Welcome to the beginning of your Stellar journey. Stellar, founded in 2014, was created by Ripple co-founder, Jed McCaleb, who left due to philosophical differences with the rest of the board.
Thus, Stellar was originally a Fork of Ripple. Later, Stellar completely changed its protocol (how it works behind the scenes), and the team wrote completely new code.
This is a beginner-friendly syllabus. If you would like to understand how Cryptocurrencies work in general, it would be in your best interest to learn how Blockchains work and what a decentralized network is.
Due to the abundance of Stellar documentation, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Don’t worry! Our information and resources will help you stay safe and secure if you choose to invest or develop with it.
Great job getting this far! Now that you understand the problem Stellar wants to solve, We’re ready to dive into the technology behind Stellar.
That’s right. Before reading anymore of this syllabus, there are two parts of Stellar you must read start-to-end. No, it’s definitely not Reddit or news headlines, it’s the official How the Stellar Network Operates and Stellar Basics Explained.
To value a cryptocurrency, you cannot rely solely on its white paper. Like early startups, based companies face similar challenges as early startups, and you must look at the market, team, technology, working products. With any new space, it’s a risky journey and you can expect to get either 100x your investment back, or lose everything.
Daniel Jeffries, a medium author who writes about crypto, wrote a very compelling essay explaining why it is important to think like a Micro VC when investing in cryptocurrency … you can read it here.
Along with the hundreds of smaller developers working on building applications on top of the Stellar Platform, Stellar has a series of strategic partnerships.
Founded in 1911, IBM is a public-listed American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. Now valued at $151Billion in Market Cap, IBM chose Stellar to be their strategic partner in developing blockchain technology for their internal payment processor and also for their big-bank client. IBM also has been added to the validator list of Stellar Network.
In 2008, a paper was released by an unknown writer, who went by the fake identity, Satoshi Nakamoto. Later, in 2009, a software called Bitcoin was released to the world. It is the first cryptocurrency in history to revolutionize the way our financial system works.
It operates with no central authority or banks, nobody owns or controls Bitcoin. Managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network.
Lumens (XLM) are the digital currency of the Stellar Network.
You’ve probably noticed one of the main purposes of Stellar is to exchange currencies between countries. So why are Lumens necessary? Well, sometimes they are not. For example, you can use the Distributed Exchange, a place where people can submit offers to the network if they want to buy or sell currencies at a specific rate.
Once you buy Lumens, it is recommended you don’t keep them on an exchange, unless you plan to sell within the next week or so.
A wallet is usually a mobile, desktop or web application that allows you to store your lumens securely, and off of an exchange. They are commonly password protected, and can be setup for two-step verification too!
Stellar has a built-in inflation system, where lumens are created and distributed at a rate of 1% each year.
Although transaction fees on the Stellar Network are extremely cheap, thousands of them per second do eventually add up. These Lumens from transaction fees are thrown together into an inflation pool.
One of the best ways to support Stellar is to be active in the community. As Stellar grows, we see hundreds of people flock to it’s subreddit, forums, and social media daily.
Now that you’re more educated about Stellar, it’s up to you to pass on your knowledge to new members joining the community. It’s important that we maintain our maturity and professionalism (and a few memes).
Stellar has been praised for it’s clean and organized documentation. Perhaps that is influenced by Stripe, a company known for easy-to-use APIs, who has team members invested in Stellar.
Perhaps you are a developer but do not necessarily want to get coding immediately. You can check out the Use Cases on their website.
Not every company is perfect, especially startups. Stellar has been blessed to make very few errors, but we would still like to cover the challenges they have had, and will face. We want you to leave you as well-rounded as possible with your new Stellar knowledge.
The founder of Stellar is known for getting a lot of bad press. It almost feels like I’m reading a teenage gossip magazine when reading about his past. Nonetheless, it’s important to read about him from multiple sources, as he is leading the company. We’ll post stories from many different sides in the resources.
Welcome to the Monero syllabus! Monero starts with many of the same principles of Bitcoin and takes privacy and decentralization further. However, unlike many projects, Monero is not based on Bitcoin’s code. It was instead forked from CryptoNote, which was created in early 2014.
Monero is one of the largest open-source projects in the world, with over 12,500 commits by over 300 contributors at the time of writing.
This is a beginner syllabus! No prior background knowledge of Monero is required. If you are new to the cryptocurrency world, it’s recommend you look into a few topics like Blockchain and Cryptography. They are not necessary to know for purchasing Monero, but the more you understand, the better you can invest your time and money into it.
Bitcoin revolutionized the world by introducing a system where the security of one’s funds were secured without having to trust any participant on the network. It uses a shared ledger called a blockchain that simply records a history of transactions that have occurred. With Bitcoin, it shows explicitly that a certain amount of Bitcoin was transferred from one address to another. It is completely transparent.
Monero functions the same way, except the information stored on the blockchain is indiscernible to an outside observer. Monero uses a different mining algorithm to secure the network called CryptoNight. Through this process, Monero provides the same services as Bitcoin, and does not rely on any trusted party.
Fungibility is an important property of money. It simply states that two people should be able to exchange equal value (eg: 1 XMR for 1 XMR) without either party losing out. Suppose that someone offered to trade money obtained from the WannaCry ransomware attack for the same amount of your own. Would you accept it?
Bitcoin and every other non-private cryptocurrency lack this important quality, since people can track what the money was used for in the past. This places the receiver in an unfortunate situation where they need to audit all incoming funds or else risk receiving funds they cannot use. Perhaps even more importantly, they want to avoid having any association with any of the illicit actions of these “tainted coins”.
Monero is a decentralized, open-source project led by the Monero Core Team. It is self-organized into several unofficial, volunteer workgroups. There are no requirements to make one, and few have requirements to join.
Most Monero contributors work pro-bono. However, for those who do need funding for their work, people can use the Forum Funding System (FFS). In a GoFundMe-like fashion, people can pitch ideas, ask for donations, and receive payment when set milestones are reached. At the time of writing, over 38,977 XMR has been crowdfunded since the start of this initiative, totalling $17.7 million in current prices.
Like Bitcoin, Monero relies on two important infrastructure elements: nodes and miners.
Nodes simply store a copy of the blockchain. They communicate with other nodes and wallets to process these transactions. It is important to run your own node if you can, since it offers the best security and privacy.
Let us take a quick dive into the three major technologies that obfuscate information on the blockchain. In the simplest sense, ring signatures, RingCT, and stealth addresses protect the sender, receiver, and amount, respectively.
Think first about giving money to someone in real life. If you owe someone $5, you simply hand them a $5 bill. Pretty simple. With Monero, everything works the same way, except instead of a bill with a set denomination, you give them an output with a loaded amount on it. This output is now theirs to spend in whatever way they want.
Kovri is an open-source side project that attempts to bring more network security and privacy to cryptocurrencies. Though it is being built for Monero, it will feature a common API that can be used by any cryptocurrency or project.
Kovri is an anonymizing router that protects network participants from leaking unwanted information. With Monero, it will mostly be used to break the possible association between transactions and the IP addresses that send them. However, it could be used in extreme cases to hide all Monero traffic, allowing people to run nodes privately.
Many cryptocurrencies have an arbitrary block size limit. Although Monero has a limit, it is adaptive based on the past 100 blocks. Similarly, fees change based on transaction volume.
As more transactions are processed on the Monero network, the block size limit slowly increases and the fees slowly decrease. The opposite effect holds true.
Now that you have a complete understanding of the Monero currency, you may be interested in buying, selling or (hopefully) receiving them!
Currently, there are few options to directly buy Monero with cash. Most exchanges (places where you can buy a variety of coins such as Monero), only let you purchase Monero with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. Kraken supports direct pairs to fiat, but you need to make a wire transfer.
In the age of decentralization, everyone has a part. As Monero grows and receives more press, we’ll see an increase in people flocking to the Monero communities. To keep the project strong, we need to keep the community surrounding it educated.
You can help out by getting involved in the Monero community. Now that you are educated, you can pass on your newly acquired knowledge to new learners.
Monero will stick to its core competency of being safe money for everyone. It will incorporate improvements to improve decentralization, security, privacy, and efficiency.
Currently, Monero transactions are relatively large at about 13kB. Research on bulletproofs, a more efficient range proof for RingCT, is expected to reduce transaction size (and fees) by 80-90%. The code is live on testnet and is undergoing peer review.
Welcome to the Ethereum syllabus! Chances are, you’re now diving a bit deeper into the cryptocurrency world (beyond Bitcoin). Well, there is a ton more to learn, especially when it comes to Ethereum, because it is very powerful and there’s a lot it can do.
By now, most people know Ethereum as the second most valuable cryptocurrency (depending on the time of reading), currently valued at over 70 billion dollars. Well, it turns out that Ethereum isn’t actually a cryptocurrency – it’s a software platform that let’s programmers build applications on top of blockchain technology. Within the Ethereum platform, is a cryptocurrency called Ether that is used to power applications built on the Ethereum blockchain.
Bitcoin uses a global network of computers that maintain a shared ledger called a blockchain that keeps track of who owns bitcoin. Once blockchain technology was introduced to the world, people realized that blockchains could be used to keep track of anything of value. In 2013, a 19 year old named Vitalik Buterin introduced the Ethereum White Paper, which proposed an open source platform that would let programmers build blockchain applications that could facilitate the exchange of money, content, property, shares or anything of value. Much like with Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper, Buterin’s was met with widespread excitement from software developers around the world who began building toward the vision Buterin laid out.
Much like Bitcoin, Ethereum isn’t owned or controlled by any one person. Unlike Bitcoin, whose creator remains anonymous, Ethereum has a leader in Vitalik Buterin. While Buterin doesn’t control Ethereum in the way that a CEO does, his word carries tremendous weight in dictating the direction of the project – something that is considered a strength or a weakness, depending on who you ask.
The basic function that programs built on Ethereum perform are called smart contracts. Smart contracts are digital agreements that execute automatically based on real world data. An easy way to think of them is an “If-then statement.” IF condition A exists, THEN perform function B.
Let’s say for example Grandma wants to make sure she never forgets to give Little Billy birthday money each year. She could write a smart contract that says IF it’s Little Billy’s birthday, THEN pay him $10 from Grandma’s account. Once this contract is broadcasted to the Ethereum network, it will execute automatically each year on Little Billy’s birthday.
As stated in the intro, Ethereum is a platform for building blockchain applications using smart contracts. What you may have just purchased on Coinbase is called Ether, which is the cryptocurrency that fuels the Ethereum network.
Ether functions more like a digital commodity than a digital currency. Just like you need gasoline to fuel your car, you need Ether to run applications on the Ethereum blockchain. In the Grandmother example cited above, Grandma would have to purchase small amounts of Ether to fuel her smart contract that pays Little Billy his birthday money.
Applications that run smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain are called “dApps,” or decentralized apps. Just as any app developer can build apps on top of Apple’s IOS operating system, developers can build on top of Ethereum’s blockchain infrastructure. To the end user of a dApp, it might not look and feel any different than the apps you use today. It’s the underlying blockchain infrastructure that make them different.
Since dApps function on top of the blockchain, they can be used to transfer value peer-to-peer. To return to our Grandmother example, there could be a dApp that Granny can download that lets her schedule Little Billy’s birthday payments without having to code the smart contract herself. dApps are also completely open sourced so other people can access the code and build on top of them. Someone could take the code to the birthday payment dApp and add the ability for Grandma to add a note that says, “Happy Birthday Billy!” Running dApps on the blockchain also offers added security benefits. Since the transactions are distributed and encrypted across the Ethereum blockchain, there is no central place for a hacker to breach and gain access to all of the world’s Grandmother to grandson birthday payment data.
So now that you understand that Ethereum is a network for building decentralized applications that require a cryptocurrency called Ether to run, I’m going to introduce a confusing concept. Many dApps built on Ethereum have their own cryptocurrencies or “tokens.” In order to interact with the dApps, customers need to purchase the dApp’s native token.
Here’s a helpful analogy I came across – when you go to a waterpark, you pay the admission fee and in return, you get a wristband. That wristband gives you the ability to ride the waterslides in the water park. With certain dApps, the token is the wristband, and a user must purchase it to interact with whatever the dApp offers.
