text:
How does one create a new native token with full control?
We would like to create a native asset on Cardano ourselves. How does one go about doing this?

You basically read the docs and if something is not clear, you may ask here https://developers.cardano.org/en/development-environments/native-tokens/native-tokens/
That being said, I don't think this is a valid question, since there are many resources about this topic out there.

@vaz This is the purpose of stackexchange. To create an easily searchable, consumable, and centralized body of knowledge on a topic. It is common to answer questions by linking to documentation.

I’m voting to close this question because No Research

Here is a step-by-step recipe for creating a native asset manually: https://silas-stulz.medium.com/you-want-to-create-your-own-nft-heres-how-you-do-it-on-the-cardano-blockchain-9a0bbf8caa39.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


text:
What are Catalyst "challenge setting" challenges for?
I have a solution idea that can be solved by Cardano and couldn't find the right category for it.  I want to put it in the "challenge setting" challenge.
Do "challenge setting" challenges have limits on what can be proposed?

What do you mean by "community challenges"? Are you referring to the "Challenge setting"?

Thanks, edited for clarity and correct terminology.

A "challenge setting" challenge is how the Catalyst community chooses the themes and funding for some of the Catalyst challenges following the next six-week cycle.
They are significantly different than most other challenges.

No reward is given to proposers
Proposals suggest new challenges
They do not contains proposals or solutions
Funds requested become the budget of the challenge
The outcome takes 3+ months to complete

There is a long lead time on funds proposed in the challenge budget being delivered to the proposals that win in the resulting challenge.  If the challenge has a timeliness component (e.g. a "Women" theme to coincide with = International Women's day) it is best to propose it about 90 days in advance.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
What is the maximum number of contracts Cardano can store?
I see Ethereum (ETH) can store 2256 smart contracts, so is there any description about this for Cardano, i.e. how many contracts can Cardano store?

In Cardano, the smart contractors are submitted as transactions with a validator script. Funds locked in the smart contract are in UTXO with the address as the "Script Address". And based on three parameters called datum, redeemer, and context, the validator script provides the go-ahead for the release of funds.
Based on this setting theoretically, there is no limit to the number of deployable smart contracts since there is no limit on how many transactions can be submitted to the blockchain. The size of Datum, which can carry some bit of data, is yet to be promulgated.

Thank you, pro!

I don't really understand the answer. Since each smart contract corresponds to an address, and the number of bits that encode an address is fixed, and even the number of bits used to encode the hash of the datum is fixed, the number of smart contracts should be fixed, and I don't know what happens when there is a hash collision.

I'm not sure that I fully understand your question. 2^256 what?
To my knowledge, the maximum size of a smart contract on ETH is 24 KB. According to the Cardano Foundation, the maximum transaction metadata size is 16 KB. Since smart contracts are not yet deployed, I'm not sure what the size limitation will be but, it will probably be in this ball park.

thank for your answer, but I mean how many contracts Cardano can store, not the contract size.

@RongNguyen if a blockchain gets close to the limit, the developers will certainly adjust it to increase the limit or remove it altogether. A blockchain cannot function if it is "full".


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What is the maximum timeout for a contract that you can define in Marlowe?
We know that Marlowe contracts always end mandatorily because a maximum timeout is defined. I wonder what the maximum timeout is, it seems like you can put a huge epoch/slot in which would be practically "infinite".

You're correct that the duration of a Marlowe contract could be practically "infinite": there is no specific limit on the timeout slot for a Marlowe contract.

What is your source? The link you provided is not specific enough to qualify as an answer.

(1) Timeout can be any slot number, (2) the Marlowe state machine does not impose any limits on the slot number, and (3) the Marlowe redeem code does not either.


text:
Are the locked funds in a contract still considered as delegated to a wallet and can get staking rewards?
The question here is if script-locked outputs can still have a staking key associated with them  (decided by the person creating the output) and whether this enables the funds to be delegated in a contract to get staking rewards.

Yes, it will be possible to associate a staking address for script outputs.


text:
Stake pool leader logs
What is the earliest point to check the leader log for the next epoch using tools like cncli? I though it was 60 hours in to the current epoch, but keep getting the "Query returned no rows" error.

In order to calculate the leaderlogs, the calculations require the epoch nonce. This epoch nonce value is calculated from the rolling nonce value at 1.5 days before the next epoch starts. This 1.5 days is also called the stability window. The nonce calculation also includes the block hash of the first slot of the previous epoch.
Finally, if there is extra entropy that needs to be added, the extra entropy protocol parameter is included in the epoch nonce calculation.
By using these two (sometimes 3) pieces of data along with a blake2b hash, we end up with a new epoch nonce value that can be used to calculate leaderlogs.

The earliest point is 1.5 days :-)


text:
What are the pros and cons of Cardano's liquid staking over other protocols that use a bonded staking model?
As some background, Cardano has a "liquid" staking model, which means that stake is never locked when it is being delegated. Other, "bonded" staking models require a locking period of various lengths (anywhere from days to months), which means the coins can not be moved and spent. I'm hoping a two-fold answer can be provided that discusses security and economics.

In my understanding, hardening the system by locking your coins is great. It has the disadvantage of not being a realistic economic policy, where the velocity of money (i.e. using it) is a must for sustainance. GDP = VELOCITY X MONETARY BASE, for example.
Cardano solves this by taking snapshots of the locked coins, so the next epoch happens in, sort of, a parallel universe where all the tokens are locked, but lets the economy of the ecosystem be heakthy by letting then move freely. Then the next snapshot happens, and hence the system keeps being secure no matter if there is a large dump, things change hands or tokens are sold for fiat.
I hope I made myself clear, otherwise let me know and I will give you a more structured answer.

Pros (advantages)

Coins are not locked while staked and can be freely spent or transferred
Staked coins do not slow the velocity of value transfer in the ecosystem
Staking pools for existing wallets can be changed at any time

Cons (disadvantages)

Coins will not be staked until the next staking snapshot occurs
New wallets need to exist for a period of time before staking becomes active on them
Existing wallets have a delay between changing staking pool and it taking effect

Those cons largely apply to bonded staking as well, since time delays are part of the system. Another disadvantage is that liquid staking being a unique/novel concept requires education for each new ADA holder, specifically around re-defining the word "stake"


text:
How do I determine who the moderators are for Project Catalyst?
I am trying to find out who to contact if I need to ask a question, make a suggestion or make a request about changes to a proposal or challenge.

The members of the campaign team are listed at the bottom of the "about" tab for each challenge (Ideascale calls them campaigns)
e.g. for the "Dev Ecosystem" challenge, they are listed at the bottom of this "about" tab.


text:
Why Strict Evaluation Operator "!" used in record definition implemented in Plutus Core?
While declaring records for use in Plutus strict operator is used like this:
data Auction = Auction
   { aSeller   :: !PubKeyHash
   , aDeadline :: !Slot
   , aMinBid   :: !Integer
   , aCurrency :: !CurrencySymbol
   , aToken    :: !TokenName
   } deriving (Show, Generic, ToJSON, FromJSON, ToSchema)

Does this mean that Plutus Core does not use lazy evaluation?

This is correct. Plutus Core uses eager evaluation. You can see this in the first section of the Plutus Core Specification. I'm not sure why however I'd expect it is to allow you to accurately estimate fees and avoid infinite data structures.
This PDF contains the formal language specifications of the Plutus Core language.

Cardano documentation says the following:

Plutus Core is the scripting language used by Cardano to implement the EUTXO model. It is a simple, functional language similar to Haskell, and a large subset of Haskell can be used to write Plutus Core scripts.

So, if Plutus Core is a Haskell-based language it is a lazy language too – hence, script's values are only computed when they are needed. But bang operator ! is an important part of Plutus Core as well.
In your example bang patterns are used to force Plutus Core to be more strict in its evaluation (we must force evaluation of those values before evaluating them). All banged properties are eagerly needed for committing a current operation, thus, that's why we use ! ops.


text:
What is the logic behind Cardano's tokenomics and emmission schedule?
Bitcoin was made to be mined until roughly 2140.  I like that it was made for decades to come while many projects are built for 4 years or whatever.
Personally I do not believe inflation in and of itself is bad, as economies are not static and expand.  What is bad is inflation manipulation that is unprovable and not tamper-proof, or when it is too high.
Coin Gecko currently shows circ supply to TS as:
32,056,062,599 / 45,000,000,000
71% in circulation on the 3rd year already seems a bit high.
Does Cardano have to have a fixed supply?  A perpetual, provable, tamper-proof small stock-to-flow seems best to me.
Can someone make the decisions behind Cardano's inflation make sense to me?

The uncirculated (reserve) coins are distributed over time at a specific percentage rate.  As the reserve decreases in size, the amount distributed each epoch (5 days) will decrease.  At the current percentage rate the reserve will halve approximately every 4-5 years.

Ada has a fixed supply of 45 billion coins
30 Billion coins were issued/sold during the ICO rounds
The other 15 Billion coins were placed into a reserve for operation of the network
Every 5 days (each epoch) the transaction fees and a fixed percentage of the reserve are added to a pot
A fixed percentage of the epoch's pot is added to the treasury and the rest are distributed as staking rewards

Cardano monetary policy has a more precise explanation.

Eventually we will stop measuring Cardano in Ada and start measuring it in “Lovelace.”

I do not agree with that. Even with a 10 trillion market cap, one ADA will be worth something around 320$, which is still affordable.

Request add rationale for your statements. Short answers without adequate explanations get flagged as low-quality posts.


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When will Daedalus show NFT'S?
I believe it is already possible to see NFT'S in Yoroi, I am wondering when could we expect similar features in Daedalus.

Right now the only way I know is using pool.pm because Smaug created a metadata specific for this purpose.
The wallets aren't yet fit to the same metadata therefore first, the proposal must be accepted.
I hope it will.

If anyone is looking for a workaround for this, you could actually use the same recovery phrase from Daedalus on Yoroi and have both instances on your machine. This allows you to take advantage of both wallets.

Daedalus v4.4.0 and higher allows you to see long-awaited NFTs and other tokens in Tokens tab.

Check out the ADA Monitor App
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esodot.andro.monitor&hl=en-US

If you need it natively supported, you'll have to wait till Alonzo and the launch of smart contracts.

You can use NFTs even now. There is little difference when ti comes to displaying it in a wallet based on if it is minted by a script or a smart contact.


text:
How much entropy does BIP39 have?
How much entropy does BIP39 have?
How long would brute forcing take?
Can a 2nd factor be included on a wallet, to lock, unlock it?

I'd take a look at this answer
It seems a very well resourced attacker would be able to find a used private key for 128bit seed.
This would be an attack on all keys in the network, not yours specifically.
For 256bit seed, it should be infeasible.

128 bit for 11 seed word and 256 for 27 seed word
for 128 bit 1.02 x 10^18 years.

I have 12 and 24 word options here.

what is your wallet ?

You should know that if you generate a wallet with the help of cardano-wallet utility you will be proposed two options: general-factor 24-word seed (2048²⁴ or 2²⁶⁴ possible combinations) and optional second-factor 12-word seed (2048¹² or 2¹³² possible combinations).
That's a real nightmare for a hacker because it's practically impossible to brute force it.


text:
Stake pool operation: estimated effort in time?
From actual stake pool operators, is there an estimated # hours effort for getting the pool up?
How much time do you spend on marketing?

Your question has no direct answer.
Its hard or not impossible to estimate the time spent on marketing, from my side its a full time job.
I spend all day on twitter and reddit, these are my favourite social media.
To setup a pool you can check Cardano Forum and ask mr. Alex post about CNTOOLS.
if you understand something about Linux OS its easy for you, if not, you'll need to learn and some DevOps is required for basic firewall configuration for example.
There's no direct answer to that, if you are already experienced on linux I would not expect more than 1 hour to setup a block producer and two relay.
Check here for CNTOOLS setup tutorial, I'd recommend this because it saved me a lot of time.
https://forum.cardano.org/t/how-to-set-up-a-pool-in-a-few-minutes-and-register-using-cntools/48767
good luck

Agreed, marketing is the hardest part and there is literally no end lol


text:
Staying secure for every day users: What recommendations do security experts have for wallet management, safety, maintenance?

What's the safest way to store BIP39 seed words?
What hardware wallet backup options exist?
How can I share details on wallet maintenance with family?

Wheater using hardware wallet, which is the safets one, or paper wallet, you must make sure to write down and keep the seed in more than one secure location. Just think of it as a key to your safe box. Do not share it with anyone.

I voted to close not because this is a recommendations question, but because it's 3 questions instead of 1 question. If you have 3 questions, it's generally better to ask in 3 separate posts rather than all in 1, because we cannot vote on the answers properly (I might want to upvote someone's answer to 1 but not their answer to 2, and this is better done if you ask separate questions). I'll retract my close vote if you correct this. Also: I was not the one that initiated the close voting.

Some specific answers to your questions.

I don't know that there is a great answer to this. Your options range from putting it on paper and in a safe deposit box in a bank, to storing it one word at a time in random places (like an escape room scenario). There are some very cool physical devices for storing seed words that are made if metal to be fire resistant. Basically you use a punch to mark the seed words in the metal.

Hardware wallet backups are similar. You just have a list of seed words that you need to protect. One nice thing about Hardware wallets is that you can restore a second or third wallet with the same seed phrase and store them in separate locations.

This depends on your family and estate management scenario. Do you trust your family? It can be a good idea for you to share the details of your wallet with a spouse or parent that can manager your funds if you are incapacitated. You can also have safe-deposit box ownership be transferrable to someone should you become incapacitated and inside have instructions for them on how to manage your funds (a will helps here).

Some more thoughts...
Wallet safety, as any other cyber security question, comes down to risk vs. effort. That is, how much is what you are trying to protect worth and how much effort and expense are you willing to put it to protect it? The billions of dollars in Bitcoin on the Tesla balance sheet is managed much differently that my grandpa's $100 of crypto.
This is of course up to the individual, but something like below is what I tell people.

< $100 worth
Standard software wallet with seed phrase in a password manager shared with a family member is probably fine.
In between is kind of a grey area.
> $1000
This should definitely be on a hardware wallet if possible. Family members can share the PIN/passphrase (ex. in case of emergency who can access your funds?). The seed phrase (hardware wallet backup) should be stored off of a computer! You can store the seed in multiple places such as a home safe or bank safe deposit box if available (again your level of risk will help determine this). It's also probably a good idea to leave instructions for family.
~$1M I probably wouldn't want these seed words stored in my house...


text:
Wallet transfer upon death - what process is the safest for transferring wallet details to family members after death?
What is a safe / vetted process for handing over wallet details to family members after death?

You could use a safety deposit box containing the wallet keys with ownership of the box going to your spouse/family member on death. That way you can share the key with your spouse/family member before death  but they'll only have access to it as part of your will.

Thanks Edd, So will referencing safety deposit box and done? What happens if the bank (with the safety deposit box) "goes away"?

Banks are regulated so this shouldn't be a risk, but of course everything has some element of risk. I'd personally see this as an acceptable level of risk, however others might not. You can usually use a safety deposit box to pass important documents so this is a tried and tested method at least.

Thanks, didn't consider the regulation aspect.

Safety deposit box is a great suggestion, I would add a crypt-keeper  wallet into the mix for a good measure.


text:
What commercial (brick and mortar) banks support ADA staking?
Some online banks have started allowing trade in ADA. None of these banks seem to offer staking. I understand the argument for self-management and decentralisation (if large exchanges start staking) but some users might not want the burdon of self-management.
What banks / online trading platforms, support staking?

This is not a technical question about the Cardano network but about the social context surrounding it, which can change over time.

Binance is the only leading exchange which offers staking that I'm aware of.

Thanks.
Binance - from what I've seen offer minimal staking at this point.

Coinbase does not support ADA. Only four coins can be staked currently according to their site: https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/staking/staking-on-coinbase
Algorand
Cosmos
Ethereum
Tezos

You're right @rubikwall, I misread their site. Edited and updated my answer.

There aren’t any commercial (brick and mortar) banks that support Ada staking. Banks are the “middle man,” crypto is designed to remove the “middle man” from the equation. Banks are antithetical to the whole ethos of the cryptocurrency movement.

SwissQuote (Switzerland) will support ADA staking by year end.


text:
Probability of Minting a Block
Assume a Stakepool with a delegated amount of x Ada. How can one calculate the probability of minting a block and what factors does it depend on?

Visit a site like pooltool.io to see current delegated total for the network (top left corner), currently 30.24b ADA but changes day to day. Each epoch we have 0.05 (active slot coefficient network parameter) of the available slots on average assigned a leader slot (chance to produce a block), which is 5 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 0.05 = 21600 blocks per epoch on average.
Doing the simple maths for, say, 1 million ADA delegated to a pool yields 1,000,000 / 30,240,000,000 * 21600 = ~ 0.7 blocks per epoch. Alternatively you can do: 1/21600 * 30,240,000,000 to get a result of 1,400,000 ADA for one block, on average.

5 * 24 * 60 * 60 part is not explained here. 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400 seconds in one day and multiplied by 5 which is cardano epoch length.

you can see full doc here https://hydra.iohk.io/build/790053/download/1/delegation_design_spec.pdf
and small one here https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/understanding-pledging-and-rewards.html
also you can use this one for calculate it. https://dynamicstrategies.io/crewardcalculator

Currently, on average it’s 1M Ada to mint one block per epoch consistently. On ADApools.org a correlation between “Estimated Blocks in Whole Epoch” and “live stake” can be observed.

It depends on a few parameters: 1. Transaction fees from the set of transactions included in a block that was minted. 2. Monetary expansion: involves distinguishing between the total supply of ada and the maximal supply of ada. Please note that the more pools join the network, the less reward will be distributed.


text:
What's the point of new incoming addresses with the Daedalus wallet?
Daedalus seems to create a new set of incoming addresses, is this epoch based, or a privacy measure?

While it's intended to be a privacy-enhancing measure, it's currently somewhat negated by the fact that any Cardano wallet that's currently registered for staking has every address easily linked to the staking address (e.g. see Addresses tab of https://adastat.net/accounts/7e8e16462417aaf4d82249228050eb66b16a143c0433b08de794675f). So you might want to create a separate wallet that's not involved in staking for any intermediate transactions where the new address re-use will actually have the desired effect (not sure if legacy Byron wallets are still create-able anywhere, they would also do the job!).

Addresses don't get recycled? They're forever associated with your account?

It's a privacy measure. Daedalus suggests you should only use an address once (although they can be re-used!). There are different addresses such as for Byron and Shelley, however these are rare changes.
All transactions are public, so one can see all transactions sent to an address.
If you only use one address, then anyone that knows that address can lookup all the transactions to that address.

All UTxO-based ledgers were conceived as ledgers in which each address must be used just once. Any change left after the transaction should come to a new address. Nonetheless, this does not prevent you from reusing each payment address.
Using the same address multiple times for receiving funds is a privacy issue, however, using the same address multiple times for sending/receiving funds is a security issue (and not only for you).

Has the staking address privacy issue been addressed yet?

IMHO, when compromising a stacking address itself, you should not worry at all...


text:
How to mint a token on Cardano?
I need help on how can I mint a token on the cardano blockchain for example an image as an NFT.

The easiest way to mint an NFT IMG token on Cardano is by using https://www.nft-maker.io/. If you want to make it yourself then https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/native-tokens/getting-started-with-native-tokens.html is a good starting point.

This is also a very interesting guide https://bikemonkey.tech/minting-an-nft-on-cardano-with-daedalus-and-macos/

The documentation has been updated and is now at: https://docs.cardano.org/native-tokens/learn

Welcome to our community! This is an unusually short answer. Pehaps you can highlight/summarize what the documentation says about how to mint a coin.


text:
Voting on Catalyst with multiple wallets
I have created multiple Yoroi wallets to share ADA with family members. We would like to use the sum of ADAs to participate in the next voting round in Catalyst. Can we do that or is your number of ADA wallet specific?

It always is whatever you have one on one wallet. So you can all each vote separately but all would need to use their own QR codes and vote for the same thing. There isn't a way to pool ADA just yet.

Each wallet will represent its own amount of ADA and will have its own representation for voting.  You won't be able to pool the amounts together and will have to register each wallet to vote independently.

You need a certain amount of Ada to participate in voting. Your voting power increases with the amount of Ada you own, one wallet does not equal one vote.


text:
How does Atala Prism work?
I mean how does it work technically, in terms of its use of the Cardano blockchain?
What blockchain features support it?
Does the use of prism entail the expenditure of ADA by any of the involved parties?
What should I read to understand this more fully?

Its well known that Atala PRISM allows people to deal with Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VC), this is a simplified version on how it could work, which should give you a better idea.
Let's take Cardano as a black-box that allow us posting data by leveraging the transaction metadata, which gives the distributed consensus (to make sure that an event occurred at a given time) and network dissemination (to be able to get the data distributed).
DIDs are known to have public keys attached, which means that whoever controls the corresponding private keys, controls the DID, we can define some events about a DID, like:

DID created
DID updated (key added/rotated/revoked, etc)

By using those events, we can define the following:

The way to serialize an event to store it in the transaction metadata.
The validity criteria to check whether a new event is valid given the existing events (digital signatures and hashes involved).

Until now, we have defined a protocol that allows posting events to Cardano, as well as to compute the current state given the existing events in Cardano, implementing such protocol would require an application that:

Provides an API to submit new events to the Cardano network.
Runs a process that pulls transactions from the Cardano network, looking for the defined events, validates and applies the events when possible (computing a new state).
Provides an API to query for the current state, for our example, it would mean being able to query which DIDs exists and each DID's state.

For PRISM, there is a similar protocol defined with a different set of possible events, including how to deal with credentials.

We do not know yet, we will once it is open source in few weeks or months.
For now, all we have is this tech walk-thought.

Yesterday they've said something in the Africa Special, and showed an SDK+documentation running on localhost, and said something about releasing it in the short term.


text:
How to market a stakepool?
Besides:

Running a zero percent margin pool
Offering a bonus of 1000 Ada for a stake of 1 million
Starting a podcast
Advertising on Adapools.org using coinzilla
NFT giveaways

What other mechanisms are possible to market a stakepool?

I'm not sure if non-technical and open questions are a good fit for Stack Exchange. There isn't a definitive answer to this.

I agree with Edd. Better place to discuss open questions like this is forum.cardano.org

Sounds good, I’ll close it. The answers were helpful though, I appreciate it.

I’m voting to close this question because of the open ended nature. Will submit it on the Cardano forum.

Here is a quick brainstorm.
Web Presence

Create a Website
- You should have your own URL
- Get a basic knowledge of SEO and follow the rules.
Dedicated Twitter account and follow and comment on everything ADA/Cardano
Start a dedicated YouTube account and start creating content geared toward your target market. Could be how-to videos, current events, price action talk, interviews, reviews of catalyst proposals and funded projects, developer stuff, education...
Other social media accounts could include TicTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, etc.
Answer and Ask questions on stack exchange.
Create a Discord for your delegators, be available and quick to communicate.
Do lottery's, giveaways, rewards, raffles, NFTs, Merch, etc.
Collaborate with an artist to start making NFTs published by your brand.
Paying for advertising would come after all this stuff. You need to have something for people to see when they start looking into your pool.
Be yourself. You are unique and you have something to offer that no-one else does.

Real Life

Get some Cardano branded stuff and wear it.
Become active in your region. Start/join meet-up groups. Talk to people about Cardano.
Get some gear with your own stake pool brand on it and wear it. Give it to friends and family.
Give ADA, Native Tokens, NFTs as gifts to friends and family.
Attend conferences.

You have to know your target group or at least try to reach your target group.
There are users who try to

maximize their returns from staking (best pool settings)
improve decentralization (any small pool)
support certain projects or projects in their area (selected projects, locations, ...)

If you try to reach users who want to maximize their staking return, your listed incentives are good. However, for small pools it will be challenging to be seen, as there are many large pools who already offer zero margin while providing a high block-minting probability. Personally, I believe that the differences between "normal" and "min-maxed" pools are too small to matter. All you do is try to take advantage of filters and search algorithms on certain pool comparison websites.
If you try to reach users who want to support the network by supporting smaller pools and increase decentralization, you just have to "be known". Overall I think that it is difficult to target this group of users specifically. Just try to be an option.
Your best bet is to have something that makes you special. If your pool supports a certain project, you could advertise your pool in this community. If you have a social media following, you can advertise there. You mentioned starting a podcast. To advertise your pool in your podcast, you have to advertise your podcast first. Some users try to support local pools specifically. Use this as an advantage to advertise your pool in a local Cardano community, for example a language specific Cardano subreddit.
The overall best way to get pledges is to become known (duh!). Participate in Cardano communities using a name like "XYZ Pool" and provide good content. Maybe you can use your answers to subtly drop the info that you operate a pool, for example when people ask how much it costs to operate a pool, or when they ask for certain pools in particular. Small events like giveaways are also a great opportunity for acceptable advertisement, as long you select an acceptable platform.


text:
How is new ADA created?
In a Proof-of-Work protocol, a certain amount of the blockchain's native coin is issued with the minting of a new block as a way to reward miners for their efforts and involvement in the network. As far as I know, though, no coins exist prior to the creation of the genesis block, and after this point, new coins begin to be issued at some rate.
How does this work in a Proof-of-Stake protocol? How does the issuing of new ADA work in Cardano? Was there a certain number of ADA created at the beginning? Or has the 31.9B ADA currently in circulation (out of the 45B max total) all been a product of stake pools forging new blocks?

All ADA has already been minted. Technically it was all minted in the first block. The stake pool payouts come from the reserves and transaction fees.

not the treasury, the "reserves". See page 2 of the ledger spec. The treasury is for funding the development of Cardano, not for rewards payouts.

Thanks for the clarification.

@EGMSSE is someone "in charge" of the reserves? who or what decides what and how much comes out of them? is it all just managed by the protocol?

@desolate_mountain Right now, IOHK is managing these variables until the release of governance where users will be able to vote to change variables in the protocol. Also you can check out this infographic here: https://i.redd.it/wbmip3szxeg61.jpg to see how rewards are being paid out.


text:
What events are kicked off when a transaction is submitted?
I'm wondering what the exact chain of events looks like once a transaction is submitted.

Welcome to our new community! It's generally a good idea to show what research you've done on your own so far, so a 1-line question like this doesn't look like a "low-effort question".

When a transaction is submitted, it is loaded into the node's mempool. This is like a waiting room for transactions that haven't yet made it on the blockchain. Whether the node is daedalus, or a stakepool, the nodes communicate with each other using the TxSubmission mini-protocol. New transactions are sent to all other nodes in the network.
Once a stakepool has been elected to make a block, it drains its mempool while validating all the transactions. It will fill up the block with all the transactions or until 65536 bytes (the current max block size which could be increased in the future).
That block is published on the blockchain. The BlockSync mini-protocol transmits the block until it propagates to all nodes. All nodes process the transactions in the block and remove any transactions from their mempool that have made it into the block.

Thanks for the great answer :)


text:
Is there a maximum number of transactions a block can hold?
If the network is under heavy use and transactions are being recorded in these blocks faster than normal, is there a cap on the size of the block?
Perhaps the rule is 20 second slot time, or a full block?
If this is the case, wouldn't a flooded network lead to decreased epoch time because of shortened slots?

Both the block size and the transaction size are defined as protocol parameters. These can be changed at any time by IOG, or voted on once we have Voltaire. Blocks come on average every 20 seconds, but the closest blocks can be currently is every second.
maxBlockBodySize is 65536 bytes and maxTxSize is 16384 bytes. As the network becomes more useful and congested, these parameters can be changed to accommodate the additional traffic.
We can also modify the activeSlotsCoefficient which is currently 0.05. By modifying this we can make blocks appear more frequently on average instead of 20 seconds.
Cardano has a verify flexible protocol so it can adjust quite a bit on its own before we need to worry about implementing hydra for additional scalability.
{
  "txFeePerByte": 44,
  "minUTxOValue": 1000000,
  "stakePoolDeposit": 500000000,
  "decentralization": 0,
  "poolRetireMaxEpoch": 18,
  "extraPraosEntropy": null,
  "stakePoolTargetNum": 500,
  "maxBlockBodySize": 65536,
  "maxTxSize": 16384,
  "treasuryCut": 0.2,
  "minPoolCost": 340000000,
  "maxBlockHeaderSize": 1100,
  "protocolVersion": {
      "minor": 0,
      "major": 4
  },
  "txFeeFixed": 155381,
  "stakeAddressDeposit": 2000000,
  "monetaryExpansion": 3.0e-3,
  "poolPledgeInfluence": 0.3
}

So an an activeSlotsCoefficient of .07 would be a block time of about 14.29 seconds?.07*14.29 = 1.003

@IsaacPadberg Yes. An epoch is 5 days or 432000 seconds which makes 432000 slots per epoch. 0.07 * 432000 means that on average 30240 slots will be filled with a block. 432000 / 30240 would give us about 14.29 seconds between blocks.

Why have these numbers been set to fairly conservative amounts, when the protocol should be capable of more.  Transaction size makes sense, but transactions per block seems fairly limited considering smart contracts will need more space.

@Scalextrix It is possible these parameters will be adjusted with the Alonzo HFC event to accommodate for a projected increase in transactions. However, there just does not appear to be any need at the moment as the max TPS Cardano has ever had to achieve at this point 0.7 TPS while the current parameters allow for ~10x of that.

Expanding on Andrew's excellent answer with some examples.
The lowest amount of transactions that could be in a block is maxBlockBodySize / maxTxSize, currently equal to 4.
It might be more practical to consider the minimum & average transaction sizes on the network. Using cardano-graphql to query these numbers for transactions in epochs >= 250 gives 2 months of history and a sample of 2.2m transactions.

Minimum real-world TX size: 190
Average real-world TX size: 613

Applying these numbers to the formula, we can calculate that at most 344 minimum size transactions would fit in a block, and on average 107 transactions can fit in a block.
Using this average and the current value for activeSlotsCoefficient, now we find how many transactions could be included in blocks per day:
107 tx/block * 0.05 blocks/slot * 86400 slots/day = 462,240 tx/day


text:
What's the difference between "on-chain" and "off-chain" in plutus smart contracts?
Smart contracts written in Plutus can be divided in two: an on-chain part and an off-chain part. What's the main difference between these two?

I think the Plutus core specification gives pretty good explanation.

Plutus Core code (and code intended for execution on a blockchain in general) can be executed in two different environments: off-chain and on-chain. As the name suggests, off-chain execution doesn’t happen on the blockchain itself, but in some other environment, such as in an electronic wallet on a smartphone or PC. In contrast, on-chain execution takes place on core nodes, machines which are actually maintaining the blockchain.

Not only the environment is different though. The purpose is also different:

On-chain code is used to validate transactions. It will be run every time somebody wants to submit a transaction to the blockchain. If validation succeeds, most likely the transaction will be written to the chain. Fees also should be paid for running the on-chain code to prevent DoS of the blockchain (if there are no fees, anybody can submit an infinite loop to the blockchain and then every node running this code will be stuck and thus blockchain won't be able to operate)
Off-chain code is used to build and submit transactions and also query the blockchain. Say, you want to participate in online auction running on Cardano. In order to do so, you need to make a bid. To make a bid, you need to send specific data to the auction smart contract, say the ID of the lot and amount of Ada. Off-chain code builds such a transaction, runs off-chain validation (so you can avoid spending fees for invalid transactions), calculates the fees and submits the transaction to the blockchain

Since the off-chain part runs on the wallet, would be possible to hang it with an infinite loop? or there's a mechanism to prevent this behaviour?

I'm not sure how specific you want the answer to be, but essentially on-chain means that the contract is executed on the block-chain. Whereas, off-chain means that this part of the contract is executed off of the block-chain (ie. on the user's machine).

Are the following clarifications correct?  By "on the user's machine", you mean the code is executed using computation power provided by a 3rd-party/user interacting with the contract (the results of which will potentially not be verified in any way).  By "on the block-chain", you mean the code is executed using compute power provided by validator nodes (the results of which will be statistically verified).

The on-chain and off-chain code are written in Plutus language which is basically Haskell.
The on-chain part is compiled using PlutusTx to "Plutus Core" which are executed by the nodes on the blockchain.
The off-chain part is compiled using Haskell compiler to run on user's machine (wallet, pc, mobile ...)


text:
How Cardano is different from Ethereum (2.0)?
As far as I know, the Cardano project was started to cover issues/problems with Ethereum blockchain. Proof-of-work and governance are some of them.
However, Ethereum 2.0 is promising to cover those issues.
So in this context, how is Cardano different from Ethereum 2.0?

Does Etherium 2.0 have 100% decentralization, a basis in peer-reviewed publishing, and only one person needed for transaction verifications?

So only the real difference is the transaction model given the fact that etherium has been well established. What are the benefits of the eUTXO transaction model ?

TL;DR:

Research-led design (102 academic papers to-date)
eUTXO transaction model (vs. Ethereum's account-based models)
Formal verification (related to 1.)
Functional-language-based (Haskell-based) smart contract language and VM (Plutus vs. Solidity)
Strong presence in emerging economies (Africa and Asia) in order to accelerate economic development and accelerate adoption
Guarantees regarding cost and executability of a smart contract prior to deployment, avoiding unnecessary gas fees.

I'm not an expert, so don't expect this to be a complete answer. But, Cardano is being developed in the context of academia and industrial partnerships. As of writing, the developers of Cardano (and their associates) have produced 102 academic papers formalizing the mathematical behavior of blockchains, generally, and of the delegated proof of stake and extended UTXO (unspent transaction output) model that the Cardano blockchain has spearheaded.
Related is that a very large emphasis is being placed on formal verification of Cardano's source code/implementation. Formal verification is the process of using software to prove, mathematically, that a certain set of code performs exactly as its designed to. A simple example would be formal verification of a function that calculates the hypotenuse of a right triangle given the lengths of the perpendicular sides. A formal verification system would operate on the source code (not the binary output, I understand) to verify that the routine does compute (and only computes, I think?) the Pythagorean theorem and isn't a virus that you might otherwise execute on your system.
Related to the above is the development of a function programming language based on Haskell, called Plutus to be used with Cardano's smart contracts platform (also called Plutus). By contrast Ethereum's smart contract language is called Solidity and is loosely based on ECMAScript/JavaScript, Python, and C++. Functional programming languages (LISP, Scala, Haskell) are preferred in environments where algorithmic and runtime safety is paramount, since the use of functions over classes/objects ensures side-effect free programs which are unlikely to mutate in an unintended way.
Additionally, Cardano is looking to work within a solid regulatory framework. Recently, the Cardano development company announced a partnership with the Ethiopian government to establish a decentralized identity system using the Cardano blockchain.
Cardano is also working hard in developing countries to bank the unbanked and provide loans and opportunity to historically disenfranchised communities.
Additionally, the Plutus platform includes, as a design goal, the feature that the cost to execute a smart contract is known prior to deployment (unlike Solidity) and the Plutus platform provides strong guarantees about the runtime behavior of your contract (it will either execute successfully or fail to execute, it won't fail while still incurring fees for partial execution.

I think ETH, no matter how and what it builds will be inferior to Cardano in many ways! Some of the core underlying reasons for that are:

ETH is an Account model vs Cardano's Extended UTXO model
ETH Smart contracts for its tokens vs Cardano's native tokens (huge benefit here)
ETH 2.0 is supposed to scale only upto a 100000 TXns at the most. Cardano with Hydra we are talking more like a Million +
Babel fees is a killer and is only on Cardano.
The on-chain governance on Cardano will always have a head start over ETH.
Solidity is buggy and unreliable. While Haskell, Plutus may be tough to learn, but they work like a charm. So more reliability.
People underestimate IELE and what it can do. Hope you watched Charles' video of "The island, the pond and the Ocean". Many don't even realize what we are achieving there.
And don't underestimate ATALA Prism which will enable Cardano to easily work with Governments and traditional world

With all the above I just scratched the surface. Idiots think that decentralized means Wild Wild West. It is far from truth. The power of research, papers, provable languages like Haskell, Plutus... sky is the limit. And we have got some of the best talent in the community.
For ETH even to live with 2.0 is a huge struggle unlike what is being written & sold on social media. The foundation pillars are what make a blockchain great. ETH foundations are shaky at best. We are seeing the results. I actually think that in the long run blockchains like ALGO, AVAX might give better competition to Cardano than ETH.

The staking experience for the end user is completely different as well. Staking on Cardano is a well thought out and planned activity, rather than an after thought of patched together services. So for example, running a stake pool/validator on Cardano is more straight forward. As so is actually staking. There is no central authority that has to approve you to be a validator or to approve your stake to be staked/unstaked. There is no lockup period for staking/unstaking. Your ADA is liquid while staking without you having to take on any third party (smart contract) risk.


text:
How can a developer access the Cardano network?
As a developer building an application, what are different way to access the Cardano network?

There are also ways to use services where you can make API requests to interact with the Cardano blockchain. (without the need to run your own cardano-node)
You could for example sign in on Blockfrost with your GitHub account. No registration required. Enter a project name and select Cardano mainnet or Cardano testnet, depending on your needs.
After generating your API KEY you can send your first request to get data for example about the latest epoch:
curl -H 'project_id: 1234567890' https://cardano-mainnet.blockfrost.io/api/v0/epochs/latest
And you will get a response in JSON format similar to this:
{ "epoch": 225,   "start_time": 1603403091, "end_time": 1603835086, "first_block_time": 1603403092, "last_block_time": 1603835084, "block_count": 21298, "tx_count": 17856, "output": "7849943934049314", "fees": "4203312194", "active_stake": "784953934049314" }
Visit docs.blockfrost.io to see the complete API documentation.

If you use Nix or NixOs, it is rather straightforward: Build the code for a cardano node using nix (link to current documentation)
Duplicating the official documentation:
git clone https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node
cd cardano-node
nix-build -A scripts.mainnet.node -o mainnet-node-local
./mainnet-node-local

This will run a cardano node on the mainnet.
Then you can also build and use the CLI tool to interact with the cardano network.

In the provided solution above, if you don't want to compile GHC which can take a long time, IOHK provides many binaries that are pre-compiled for you: lots of time gained ! So don't hesitate to use their nix binary cache
In NixOS, I currently set it this way:
# configuration.nix
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
  # ... all the rest of the configuration of the server

  # iohk binary caches
  nix =
  {
    binaryCaches          = [ "https://hydra.iohk.io" "https://iohk.cachix.org" ];
    binaryCachePublicKeys = [ "hydra.iohk.io:f/Ea+s+dFdN+3Y/G+FDgSq+a5NEWhJGzdjvKNGv0/EQ=" "iohk.cachix.org-1:DpRUyj7h7V830dp/i6Nti+NEO2/nhblbov/8MW7Rqoo=" ];
  };
}

Running this command "./mainnet-node-local" will download the whole blockchain or not?

@vs4vijay when running this command, it creates a folder state-node-mainnet/db-mainnet which size increases overtime. I'm fairly confindent it is the state of the blockchain

This will get even nicer soon. It should become as simple as nix run github:input-output-hk/cardano-node/1.28.0#something. without even having to clone the repo locally. something isn't quite defined yet, but will be similar to the path building the script above.

Generally, there are several options you could pursue.

Start a stake pool on test-net and then launch one on main-net.
How to build a Cardano Stake Pool.
Get involved with project catalyst. Offer feedback and input to projects that interest you. Try to get involved with a team that has promising ideas. Offer your services where you can fit in.
Project Catalyst Ideascale.
Try building smart contracts using Marlowe. Marlowe Playground.
Mint your own native token on Cardano. FAQ : Native Tokens (Cardano’s Multi-Asset Support Feature)
Follow along with the videos for the Plutus Pioneers Program and learn to write smart contracts in Cardano's on chain programming language. Plutus Pioneers Program on YouTube
Figure out how to mint some NFTs...
Integration with Atala Prism for identity and certification. Atala PRISM

I'm sure there are lots of other possibilities that I haven't heard of or considered. There is no shortage of room to explore for a developer.


text:
Can Cardano be used to mint and trade gaming NFTs?
Being a total noob when it comes to using blockchain for development, I would like to know if Cardano can be used, at the time being, to mint and trade NFTs for gaming purposes and if this could be fairly easy to achieved on an engine like unity or unreal.
Or should I stick to something that is more directed towards that purpose, like Enjin?

Cardano adrestia links to several different options for interacting with Cardano from 3rd party applications & languages. cardano-wallet provides a REST API to manage a wallet, and can send/manage tokens, but does not appear to have minting functionality just yet.
AFAIK, the only way to mint tokens at the moment (if you don't want to use Haskell SDK) is by using cardano-cli as documented here. Creating tokens dynamically would then require writing a layer on top of the CLI, since several intermediate steps are involved in transaction building.
For the client-side of your game, you may want to consider 3rd party APIs like blockfrost.io for fetching user's NFT data, or provide it from your own server along with regular game data.

Not currently.
NFTs are essentially smart contracts implementing auctions for assets embedded in the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS). So, you need a blockchain that supports smart contracts.
Ethereum supports these via the Solidity VM and language, but Cardano's smart contract VM and language (Plutus) is forthcoming in the Goguen release of the Cardano blockchain.
You can start getting familiar with the Plutus language and the smart contract platform via the Cardano Plutus Pioneer Program lectures (being released actively over the next few weeks). The first one is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEn6jUo-0vU .
Apparently NFTs are implemented as native tokens on the Cardano blockchain (which don't require writing a smart contract). So, yes. You can make an NFT (platform) on top of the Cardano blockchain.

I am aware of Native Tokens and that NTFs can be minted that way, but I am not familiar with Haskell and this doesn't answer "if this could be fairly easy to achieved on an engine like unity or unreal."


text:
What are the practical motivations for owning ADA crypto currency?
As a person who are deciding to buy some ADA currency, what I am getting in return?
So far using ADA I can have:

Voting rights (governance)
Ability to run a pool
Grow your voting power through delegation rewards

Cardano has established community, company and the leader behind it.
It was not designed to be used as a stable coin so the value is volatile by definition.
Holding ADA is different from owning shares of a public company.
So what are the value behind ADA except the reasons listed above and price speculation on exchanges?

Is there such an existing "calculus" for gold, or wheat, or oil ? And for traditional fiat currencies ?

Yes, there is an intrinsic value you can calculate to estimate price of those goods. You have to estimate amount of work you need to perform to mine gold, harvest wheat or oil. Then you divide the harvested amount by resources you've spend - there you go, some basic value of goods without any interest / taxes / market interest etc on top of it.

ok, that makes sense for goods, although markets can even make oil having a negative value if there are too much stock that cannot be stored due to a pandemic. And for fiat currencies ? I guess you would use something like GDP ?

IMO, fiat currency have 0 intrinsic value but its extrinsic value purely socially justified. People have some consensus agreement, based on what they can afford and willing to pay. ADA on other hand, limited in supply, require infrastructure / electricity to survive. But there nothing much you can buy spend it to (yet).

This is very subjective and can only be answered from an opinionated position. With that, it has value, IMO because it has

been developed by a very methodical, mathematical, and scientific method
derivative tokens which are "native", compared to Ethereum, where tokens are implemented via smart contracts – this has one major implication (among other benefits): transaction fees are a small fraction; no "gas" fees are required to execute a contract
a dedicated and sophisticated, and ever expanding, ecosystem of people and companies working to solve real problems, create valuable businesses, etc.
outreach programs targeting new developers, governments, and education
a treasury system where regular rounds of Catalyst fund winning Cardano-based projects via grants
smart contracts that can be mathematically verified, enabling greater trust in the proper handling of funds

I don't think this answers the question. It is not necessarily accurate and there are non-subjective answers. Market dynamics and the game theory behind the ADA token is different to irrational crypto markets.

The value of an ADA is based on the market worth of the Cardano platform. The market worth of the platform grows as more blockchain-based services are added to it and are reliant upon the performance & features of the Cardano blockchain.
The growth and popularity of the applications of these services - eg. identity services, education checks, NFT services - will ultimately be what decides how valuable the Cardano platform is. This is why native multi assets is a big deal as it allows quick development & scaling of blockchain services upon the existing decentralised Cardano network.
Because the PoS nodes are paid for their efforts in ADA (even when processing assets that aren't ADA tokens), the value of ADA increases as more tokens, applications and services are dependant on the functionality provided by Cardano and the stakepools.
So to answer the question 'what do I get from buying ADA', the answer is an asset that will hopefully increase in value.

Ada cryptocurrency is used to access the Cardano platform. Cardano platform is used to build smart contracts and decentralized applications. The value of the Ada token is derived from utility.

At the end of the day, it's the market that determines the value of a cryptocurrency.


text:
How are NFTs being minted without smart contract in Cardano?
NFTs are being minted in Cardano even without a smart contract in place. How does it ensure that no more token gets minted with the same ID?

Useful document on the minting can be found here https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/native-tokens/learn-about-native-tokens.html

Please mark one of the answers as accepted or give feedback as to why they are not.  Your fellow SE members have put in time and effort to supply answers to your question.

@GerM link broken: https://docs.cardano.org/native-tokens

On Cardano, an NFT doesn't require a Smart Contact, as it is minted as
a native asset.
To make sure a NFT is a really non-fungible, the minter of the native asset is usually locking its minting policy in time. In other words, you mint just one native asset and lock any further minting/burning in time, so it is impossible to increase its supply starting from a specific slot time.
As an example, have a look at the minting script of nutcoin.

Lecture 5 in the Plutus Pioneer Program talks about different ways NFTs can be implemented.
A naive way to implement NFTs is by looking at the forge field of a transaction and check that the amount is set to 1. That in itself allows for the minting of just one token - per transaction. Now you can combine that with deadlines in the policy script by allowing the minting of the token until the deadline has passed. This is the way NFTs have been implemented since Mary on Cardano. With the policy in place, and the deadline passed, you can then check a blockchain explorer, that there is only one token minted for that policy.
With Plutus things are much more straightforward of course, but in terms of minting NFTs w/o smart contracts (Mary) that's essential how it's done.

Lars explains the naive approach here: https://youtu.be/SsaVjSsPPcg?t=2588


text:
How to restore a wallet with 24 words and passphrase?
The BIP39 standard supports an optional passphrase.
Cold wallets such as Ledger wallet support this feature, so you can have your private key additionally to 24 words secured with passphrase.
At this moment there is no option to restore such wallets neither through Yoroi or Deadalus wallets.
How to software recover such a wallet?

By April 2021, there is no software solution for Cardano wallets that supports such combination.
There is an open source tool (and its extended fork) on the Github to convert such mnemonics.
It supports most of the wallets, unfortunately it does not support Cardano logic yet.
The only way to restore such a wallet is to use any physical cold wallets that fully have implemented BIP39 support.

The wallets support "hidden" wallets on hardware devices with passphrases but you can't restore the wallet directly into Daedalus or Yoroi. Instead, you need to restore the wallet to a new Ledger device and then connect it to the software
wallet.

And once restored, you can happily move your funds elsewhere, if you desire to abandon the Ledger platform.


text:
Multisig wallet for Cardano?
Does Cardano support multisig wallets? If not, are there any ongoing projects to have them implemented, any standards defined or at least drafts proposed?

The node does support multi-signatures (for instance you can do a multi-signature when minting NFTs). However, the wallets do not yet support this. But its coming eventually!

Are there any docs on those multi-signatures?

@MarekMahut-StakeNuts The links seems to be broken (404)

Github Link for the comprehensive guide
You can create your own Multisig Wallet using cardano-cli locally. However, this is for a technical people and with basic knowledge on how Cardano UTXO works and the concept of private/public key to sign transaction etc. The development of creating a user-friendly multi-sig wallet is still ongoing Round Table
There's a guide on how to create Cardano's Multi-sig Wallet + ability to stake the wallet.
Here's the general overview:

Generate public key pair of payment.vkey and stake.vkey (verification key) for your wallet and the participant's wallet
Create the script policy (using Native Script) and provide this information *basically telling who are the people that need to sign / approve transactions for this wallet
Create the address (called Script Address)
Everytime you want to do transaction with this wallet, participants need to sign the .raw transaction file using their private payment.skey or stake.skey file locally.

This is at the core level / behind the scene on how to create and use multi-sig wallet on Cardano.

CIP 1854 (Cardano Improvement Proposals) allows us to use Multi-signatures HD Wallets, but there's no implementation at the moment. However, in Goguen era, which begins on 12th September 2021, Cardano with the help of Alonzo gives developers the tools to create Smart Contracts with Multisig.
Here's a quotation from IOHK post:

Applying a rigorous approach based on formal methods and verification, Alonzo extends the basic multi-signature scripting language (multisig) used in Cardano Shelley. Multisig will be upgraded to the Plutus Core language for more powerful and secure scripting options.

I just launched https://broclan.io
Anyone looking for a multisig wallet on Cardano can give it a try :)

Leo, is broclan still up and running. As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem ready for mainnet yet?

@JacquesBosch its up an on Mainnet. If you need any help please reach out to me on twitter or Discord (links on the broclan website).

Below are 2 more options I have found.
The Summon Platform
https://medium.com/@SummonPlatform/multi-signature-treasuries-ba855e748878

Multi-signature Native scripts are one of the most secure ways of
managing funds on the Cardano blockchain. Current use cases range from
personal backups, trusts, or “fail-safes,” to subDAOs, guilds, working
groups, investment clubs, hedge funds, p2p swaps, and even
multi-player betting or gambling games. And that’s only scratching the
surface. In the future, we expect to see many new and exciting use
cases that benefit from this simple yet secure scripting language.
... The Summon multi-signature treasury system focuses heavily on user
friendliness and easy treasury management. The interface allows you to
assign signers/key holders by simply inputting their Cardano receiving
address or by resolving their $ADAHandle directly in the UI.
Create A Multi-Sig Treasury The Summon multi-signature treasury system
requires no coding experience and is compatible with all popular
Cardano lite wallets. Creating a new treasury is simple: ...

LedgerFlow by Iagon
https://docs.iagon.com/docs/whitepaper/products/ledgerflow/
Here is what they say:

Ledgerflow is an innovative project that operates within the Cardano
blockchain ecosystem. It offers two essential features: Multisender
and Multisignature (Multisig) capabilities. Let's delve into each of
these functionalities:
Multisig is a powerful security feature that enhances the safety of
cryptocurrency wallets and transactions. In a Multisig setup, multiple
parties (often referred to as signatories) collaboratively manage a
wallet. Transactions require approval from a predefined number of
these signatories. For instance, a company treasury might use a
Multisig wallet where three out of five board members must sign off on
any outgoing transaction. This prevents unauthorized access and
provides redundancy.


text:
Why was the platform/foundation named after Gerolamo Cardano?
Cardano was named after the 16th century Italian scientist Gerolamo Cardano; given the people designing the platform it makes sense to name it after a scientist, but is there any reason to specifically choose Cardano? I only know him for publishing general solutions for cubic and quartic equations. I did a quick search on the foundation's website and forum but found nothing about this.

I think the answer you are looking for can be found at the 3:10 mark (bold part in the transcript below) on this video, but for the consistency of ideas please watch from the 1:43.
The transcript of this portion of the video is:

Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) was an Italian mathematician, physicist, biologist, physician, chemist, astrologist, philosopher, writer, and gambler.
During his lifetime he wrote over 200 scientific works and was one of the key figures in the mathematical field of probability during the Renaissance.
Gerolamo Cardano, is well known for his achievements in algebra.
He was a teacher in Milan Italy in the 16th century.
In his 1545 book Ars Magna, he made the first systematic use of negative numbers in Europe, published with attribution the solutions of other mathematicians for the cubic and quartic equations.
He also acknowledged the existence of imaginary numbers now used in geometry.
His book about games of chance, Liber de ludo aleae written around 1564, but not published until 1663, contains the first systematic treatment of probability.
He used the game of throwing dice to understand the basic concepts of probability.
He demonstrated the efficacy of defining odds as the ratio of favorable to unfavorable outcomes.
For a cryptocurrency project that is looking to utilize scientific methods based on mathematical proofs and game theory to build highly flexible and interoperable money, I think this choice seems to match perfectly.

"I only know him for publishing general solutions for cubic and quartic equations."

In 1550 he also introduced a cryptographic writing tool called the Cardan grille which uses a grid.
The answer by Dacomis points to a video by a Youtuber named "Crypto Jerome" where Jerome says that "Cardano the project is all about innovation" and "Cardano the man was all about challenging the status quo", which is what he says immediate after the transcript given by Dacomis. While this could be what Charles Hoskinson had in mind when he chose to name the platform after Cardano, there's also other people throughout history that used the scientific method and mathematical proofs, so it could just be that Hoskinson was a fan of Cardano (like I am).
Another relevant article on this topic is "Cardano – Inspired by Legends of Science & Math" which talks about how the platform was inspired by legends Gerolamo Cardano and Ada Lovelace, but again the article's content is not coming directly from Charles Hoskinson.

To really find out the answer to this question, you'd have to ask Charles Hoskinson (or find a source that got the answer from him, such as an interview).


text:
What do I need to run a stake pool?
I would like to run a stake pool, but don't know if I am capable to do this. What do I need for that?

Running a stake pool requires two main components, technical ability and marketing savvy. I'll outline some of this at a high level for you below.
Technical

Linux server administration. You must be able to setup and administer a server that will run your pool and relay nodes. You will need to be comfortable running applications in the terminal.
Bash scripting (for setting up your pool, running the nodes, etc.)

Marketing

A pool cannot make blocks without attracting delegation. It takes around 1.2M ADA staked in the pool to average one slot per epoch (whether or not you actually forge the block at the assigned slot depends on the technical abilities).
Pools need effective marketing to attract enough delegators unless you own enough ADA yourself.
This is actually the hardest part about running a pool.

One last thing is pledge, currently the pledge only has a small effect on the rewards a pool earns. However, this is set to increase in the future. The exact amount of pledge needed is unknown but will be more than a few thousand ADA. Looking at most of the pools that are out there I would assume anything less than 50-100k ADA will not be sufficient.
There is a plethora of resources for how to setup a node, but hopefully this helps to answer the question of whether or not this is something you want to pursue. Good luck!

I like that you answered the politics side as much as the technical one. As a DevOps Engineer, I was thrilled with the idea of setting my own pool and helping the protocol along the way, until I discovered it's not really "random guy with good technical skills"-friendly.

Lots of time

"It take around 1.2M ADA to average one block per epoch." Can you unpack that for me? I understand you to mean that the return on investment is 1ADA per 1.2M per epoch.

Stake pools have to make blocks in order to earn any rewards. The number of blocks a pool is chosen for is dependent on the amount of ADA staked to it. The size where a pool will average one block each epoch is around 1.2 M.

This is the guide that I used and also included the prerequisites from their site below:
https://www.coincashew.com/coins/overview-ada/guide-how-to-build-a-haskell-stakepool-node

Prerequisites
Mandatory skills for stake pool operators
As a stake pool operator for Cardano, you will be competent with the following abilities:

operational knowledge of how to set up, run and maintain a Cardano node continuously
a commitment to maintain your node 24/7/365
system operation skills
server administration skills (operational and maintenance).

Mandatory experience for stake pool operators

experience of development and operations (DevOps)
experience on how to harden and secure a server.
passed the official Stake Pool School course.

It's is the most comprehensive guide out there, IMO.  I used it for setting up my own stake pool.

something which is not mentioned....
please remember,

you need 1 Block Producer (BP)
and Relay(s)
1 Relays is enough, but for your Redundancy it is better and recommended to run 2 Relays minimum.

for the Redundancy and High Availability of your BP, it is recommended to run another Node. but we are not allowed to run 2 BP. if you produce a block from 2 BPs, your pool will be penalised.
which means, manually or automatically, you have to prepare a second Node as BP, to run this node as Relay and only if the main BP is down to run this second node as BP, so that you dont loose an assigned Block.
for any further question, dont hesitate to ask.


text:
How can I stop Daedalus filling up my Time Machine backup drive on MacOS?
Every time I open Daedalus, a multiple gigabyte backup is triggered to Time Machine at the next backup time.  This is likely to fill up a Time Machine backup drive fairly quickly.
Thus I'm wondering what is a good choice of directories to exclude (from within the Daedalus state dir, found at ~/Library/Application Support/Daedalus Mainnet), to exclude transient files from backup, which don't need to be backed up. (Excluding directories from backup is done via System Preferences/Time Machine/Options, for those who don't know.)
It would seem unnecessary to backup the blockchain itself(!) (I think we can rely on that being done elsewhere... :), but, it may not be ideal to exclude the entire data dir, because, some people may be using software wallets, in which case including those in a default backup, should a full system restore ever be needed, might be sensible.
For clarification, this question isn't about recovery seed backups, which are essential and should already be being done in all cases. The question here is about how to achieve an effective time machine backup ("time machine" is apple's rsync style backup, for those from the linux world, not familiar with mac).

You're right. You can exclude just the big chain subdirectory.
For mac users unfamiliar with the procedure: open System Preferences, click Spotlight, Privacy tab, +, browse to and select the  ~/Library/Application Support/Daedalus Mainnet/chain directory, click Choose.
This will exclude just the downloaded blockchain data from Spotlight search and Time Machine backups. (If you run other versions of Daedalus, like Daedalus Flight, exclude their chain directory too.) This will improve your system's performance and reduce space usage on your backup drive. If you have to restore from such a backup, Daedalus will re-download that chain data, which takes a loong time, but is automatic.
Related: it might be a good idea to make sure all your Time Machine backups are encrypted (requiring a password to restore from), to reduce the risk of an unauthorized person restoring your wallets.
If you can't do that, then excluding all of the Daedalus directory from backups, and relying only on your wallet recovery phrases to restore wallets, might indeed be best. In this case Daedalus settings, wallet names, spending passwords would not be backed up, but you can recreate those manually. (Unless you have a lot of wallet names, in which case it might be worth writing those down somewhere. You might be tempted to write down their balances as well; think twice, that information is more sensitive.)

The only thing required to restore wallets is the recovery phrase.
Therefore it is safe and efficient to exclude all Daedalus directories from time-machine if you have your recovery phrase stored safely elsewhere.
It also means that you can be less concerned with any changes to the disk structure and usage that may cause your time-machine backups to experience similar problems in future.

The OP asks about time machine backups, not recovery seed backups (which it is assumed are already being done). The question is how to achieve an effective time machine backup. Or perhaps the argument here is that it is safest not to create a backup of wallets at all? (= of daedalus at all). And safest to rely only on the seed? If so, more articulation of this position would help.


text:
How can a node verify a transaction with a script address without the script?
How can a node verify a transaction with a script address without the script?
I mean when i start a node months after the transaction has been minted into a block. How can my node verify that the script conditions were met since only the hash is persisted in the chain?

By inspecting the current ledger CDDL specifications, you can see that each block contains a transaction_witness_sets field, where each transaction_witness_set is defined as:
transaction_witness_set =
  { ? 0: [* vkeywitness ]
  , ? 1: [* native_script ]
  , ? 2: [* bootstrap_witness ]
  }

Here, native_script, if present, contains some rules that need to be respected in order for the transaction to be valid (for instance, some minting policy):
native_script =
  [ script_pubkey
  // script_all
  // script_any
  // script_n_of_k
  // invalid_before
     ; Timelock validity intervals are half-open intervals [a, b).
     ; This field specifies the left (included) endpoint a.
  // invalid_hereafter
     ; Timelock validity intervals are half-open intervals [a, b).
     ; This field specifies the right (excluded) endpoint b.
  ]

So not only the script hash is included in the chain, but also the actual rules it contains.

A node initially executes a valid Plutus transaction and records it to the chain, it also adds an "isValid" tag to that transaction record.
When a new node starts syncing up and arrives at a Plutus transaction, it only looks out for the "isValid" tag and then adds that transaction to its chain if it does have the tag, this way new nodes don't have to re-execute the script but still have proof they belong on the chain.

hm sounds bad, when a validator can just set isValid=true and everybody beleves it

Cardano transactions are deterministic and compliant with the Ledger rules, a block producer cannot just slap an "isValid" tag on a transaction anyhow, it has to be validated by them and according to rules so if a block producer acts adversarially then other validators who do decide to do the heavy-lifting will notice and consensus rules take charge. Also an isValid tag doesn't mean a client will just speed run by default, they can still revalidate the Tx if they choose. Vas points to the data they need in their response.

"Can" revalidate sounds vague, i think the other answer is more appropriate and the script is always attached to the transaction and all nodes re-evaluate that the condition were valid.


text:
How many receive addresses per wallet?
We are curious how many receive addresses can possibly be generated for a given wallet?

According to BIP44, which Cardano wallets are using, the index number of addresses is capped at 32 bits.
So you will be able to generate 4 294 967 296 addresses for one single HD wallet. The first half is reserved for non-hardened derivation and the other half is reserved for hardened derivation.

While there's definitely some limit determined by the encryption scheme used to generate the public keys associated with the master private key, their is no practical limit that I'm aware of.
Apparently the most recent wallet addresses (Shelley era) are in BECH32 format, which support 2^160 number of addresses. So, practically unlimited.

The user is asking about addresses for one single wallet.


text:
Why am I prompted to recover Yoroi Wallet every time on startup?
Every time I start the app, despite it logging in, I can not see my wallet.
I can see the two options to add a wallet. After that, I can choose between creating, restoring, and connecting to a ledger.
How can I recover the wallet upon startup?

Just to double check: have you created a wallet first?

Not sure which platform (iOS/Android) you're using or which version of Yoroi wallet. And, I'm a bit confused about the two options. In my Yoroi application (Android, Yoroi v4.0.2, Commit ea5c1120) I see the option to access my wallets (saved) or, at the bottom,

ADD WALLET (SHELLY-ERA)
ADD WALLET (BYRON-ERA DEPRECATED)

So, if you don't see your wallet(s) listed under (My wallets) then you'll need to either:

A. CREATE WALLET (which will create a new wallet that will be saved in the application in the future)

B. RESTORE WALLET (which requires you to have already created a wallet and have your 12/24 word recovery phrase, your private key)

C. CONNECT TO LEDGER NANO (which requires you to have a Ledger Nano hardware wallet)

You'll need to decide which path makes the most sense for you, but my guess is you'll want to do 1. -> A.

As you said I will try option A as it is the simplest option here as I am beginner .. but really thanks for great answer ...

There is currently a bug in version v4.0.2 affecting a few users in the way you describe. As a workaround, you can try to restore your wallet again and then delete it. The first wallet should now appear in the initial wallet list screen.
See https://twitter.com/lordb_rocks/status/1384565929665720323


text:
Why is the growth in value of ADA being described as "parabolic" rather than "exponential" or something else?
Here I list multiple articles since March 2021 that have described ADA's value as undergoing a "parabolic" trajectory:

26 March 2021: Cardano Technical Analysis: ADA Has Flipped The Parabolic SAR From Bullish To Bearish
17 March 2021: Cardano Is a Rising Altcoin Star, but the Payoff May Be Years Away
2 April 2021: An Emerging Trend Could Mean Wild Prices Ahead for Cardano

In the field of stocks and securities, the term "parabolic SAR" was coined in 1978 by J. Welles Wilder Jr. (who unfortunately died 9 days ago by the way).
In the cryptocurrency community, why is ADA's growth seemingly always being described as "parabolic" rather than "exponential" or following some other type of growth curve?

Searching Google for "cardano ada exponential" gives ~305k results.
Searching Google for "cardano ada parabolic" gives ~309k results.
Likely is just some resistance in the community to the mass-media habit of applying the adjective "exponential" for any sort of super-linear growth.  I don't know that parabolic is a better adjective, but it seems to be adapted by the community.

Thanks! The fact that "parabolic" is used more than "exponential" despite those search results showing "exponential" way more if you remove the "cardano ada" part, is what alarms me. These functions are very different, so I wondered if there was some actual basis  for the choice of term, such as J. Welles Wilder Jr's definition based on "Parabolic SAR".


text:
Are native tokens divisible?
If I mint a NEAT token, can I send .5 NEAT to someone or do I have to send a whole 1 NEAT?

Under the hood at the ledger levels there's no concept of floats for native tokens. To have a partial token (like having a partial ada), there needs to be some metadata option that says 1000 X token is really 1 X. But this is just a end user client abstraction layer. If you mint 1 of a token, that isn't divisible.

There is no support for decimal places of native tokens on Cardano.

The data type is an Integer as defined in Haskell, and has an unbounded theoretical limit.

Although, I tried finding an explicit reference in the source my Haskell knowledge is awful and I couldn't find the data type associated with the --mint parameter for the CLI.
My 99.999% gut instinct tells me that it's based on a Number type, which can be an arbitrary floating point value. In which case, yes, you could subdivide.
I see no reason they would limit the token API to only support integer values (even though integers are generally safer for financial transactions since operations don't produce rounding errors).

The reason why there is no support for decimal places on Cardano right now, is because they are not on-chain and therefore could not be verified by hardware wallets. This might change in the future with Plutus smart contacts.


text:
Are there any negative effects of having too many stake pools run by central exchanges?
I was browsing through the adapools.org groups section to see how decentralized the stake pools were and I noticed that a lot of the central exchanges have a ton of ADA staked and lot of stake pools.

Are there any concerns to the network if central exchanges like Binance, etoro, etc gain more stake/create more stake pools that would affect the overall security of the network? Anything from a governance perspective where they would have more voting power for changes to the network in the future?

TL;DR: Centralization in the network is definitely a concern, but I don't think these numbers are scary.
Of course, the goal with staking pools is that they'll decentralize the network and encourage many stake pool adopters. Actually, Cardano has a formula used to determine block rewards and you'll notice that it reduces rewarding blocks to stake pool operators (SPOs) drastically after a critical value, determined by the number of ADA that will saturate a pool (currently that's ~63.6M ADA). So, there's not a lot of benefit for wallets/users to delegate their stake to a node which is over-saturated since the block rewards will have to be divided among a greater number of people.
However, the stake pool operators have almost no control in the governance/control of the protocol and are only responsible for providing trust/decentralization to the network.
Theoretically, if any single miner controls >51% stake then the security of the blockchain is lost. Practically, though, analysis has determined that with >50% probability a one-block attack can succeed with only 35% control of the network (see page 11). So, centralization is definitely a concern.
Now, if you treat all organizations as "independent stake pool operators" and don't denominate based on corporate structure/private ownership then you'll notice that the largest stake is Binance with 12.36%. I've read the details regarding the provenance regarding that chart, I'm not sure how accurate it is. To be sure, there's some uncertainty in these numbers.
However, my guess is that you'll see this distribution swing over 12-month periods as people seek higher returns from smaller SPOs and move funds to/from different exchanges who compete on rates.

"So, there's not a lot of benefit for wallets/users to delegate their stake to a node which is over-saturated since the block rewards will have to be divided among a greater number of people.", which is why Binance run multiple (64+) pools, each at the "optimal" (100%) saturation, so they aren't "penalized" by that network formula.

Yeah, and if these nodes all work in concern to achieve some end for Binance then it poses a threat to decentralization given sufficient stake across all pools. One solution is for delegators to select pools from a variety of different SPOs to ensure decentralization. This isn't too hard, since most SPOs have pretty strong branding/online presence.


text:
How to make your own coin on the ADA Cardano Network?
Is there any way to start your own coin in ADA Cardano Network?
I just googled the idea but no suggestions about Cardano. Any advice?

You'll need to use the Cardano CLI. It's technical and a programming background is helpful but not required. Here is a walk through video.

In addition to @xanadont's answer, you can also use cardmintano if you prefer a graphical user experience. It's being actively updated (most recent commit was ~2 weeks ago).

The Daedalus team is working to have this ability using the Daedalus Wallet GUI.

We also have some step-by-step instructions here: https://input-output-hk.github.io/offchain-metadata-tools/
Feel free to raise issues here: https://github.com/input-output-hk/offchain-metadata-tools/issues

Nowadays there are websites that provide an easy way to create Cardano Native Assets in just a few clicks.
Examples

https://cardano-native-token.com/
https://minterr.io/mint-cardano-tokens/


text:
How does one create receive addresses for a wallet programatically?
We wish to generate large numbers of receive addresses for a single wallet. These addresses will let us identify who is sending us Cardano, or other native assets. Can someone explain how one goes about generating such addresses?

Have a look at this : https://github.com/uniVocity/cardano-tutorials/blob/master/cardano-addresses.md

Multi address wallets are usually called Hierarchically Deterministic (HD) wallets and are defined by the BIP44 standard.
In Cardano, we do extend BIP44 in CIP1852 by adding staking key capabilities, but this is not your use case.
To derive wallet addresses for a single wallet, it is easiest to use an existing library that can do this for you, as for example the cardano-seralization-lib by Emurgo.
Have a look at their documentation, but this easy snippet you will show you how to derivate the 10th address of your wallet:
function harden(num: number): number {
  return 0x80000000 + num;
}

const rootKey = CardanoWasm.BIP32PrivateKey.from_bech32("xprv17qx9vxm6060qjn5fgazfue9nwyf448w7upk60c3epln82vumg9r9kxzsud9uv5rfscxp382j2aku254zj3qfx9fx39t6hjwtmwq85uunsd8x0st3j66lzf5yn30hwq5n75zeuplepx8vxc502txx09ygjgx06n0p");
const accountKey = rootKey
  .derive(harden(1852)) // purpose
  .derive(harden(1815)) // coin type
  .derive(harden(0)); // account #0

const utxoPubKey = accountKey
  .derive(0) // external
  .derive(9) // <- here is the index of your address, cycle thought this number to generate more of it
  .to_public();


text:
Can I restore my Yoroi account with only 12 words?
Yoroi wants 15 words from me, but I only wrote down 12. I know it was a Shelley wallet, and can see all details about my Cardano.
Can I restore my account without seed phrase?

Yoroi uses 15 words for its seed phrase. You did probably used Daedalus to generate it. I recommend you to try to use Daedalus to restore it.

This table represents which length of seed phrases was used in wallets during the Byron-era (legacy) and which one in the today's Shelley-era wallets. By the way the cardano-wallet is a command-line tool allowing you to use a first-factor seed phrase 15-24 word, and an optional second-factor seed phrase 9-12 word.

Wallet
Byron-era
Shelley-era

Daedalus
12-word
24-word

Yoroi
15-word
15-word

cardano-wallet
15-word, 18-word, 21-word, 24-word
15-word, 18-word, 21-word, 24-word


text:
Where can I get the BIP39 file?
I would like to leave a copy of the BIP39 words with a person of my trust.
Where is the safest place I can download the BIP39 file?

The list of the word lists is included in BIP39, this is used directly in Yoroi as part of the BIP39 JavaScript module.
It appears, Daedalus is using its own wordlist.

The Daedalus wordlist is defined in a different place, but that seems unrelated to the wordlist itself. They're both 2048 words and, on inspection, look identical.

Having digital copies of your mnemonic set is always discouraged due to security issues.
However, if you really want to give a digital copy of your recovery phrase to a person I'd personally suggest to take a picture of the recovery phrase, encrypt the picture, compress the encrypted picture and finally encrypt the compressed file again.
Please take this suggestion with caution since I'm not a security expert.

Found it! It's in IOG's cardano-crypto repository. Have a look:
https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-crypto/blob/develop/src/Crypto/Encoding/BIP39/English.hs

You can download this website to a folder https://iancoleman.io/bip39/
and generate a BIP39 code on a clean computer not connected to the internet.
With that site, you can generate as much as you want.
or just buy a nano ledger x. Far easier.

Here's BIP39 english wordlist and a detailed instruction how to generate a seed phrase from it.
You can store BIP39-wordlist anywhere you like. But the seed phrase generated with these 2048 words should be kept away from strangers.


text:
Is it possible to reuse the blockchain for both relay and block producing nodes?
While setting up Cardano Stake Pool, we need to have at least 2 nodes: one for Relay, another for Block Producing (BP).
This Relay node downloads the whole blockchain, and the BP Node will connect only to Relay node and it will sync the blockchain from the Relay node.
My question is, since both of these nodes are in same network, I feel like it's duplicate information downloaded twice. Is there any way by which we can share the same blockchain database for both of these nodes?

You can't share the underlying data folder so will need a copy for each node. However, you can pre-seed them by syncing one, then duplicating its db folder into the others, so that when they start up they do not need to re-sync and validate the entire chain.
If you can get a copy of the db folder form a trusted source, you could potentially speed up the very first sync too (since downloading a compressed version of that will be much faster than syncing and validating the whole chain).

This answer is correct.
Furthermore, first sync the node to the network, then stop the node and copy the db to the BP, before starting the BP.
As in your (and most cases), the BP is on the same network as one node, and the BP only ever gets data from it's own nodes, the transfer of data from the node to the BP during normal operation is local, and therefore quick, and possibly free, depending on where it's hosted.

This is not possible, as both nodes are two different blockchain nodes and might have different views of the network in forks as in transactions in the mempool.

This does not answer the question asked.

Can you please elaborate? The answer is that it is not possible and then I expand on why it is not possible.

You have answered as if the question was asked about two nodes. The question relates to a node and a BP. The BP only ever sees it's own nodes, so saying that they have may have different views of the blockchain is incorrect, as the BP will have the view provided by the node.

I disagree, it is not incorrect. It is possible and actually happens quite often, that the block producer is on a different fork than a specific relay, because in fact, they are two different blockchain nodes. In a multi relay setup, you often have differently forked chains coming from one relay (and not others) to the block producer and it takes time until these are resolved. Please note, by "view" I do not mean what the node sees as in network topology, but what the node sees as the blockchain (series of blocks and transactions inside these blocks)

You have misunderstood the question. The question relates to a node and it's BP.

Can you please elaborate on your comment to point out the misunderstanding? The question is about a staking pool (block producer) and its relay. Both which are block chain nodes.

You stated "... as both nodes are two different blockchain nodes and might have different views of the network ...".
This is incorrect. Why? The BP is only ever connected to it's relays and nothing else, ever. When you have one relay, the BP view of the network is the view of it's relay.

When a new block reaches a relay and within a very short period of time another for the same slot, the relay might be on a fork for a short time that is never seen by the BP ever. This happens often.

It's impossible to share the same state directory. But if your concern is primarily disk space, you can use filesystem deduplication. For example I have a dedicated zfs volume with dedup setup I use to limit disk usage for multiple nodes ran on same machine for test networks. I wouldn't recommend doing this on mainnet though as running a bunch of nodes on the same host defeats the purpose.

Thanks for the info.


text:
Stake pool - Failed to start all required subscriptions
Description
I recently went through a router failure and an upgrade. And with that local and external IP addresses changes. After an IP address update both relay and producer nodes are fetching updates from the blockchain (as in passive node) but not processing transactions. Or at least this is what Guild Live View is showing. Interestingly the producer node just minted a block that I take that will be lost on network write sync up.
Setup

Relay node: 192.168.0.12
Producer node: 192.168.0.10
IP: 82.44.254.62
Adapools: see here
Pooltool: see here
Pool.vet: see here

Topology
a) Relay
  1 {
  2   "Producers": [
  3     {
  4       "addr": "192.168.0.10",
  5       "port": 6000,
  6       "valency": 1
  7     },
  8     {
  9       "addr": "relays-new.cardano-mainnet.iohk.io",
 10       "port": 3001,
 11       "valency": 50
 12     }
 13   ]
 14 }

b) Producer
  1 {
  2   "Producers": [
  3     {
  4       "addr": "192.168.0.12",
  5       "port": 6000,
  6       "valency": 1
  7     }
  8   ]
  9 }

Exceptions (might be related as well as might not):
a) Relay
20844 Apr 27 18:52:38 jolanta bash[677]: [jolanta:cardano.node.ChainDB:Notice:108] [2021-04-27 17:52:38.20 UTC] Chain extended, new tip: 1e774042b9adf5e4d4677dac54069ecce09926af382f5979e3db3200bfae31f2 at slot 2      7979667
20845 Apr 27 18:52:51 jolanta bash[677]: [jolanta:cardano.node.DnsSubscription:Error:2319] [2021-04-27 17:52:51.67 UTC] Domain: "relays-new.cardano-mainnet.iohk.io" Application Exception: 204.236.187.238:3001 Mu      xError MuxBearerClosed "<socket: 45> closed when reading data, waiting on next header True"
20846 Apr 27 18:52:51 jolanta bash[677]: [jolanta:cardano.node.ErrorPolicy:Warning:127] [2021-04-27 17:52:51.67 UTC] IP 204.236.187.238:3001 ErrorPolicySuspendPeer (Just (ApplicationExceptionTrace (MuxError MuxB      earerClosed "<socket: 45> closed when reading data, waiting on next header True"))) 20s 20s
20847 Apr 27 18:52:52 jolanta bash[677]: [jolanta:cardano.node.DnsSubscription:Notice:4453] [2021-04-27 17:52:52.72 UTC] Domain: "relays-new.cardano-mainnet.iohk.io" Connection Attempt Start, destination 3.9.116      .228:3001

Netstat
a) Relay
maciej@jolanta:~/cardano-node$ netstat -pant | grep 6000
(Not all processes could be identified, non-owned process info
 will not be shown, you would have to be root to see it all.)
tcp        0      0 192.168.0.12:6000       0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      677/cardano-node
tcp        0      0 192.168.0.12:6000       192.168.0.10:45311      ESTABLISHED 677/cardano-node
tcp        0      0 192.168.0.12:37851      192.168.0.10:6000       ESTABLISHED 677/cardano-node

b) Producer
maciej@wladyslawa:~/cardano-node$ netstat -pant | grep 6000
(Not all processes could be identified, non-owned process info
 will not be shown, you would have to be root to see it all.)
tcp        0      0 192.168.0.10:6000       0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      718/cardano-node
tcp        0      0 192.168.0.10:6000       192.168.0.12:37851      ESTABLISHED 718/cardano-node
tcp        0      0 192.168.0.10:45311      192.168.0.12:6000       ESTABLISHED 718/cardano-node

UPDATE:
Logs
Relay:
Download
Producer:
Download

See this https://www.coincashew.com/coins/overview-ada/guide-how-to-build-a-haskell-stakepool-node

Thanks. Did the whole IP address change according to this very guide. Paragraph 18.4
https://www.coincashew.com/coins/overview-ada/guide-how-to-build-a-haskell-stakepool-node#18-4-changing-the-pledge-fee-margin-etc

Sorry not sure :)

Have you verified that both machines are running with the correct IP and has firewalls allowing for the new IPs? The relay might be pushing blocks to the BP, but the BP may not be able to push its blocks back to the relay.

Thanks. Yes, I nmapped from the same subnet and can see that both relay and producer ports are reachable. Also, have updated the question with the logs

did you disable "TraceMempool" in main config file ?
can you send screen for your relay ?

Try dropping your valency down to the recommended 2 for your IOHK connection. You might be chocking it with too many connections.

Hey very off topic but what is that terminal chart you have to see the status of the cardano-node?

"Failed to start all required subscriptions"

As recommended by @KC Gibson, reduce the valency for the IOHK node to two, and restart the node. The remote host is closing your connections, probably due to some connection limiting policy on their end.

I recently went through a router failure and an upgrade. And with that local and external IP addresses changes. After an IP address update both relay and producer nodes are fetching updates from the blockchain (as in passive node) but not processing transactions. Or at least this is what Guild Live View is showing.

If your issue is that gLiveView is not 'processing transactions', then you must first set TraceMempool to true in your mainnet-config.json to enable this feature.

Interestingly the producer node just minted a block that I take that will be lost on network write sync up.

cardano-node uses a 'pull' system for sharing blockchain data, so your ability to broadcast blocks depends on other nodes connecting to yours to pull data.
pool.vet suggests that you may not be well connected because you don't use topologyUpdater. Nevertheless, it reports that you should have one inbound connection from an IOHK node, and this is enough for you to publish blocks. Your netstat example doesn't show this, but if you run netstat -pant | grep cardano-node on your relay, you will see an incoming connection from IOHK.