What is Stellar? Ive had some questions and I am going to ask them here.
https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/
Browsing some basic slideshows
https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/#how-it-works
Anchors are simply entities that people trust to hold their deposits and issue credits into the Stellar network for those deposits. They act as a bridge between different currencies and the Stellar network. All money transactions in the Stellar network (except the native digital currency of lumens) occur in the form of credit issued by anchors.
"Anchors do two simple things:
- They take your deposit and issue the corresponding credit to your account address on the Stellar ledger.
- You can make a withdrawal by bringing them credit they issued.
You have to trust the anchor to honor your deposits and withdrawals of credit it has issued."
Anchors exist in the pre-stellar world now. For example, to use Paypal, you deposit money in from your bank account. Paypal then gives you credit in your Paypal account. You can now send that Paypal credit to anyone that trusts Paypal (anyone with a Paypal account). Someone that received your Paypal credit can convert it to real money using Paypal by withdrawing it to the bank.
Anchors perform the same function in Stellar. The difference is, all the “Paypals” and other anchors are operating on the same network so they can all transact with each other now – this makes the system way more powerful. People can now easily send and exchange all these different anchor credits with each other.
Stellar.org covers operational costs in several ways:
5% of the initial lumens are set aside for operational costs.
Stellar.org accepts tax-deductible donations from the public.
We received an initial infusion of funding from the payments startup Stripe. Our corporate donors include BlackRock, Google.org, and FastForward.
https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/use-cases/
"Conversion through an offer
Stellar finds an offer on the internal USD/EUR exchange for someone wanting to buy EUR for USD and automatically makes the exchange between the two parties."
"Using lumens as an intermediary currency
Stellar looks for offers on the network asking for USD in exchange for lumens (the native — purely digital — currency). It simultaneously looks for an offer asking for lumens in exchange for euros. The network makes those exchanges and sends Bob the resulting euro credit."
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar/
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar/#markets
Technical overview of Stellar
https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/
https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/accounts.html
https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/anchor/index.html
The fee pool is the lot of lumens collected from transaction fees.
Stellar does not retain these lumens. They are distributed in the weekly process of inflation voting.
If there are any unallocated lumens after the vote, those lumens return to the fee pool for dispersal in the next round.
Minimum Account Balance
All Stellar accounts must maintain a minimum balance of lumens. Any transaction that would reduce an account’s balance to less than the minimum will be rejected (it seems to be about 2.5 Lumens min)
https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/fees.html
https://www.stellar.org/lumens/wallets/
There are wallets you can use
but read before jumping into anything new!