invest on your platform?

  • kushti khushi

    Sure, I believe now many UIs around are simple enough, not to say about crypto knowledge. At the same time, the community is planning to clearly specify assumptions behind Ergo core protocols and dApps, so even with no cryptoknowledge an investor will know what is trust involved about.

Question 10:

  • Gia Hy

    1. There are some opinions that PoW now is obsolete so why Ergo chose PoW instead of PoS? How would you resolve the “staking issue” for Ergo?
    2. For almost projects in the industry they need private sale, seed sale, ICO, IEO, IDO… to fundraising in order to build the project vulnerably, so why didn’t Ergo do that. Where does the capital come from for Team to develop and Is it effected to the Ergo’s progess?

    Thank You very much, Brilliant Team!

  • Armeanio

    Gia Hy, Thanks for the question

    1. Proof of Work is still what I could call an emerging technology. Therefore I think having the PoW PoS debate is very premature. I would compare it to having the electric car vs internal combustion engine debate in the 1930s (both were around)

    Proof of Work is well studied and the security is well understood. Simplicity and complexity when married create elegant solutions. I think if I could sum it up in the shortest way possible Ergo is designed with this balance KISS keep it simple stupid. Layering complexity in design can create multiple issues and points of failure.

    1. Ergo was launched without fundraising due to supporting the concept of decentralization and preventing a tiered class system that so many projects release with. Many believe that buying market access out of the gate is the way to go, but they end up with technical debt. Meaning the technology is well behind their market position and adoption. Ergo is built on a very solid technical foundation, and that makes the driver of growth organic. It is slower, but in my opinion more robust.

Question 11:

  • Glenn McCarthy

    Do you have a Token Burning plan to increase Token value and attract Investors to invest?

  • Glasgow

    Wouldn’t really work like that on erg. The developers did not keep lots of tokens no there’s nothing to burn :)

Question 12:

  • Habu Vai

    How old is Your project? What are the major plans ahead? Could you show to us image of your roadmap?

  • Glasgow

    Mainnet launched July 2019 (The previous spike was Ergo-First Year Token). See more here

    https://ergoplatform.org/en/blog/2019_05_20-curve/

Question 13:

  • Xyz

    Is it true your project really support staking program? if yes, how does your stake work system look like, what are the requirements for users if they want to stake on your platform?Staking programme is very important for any project, Can i stake your token? Do you have any plan of starting staking programme?

  • Glasgow

    Yes through tokenisation of dApps - ErgoMixer is up first. You can read more (technical details) here - https://www.ergoforum.org/t/a-solution-for-staking/1057

    But I believe this is almost done so you’ll find out soon.

Question 14:

  • ๐Ÿ‡ฒ ๐Ÿ‡ด ๐Ÿ‡ท ๐Ÿ‡ฎ ๐Ÿ‡ณ ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

    How can I trust not to rug pull? How many liquidity did you lock and how many months did you lock them?

  • Glasgow

    Because Ergo doesn’t own the rug. There was no premine, no ICO, no VC funds. A small amount (~5%) is taken from miner rewards for the first 2.5 years to support all development, marketing, etc. It’s already started reducing and should be complete by January. See https://ergoplatform.org/en/blog/2019_05_20-curve/ for more information

Question 15:

  • Hazana

    Any plans to make add more to content for learning Ergoscript? There is a a massive gap between starting and beginner, making it difficult to first approach learning to write Ergoscript smart contracts

  • kushti khushi

    Yes, we are always improving number and also quality of tutorials etc , for now please refer to ErgoScript by the example https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergoscript-by-example , https://github.com/anon-real/ergo-js-template (DApp template), and ready apps, they all are opensourced!

Question 16:

  • Hazana

    Any plans to make add more to content for learning Ergoscript? There is a a massive gap between starting and beginner, making it difficult to first approach learning to write Ergoscript smart contracts

  • Glasgow

    Yes! :)

Question 17:

  • Enajite

    Where does the project name you found? What does it mean for you and why did you choose that name for your project?

  • Glasgow

    Ergo means “therefore” in Latin, but “work” in Greek. Initially the name was chosen to point to the fact that the design of the cryptocurrency is ERGOnomical.

Question 18:

  • Arobi

    The common problem that often accours DeFi projects is that smart contract vulnerability can lead to loss of funds, what steps has your projects taken for solve to fix this major problem and prevent such occurrences in the future?

  • Armeanio

    Regarding security concerns UTxO operate much differently than the account model. In the account model, the token and the smart contract logic are separate, flaws in the programming between the two is often the vulnerability or point of failure that is exploited in the account based model.

    In extended UTxO the smart contract is embedded within the box (UTxO token) itself, there is no separation and each box is protected by a guard script making it much more difficult to manipulate.

Question 19:

  • I Am Back

    90% investors sell tokens after first listing exchange. Can you give us advice and tell benefits for hold your token in long term?

  • kushti khushi

    Ergo already listed on dozen of exchanges, and price going up mostly. Please note that this is mineable Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, so pricing mechanics and distribution is different from most of modern tokens.

Question 20:

Question 21:

  • Ayhan

    Platform security is very important,how strong is Ergo security?

  • Glasgow

    “In regards to security, we always tried to use the most straightforward and well-studied approach; otherwise, to cover a new direction with a published paper and a lot of testing.” - kushti

    Each script is applied to an unspent output. We have drawn this feature from the Bitcoin protocol, which uses UTXOs or the 'coin' model rather than an 'account' model like Ethereum's. We consider this a more secure approach since boxes are immutable, as well as being more flexible.

    Ergo's blockchain uses the Autolykos algorithm for consensus, which is a variant of Equihash and offers better ASIC resistance. This enables better decentralization. At the same time, we recognize that ordinary users who do not run a full node should enjoy the same security benefits as miners. Ergo's non-interactive proof-of-proof-of-work (NiPoPoW) allows anyone to make and verify transactions with complete confidence, without needing the storage, bandwidth and time required to download the full blockchain. As little as 1 MB of data is needed – meaning any device can be used.

Question 22:

  • Xyz

    Is it true your project really support staking program? if yes, how does your stake work system look like, what are the requirements for users if they want to stake on your platform?Staking programme is very important for any project, Can i stake your token? Do you have any plan of starting staking programme?

  • Armeanio

    Ergo has a dApp called the mixer. Developers are currently in the process of creating what is being called a staking contract. Now staking here has to do with owning a stake of the fees this dApp produces.

    Since there is no mechanism of securing consensus this is not akin to PoS but is more similar to earning passive rewards from an asset that produces a dividend.

Question 23:

  • Gia Hy

    1. There are some opinions that PoW now is obsolete so why Ergo chose PoW instead of PoS? How would you resolve the “staking issue” for Ergo?
    2. For almost projects in the industry they need private sale, seed sale, ICO, IEO, IDO… to fundraising in order to build the project vulnerably, so why didn’t Ergo do that. Where does the capital come from for Team to develop and Is it effected to the Ergo’s progess?

  • kushti khushi

    PoW is simpler and well studied to the moment.

    ICO was discussed back in 2017, but the result would be very different. No public tokensale/VC means totally different and natural growth of the ecosystem, which is worth long painful months of initial depression the team survived through.

Question 24:

  • Pakija

    How is this project different from the rest of the other outstanding projects currently in the market?

  • Glasgow

    Too many to list - It returns to Bitcoins roots - and is truly for the people! Only a handful of coins hand tokenomics which are as fair. Read the manifesto

    https://ergoplatform.org/en/blog/2021-04-26-the-ergo-manifesto/

Question 25:

  • I Am Back

    If we are in BEAR market, What are the plans on surviving on BEAR market? Surviving in a bear market is not easy for a new project entering to crypto, Do you have any plans on this?

  • Glasgow

    See the roadmap image above, Ergo has more functional tooling than many coins way above it.

Question 26:

Question 27:

Question 28:

  • I Am Back

    If we are in BEAR market, What are the plans on surviving on BEAR market? Surviving in a bear market is not easy for a new project entering to crypto, Do you have any plans on this?

  • Glasgow

    Ergo was born in the crypto winter and will do just fine :) It’s built to be adaptable and sustainable.

Question 29:

  • LUPIN

    Could you explain have you listed Your tokens on any exchange right now and where can I buy your tokens?

  • Glasgow

    bitcoin.com!!

Question 30:

  • Hello Sir๐Ÿ˜Ž

    Do you have a Token Burning plan to increase Token value and attract Investors to invest?

  • kushti khushi

    No, but native token has limited emission, and >40% already minted

Question 31:

  • I Am Back

    If we are in BEAR market, What are the plans on surviving on BEAR market? Surviving in a bear market is not easy for a new project entering to crypto, Do you have any plans on this?

  • Armeanio

    Ergo is building for the long term, it was born in crypto winter and the devs kept their head down focusing on research and development.

    The commitment to this is outlined in the Ergo Manifesto.

Question 32:

Question 33:

  • Hello Sir๐Ÿ˜Ž

    Binance smart Chain blockchain is having high transaction speed and cheap gas fees, Are you planning to launch your mainet or switch to other blockchains in the future?

  • kushti khushi

    Mainnet was launched in 2019, Ergo is oriented towards decentralization and security, unlike BSC

Question 34:

Question 35:

  • Hello Sir๐Ÿ˜Ž

    CAN you explain the background of your team? How will you and your team carry out this project during this current pandemic?

  • Glasgow

    See the Hall of Fame - https://ergoplatform.org/en/hall_of_fame/

    Ergo was set up for decentralisation before the pandemic hit!

Question 36:

  • Fd

    Do you have any plans to add more members to your team, as ambassadors or any other position?

  • Glasgow

    Yes, growing all the time :)

Question 37:

  • LUPIN

    Can you give me the list about all function of your token? what user possible to do by holding token? and do you have any new event for holder?

  • Glasgow

    I think I’d run out of space. See the FAQ here for a quick overview - https://www.reddit.com/r/ergonauts/wiki/faq

Question 38:

  • Rian

    I think the most unique of your project is ageusd (sigusd, and sigrsv) which is bring stable coin to our community, my question is for the next future could you also want to bring those stable coin to exchanges? And what is the benefits for us as ERG holder if sigusd and sigrsv token bring to exchange?! Thanks

  • kushti khushi

    It seems ErgoDEX will be the first exchange, but there are some talks with CEXes on sigUSD/RSV listings

Question 39:

  • ๐ŸŒ€ZARA VE๐ŸŒ€

    Could you share with us your approach to the community and your strategy to expand your community? Do you have practices that increase and encourage motivation for the community?

  • Armeanio

    Personally, I think the best way to grow crypto as a whole is simple, education which leads to growth and adoption. Ergo is a research-driven project.

    This is not simply on the user side. Although understanding the tools provided, their benefits, and their risks is always extremely important.

    It is also important for developers to learn from the community what tools are needed.

    It is important for developers to learn from other developers as the capacity and technology of a system evolve.

    That is a feedback cycle that drives growth and adoption.

Question 40:

  • ๐ŸŒ€ZARA VE๐ŸŒ€

    Q. These days, scammers can easily throw some fake projects for their interest. And event pretending to be the best service in the similar platform. As to counter this assumption, how do you assure the investor on this project?

  • Glasgow

    Reversible ICOs are possible ontop Ergo!

    https://ergoplatform.org/docs/paper_26.pdf

Question 41:

  • Hello Sir๐Ÿ˜Ž

    Binance smart Chain blockchain is having high transaction speed and cheap gas fees, Are you planning to launch your mainet or switch to other blockchains in the future?

  • Glasgow

    Ergo Platform is one of the most sophisticated protocols in the space with stateless clients (for true full-nodes), NiPoPoWs (for light clients), and the ability for miners to vote on parameter changes like increasing the block size easily. Here’s an outline of the scaling plan.

    L0: A lot of efficiency improvements in the node have been completed starting from v4.0.8. We are going to count every memory allocation and every operation. 20-50x improvements are likely still possible by just optimizing the node code. Implementations for bootstrapping with NiPoPoW proofs and UTXO set snapshots are planned.

    L1: Ergo's blocks have an extension section which allows the implementation of a wide variety of other scaling solutions such as BitcoinNG-style macroblocks and Sharding -- and even lets us do generic sidechains with velvet or soft forks.

    L2 (off-chain) - Ergo could support the Lightning Network, Rainbow network, Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payments, and FairSwap/FastSwap protocols - and many others. Our implementation here will depend on the applications.

Question 42:

  • Hello Sir๐Ÿ˜Ž

    Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is it like this? If not can u tell us, What makes it different from other projects?

  • kushti khushi

    Ergo mainnet was launched back in 2019, and it is fully functional unlike PolkaDot etc

Question 43:

  • Angel

    I believe your project have a good team that is ready to get the job done to the maximum, will you take into account the opinions, contributions, ideas of your community members at any time ??

  • Glasgow

    Of course! Join the chats and let us know your suggestions

Question 44:

  • Flipsah

    How can I trust Your project because I got scammed twice this year, did you ever get scammed by crypto projects personally?

  • Glasgow

    Yes my frog farm got rugged (Cardano incubator project). :(

    You can trust Ergo by doing your research, and realising the foundations it’s built upon.

Question 45:

  • Hello Sir๐Ÿ˜Ž

    Southeast Asia is a very vibrant market and there are many new platforms under development. So what do you think about Southeast Asia and do you have plans to grow there?

  • kushti khushi

    We had Asian roadshow back in 2019, with meetups in HK and Ho Chi Minh, next time Singapore and Bangkok also hopefully, but currently it is utterly hard to make roadshows

Question 46:

  • Hello Sir๐Ÿ˜Ž

    Can you list 1-3 killer features of Your Project that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?

  • Glasgow

    NiPoPoWs : Trustless Light Clients with Minimal Resource Requirements: Ergo block header supports NiPoPoWs that enable synchronizing network by downloading < 1Mb of data.

    Rigorous research and scientific approach: Ergo is based on original research, published at known peer-reviewed conferences. A list of scientific papers is available at https://apograf.io/c/7MEY3, but Ergo is not limited by research alone and continues to implement other novel scientific ideas.

Question 47:

  • ๐ŸŒ€ZARA VE๐ŸŒ€

    I'm still new to crypto, how do you make Your project easy for anyone? Including those who don't understand crypto will also use Your project?

  • kushti khushi

    Yes, you can learn crypto here, with the warmest community possible )

Question 48:

  • Cheese Ball

    Do you have plans to conduct LP staking for token long term holders?

  • Armeanio

    Ergodex will allow users to provide liquidity for the potential of passive yields with the caveat of impermanent loss. This loss however can be minimized as the liquidity provider will be able to select active ranges.


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