Thank you for useful questions!
1. Has Supernet generated any revenues? (Props to you for keeping the price at near beginning level)
- yes there have been some assets, but those didn't really give any revenues
- the funds supernet has, have been used for trading, have any of those profits been given back to the hodlers?
Unfortunately, other than trading gains, which arent revenues, there hasnt been anything that generates positive cashflow. Now there is no way I can responsibly even think about dividending out the trading gains while we are below the original NAV. Things got pretty bad for a while, but I seem to have made up almost 2000 BTC worth this year. However past performance cannot be guaranteed to confirm and I did hit a good run of picks.
As komodo is the anchor piece that gets a stable set of notary nodes, they will not only perform notary duties, I will use them for other useful tasks in the ecosystem where a set of high availability services are needed. mostly just simple directory and "bulletin board" low bandwidth services, but still very useful for things like a list of all active coins in the networks, current active peers, DEX trading pairs, etc.
Getting the DEX fully stocked LP (liquidity provider) nodes is one of the charter's for komodo funds (after the blockchain critical things are paid for)
2. What role will Btcd play in iguana?
-Before it was needed as the grease for iguana transactions? Now what is the grease for iguana, komodo?
where it makes sense what would have been btcd fees will be komodo fees, as komodo is btcd 2.0. However, maybe there is a miscommunication, even before komodo if an iguana node is performing say LTC services for a basilisk, it would have charged LTC. Ah, ok I think I understand. For the multicurrency fees coming in to the revenue streams, they will be converted to the komodo and act like a pool that is converting the various mined currencies to the destination currency. But, the coin fees an iguana node would get from a basilisk node wont be autoconverted, that would be something that the one running the node would have to do
So grease is not the right analogy... I dont want there to be any needless barriers to adoption, so whenever possible it will be denominated in the most appropriate currency, whatever that is. The reinforcement effect will come from the required conversion into komodo
3. You said that you will never build on a platform you have no control on (ie: nxt) but is not btc and zcash outof your control
-what happens if btc transaction fees become large
-or btc changes in a way that is disasterous to your project
The bitcoin protocol is documented and not anything that can just be changed by one dev declaring it changed, like happened in NXT. The often contentious BTC world has the advantage that change is much slower.
Fee increases are factored in and why this ICO, but even at the lower end of funds raised, I can reduce the costs by increasing the delay. There is a parameter of "Delay Minutes", which determines how long after a new BTC block comes in that the notary transaction is submitted. The smaller this, is the more frequently we get notarized, which reduces the delay for BTC protection, but increases the cost.
So the fallback plan is to increase Delay Minutes to fit within the budgeted amount.
Now if some blackswan event makes bitcoin go insane and unusable, well, there is always other very strong chains, so I would find the most stable and secure one and use it for the notarization recording.
As far as zcash goes, it is a large open source project with a lot of very good devs. Having interacted with them during the alpha stage I dont see them making changes other than what is required for security reasons and if that is the case, komodo is well served to adopt it.
Another point to note is that iguana now works with over a dozen coins. natively, doing parallel sync with them. zcash is one of these and it is a key component for komodo, but iguana is still the platform. So the dPoW layer will be built on top of iguana API (custom extensions I will create) and the iguana will interface with the bitcoin and zcashd components.
I know from the outside it is really hard to discern these type of things, so I am glad you are asking such good questions
-or z cash fails to deliver a working product, or zcash delays their launch, or zcash who can read this thread sees you as a competitor and seeks to throw a monkey wrench in your launch somehow.
zcash already has a working product! Granted it is being security reviewed for flaws, but it is working. Of course for the GUI purists it is totally unfinished as it wont have a GUI for a while, but I speak of the zkp (zero knowledge proof) logic and having it mapped to the bitcoin transaction model. Quite an achievement already. Of course a delay is possible, but I dont expect there to be any prolonged delay.
Now I certainly hope zcash doesnt view komodo as a competitor. It is an open source project and we will be doing a GUI that I hope the zcash team can use. Also, ZEC is a mined coin, komodo is dPoW so I really dont see how there is much overlap between the two from a non-technical point. I estimate the market price for ZEC to be very high compared to komodo, so it will be similar to LTC's silver to BTC's gold situation. komodo price will be in sub-dollar range. ZEC price I have to imagine will be $10 to $100+, especially at first.
If komodo is a massive success that will give zcash a lot of exposure by necessity. I was also in discussions about donating the 5% staking by the zkp funds to the zcash devs, as I couldnt figure out a way how to get anymore than aggregate amounts in the zkp form, it is that strong a privacy. So if the zcash team would accept this, then we wouldnt just be a project that forked zcash, we would be contributing back GUI, publicity and also some komodo