I wonder why almost every time I visit 'Announcements (Altcoins)' section of this Forum I see the topic about Idena being at the first page. It either being bumped all the time by people from its community or it is just being popular.
I personally love this project so I like it anyway.

I saw one interesting message. Not sure what is it about.

It seems that idena actually has won this competition. But the've stopped DAO Race for some reasons. Now I'm interested if Idena's devs will get some reward for the winning.

I'm glad that sharding seems to be working considering previous successful validation. Hope that it will help to get at least 100,000 identities in nearest future.

Let me add my 2 cents to your conversation.

Any coin needs quick and constant growth of its metrics (not price!) in order to draw attention of investors - smart people with some money. And only after this attention is drawn buy orders start to grow. Most of people behave some kind of opposite to investors - they see price pumps and then start to pay their attention to that asset and even buy it hoping of further growth. This is a losing strategy for most of the people besides maybe small portion of really smart traders.

So, the main thought here is that you need to have some parameter or characteristic of your blockchain which is rapidly growing and outperforming other rivals. For Idena these parameter are number of unique users (identities) and full nodes number. An interesting thing is that in idena each identity automatically implies miner. So every user which takes part in validations automatically gets his small reward. This is mind boggling property in terms of potential user base size. Besides, these consecutive validations are very interesting and entertaining events on their own, they seem like online multiplayer game or some kind of smart mob event. So validations naturally draw people's attention without any guaranteed rewards. People join the network just for fun, regardless to its current market capitalization, emission, price, etc.

I bought Idena at average price of $0.04 in the beginning of 2020. At that time the network did grow every epoch exponentially and I was sure that made a right decision of buying it. But then some technical and scaling issues started to appear. People could not connect the network right before validations and thence their identities were kicked out and then killed (I mean 'suspended -> zombied -> killed' cycle). So the growth started to decline of even go back. For now I think it is obvious that Idena need sharding in order to continue its growth.

So the team recently announce 27th hardfork which includes long awaited sharding:
https://medium.com/idena/idena-hard-fork-announcement-validation-sharding-ca910bac3599

I hope that this technolodgy will help Idena in terms of scaling. And when (and if) that happens we will see investors putting their money in Idena again.

There is new hard fork on the way:
https://medium.com/idena/idena-hard-fork-announcement-early-invitations-9d6d171015c7

I genuinely think that Idena is much better than 99% of the coins which are being discussed in this section of the forum. It has its own and unique consensus mechanism. It has more than 5000 unique humans/minters. It has one of the most active community (this topic is being bumped all the time) considering such a small market cap. What else new coin can brag with such things?

The Idena validation results

5644 identities are validated:
https://scan.idena.io/epoch/63/validation

Validation rewards paid:
https://scan.idena.io/epoch/63/rewards

Minimum Total score for Humans to get the second invitation and Verified to get an invitation: 100%

Цена внезапно подросла до 10.5 центов. Причина пока непонятна.

That's cool, but it is Idena, not Idea 

We already have 4,700+ nodes. The next stop is 10,000

Yes, I am genuinely surprised how come a coin with such a big community and so active thread here on bitcointalk has so low marketcap. Hope that in the new 2021 we will have 100,000 nodes and x100 of the price 

Интересная фишка. Позволяет получать дополнительные монетки, отвечая на вопросы других пользователей сети - подрабатывая оракулом. Тут написано подробнее как правильно создавать свои запросы для сети:
https://vk.com/@ru.idena-kak-sozdat-golosovanie-orakulov

PS: Помимо поддержки оракулов, в последней версии клиента на флипы добавили водяные знаки с датой валидации и надписью "www.idena.io". Это по задумке должно усложнить повторное использование чужих флипов и заодно может сподвигнуть работников ферм прочитать, что такое idena и понять, что их труд эксплуатирует владелец фермы, и что можно заиметь свою ноду и работать только на себя, забирая 100% заработка себе.

Owner reward is not 100% in case of owner fee is 100%:
Owner reward = (Smart contract balance — Voting deposit * Number of votes) * Owner fee %

На данный момент уже нет, но в свое время закупился прилично (цена тогда была еще привлектельнее).
 
Но вообще сейчас мне кажется неплохой момент для закупа. Цена определенно на локальном дне в предверии разлока 8.3 млн. монет 1 января 2021. Следующий разлок будет только в августе, да и то на жалкие 2.5 млн.

Крутой гайд. Только можно было его поместить в тему по Идене. Она тут есть:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5195687.500

Я считаю Idena мегаинтересной монетой. Одна из немногих монет, которая принесла нам новый механизм консенсуса. Т.е. она несет в себе технологические новшества. Причем текущая цена у неё на уровне 10 центов находится практически ниже себестоимости майнинга. Т.е. с точки зрения инвестирования она тоже очень переспективна.

I hope that in future due to competition between pools they will become more fair and will let their workers to own their private keys. It is something like exchanges. Some people keep their cryptocurrencies on exchanges all the time and others use cold wallets. But most of people understand that cold wallets are more safe.

Оракулы выглядят интересной темой, только результат таких голосований очень сильно будет зависеть от настроек самих голосований - от награды, числа оракулов, процента победы и т.п. Т.е., играясь с настройками можно будет получать самые разные результаты. В умелых руках - это сильный инструмент для манипуляции общественным мнением. Хотя возможно, наоборот, это натолкнет людей на новые мысли по поводу того, какие настройки оптимально использовать для каждого конкретного случая для получения адекватного результата.

Devs said that they will create a post about this botnet / farm thing after they implement a solution. So let's wait for their research and explanations.