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FAQ.md

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Ergo?

Ergo is a Resilient Platform for Contractual Money. It is designed to be a platform for applications with the main focus to provide an efficient, secure and easy way to implement financial contracts.

To achieve this goal, Ergo includes various technical and economic improvements to existing blockchain solutions. Every coin in Ergo is protected by a program in ErgoScript, which is a powerful and protocol friendly scripting language based on Σ-protocols. It specifies conditions under which a coin can be used: who can spend them, when, under what external conditions, to whom, and so on.

Extended support of light nodes makes Ergo friendly for end users and allows it to run contracts on common devices such as mobile phones trustlessly. To be useful in the long-term, Ergo is strictly following a long‐term survivability approach — it uses widely-researched solutions that are not going to result in security issues in the future, while also preventing performance degradation over time with a new economic model.

Finally, Ergo is a self‐amendable protocol, that allows it to absorb new ideas and improve itself in the future. The focuses on long‐term survivability and self‐amendability are what give Ergo its resiliency.

What does Contractual Money Mean?

In our opinion, the overwhelming majority of successful public blockchain use‐cases are related to financial applications. Ergo is extending Bitcoin’s way of writing contracts by attaching a protecting script (together with additional custom data) to every coin. Thus Ergo applications are defined in terms of guarding scripts built into boxes also containing data involved in execution. We coin the term Contractual Money for Ergs and secondary tokens which usage is bounded by a contract. For example, in addition to regular protection by some m‐of‐n signature, Ergo allows specifying, who are the possible recipients of these coins, which may also be a contract with such complex conditions. This "chaining" approach allows implementing secure and efficient contracts of arbitrary complexity.

What was the ICO price?

Ergo is following the most decentralized way of emission and will start with zero coins in supply with the “minting” of the entire coin supply happening during the first eight years of Ergo mainnet, using the tried and tested PoW mining method. There was no ICO of Ergo. No VC Funding. No Pre mine.

How to mine Ergo?

You need a configured (Ergo node) and GPU with at least 4 Gb of memory (while 8 Gb is recommended for maximum efficiency). Use this guide to configure miner together with the node. Note, that you may employ many GPUs together on one Ergo node.

How to find Ergo mining pools?

See the mining pools listed here. Please select one of the smaller pools.

Does Ergo have a block size limit?

No, Ergo does not have a hard block size limit. Instead, the block size can increase or decrease over time based on demand. It is capped at a certain growth rate to prevent excessive growth in a short period of time.

Why does Ergo have its own smart contract language?

The design space of programming languages is very broad ranging from general-purpose languages like C, Java, Python up to specialized languages like SQL, HTML, CSS, however, none of them was designed for the Contractual Money application.

ErgoScript was designed to achieve several properties. It only contains deterministic operations to maintain consensus in the network. To prevent possible spam attacks ErgoScript supports ahead-of-time cost estimation, excluding a wide range of operations like possibly infinite loops. But even keeping all these limitations in mind, ErgoScript is expressive enough to implement complex smart contracts, including Turing-complete smart contracts but in a secure manner.

What is the Ergo token emission schedule and total monetary base?

The details of the Ergo emission schedule and monetary supply can be found in the blog post here.

Where can I learn more about Ergo?