The great Albert Einstein, father of the physical theory of special and general Relativity, was surely a smart person.
But he was delighted by simplicity.
Following his humoristic spirit, I'll try to tell you what's Ampleforth, and let's "Explain it Like I'm 5 years old" [ELI5].
So, even if I'll imagine to tell this like you're 5, I'll deal with you, the dear reader, like if you were, simultaneously, my grandma' !
In fact, Albert once told:
“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”
? Albert Einstein
To start with this instructive trip, let me ask you a simple question, dear young/old reader:
How do you feel about having a dentist appointment?
The answer is : BAD!
By constrast we, the adults, we don't like having appointments with a banker! What can we do to remedy for that?
Some smart guy, @igort , who created this platform, told us to give a look to Ampleforth. This because some others smart persons created a way to issue a type of "money" which do not need a banker to use it, let's call it an "asset". It may look like your well known Dollar-$, but it is not!
This new asset can save as also from the really bad banker, who wants us to get poor, my dear reader!
In fact, do you know that the dollars your mother gives you to buy some candies, one day or the other, will not be worth enough to buy even the smallest piece of chocolate? That's a drama! But this is the reality!
So those smart people, who created the asset Ampleforth, and they studied a lot for this, came with a solution.
The value of those AMPLs will, forever, be equivalent to the worthness of the US dollar in the year 2019!!!
( this point, really important, is often omitted).
So, instead of holding your Dollars under the bed, take some AMPLs and you'll always be able to buy the same amount of chocolate, indipendelty of what the devil bankers decide to do with the US dollar!
In fact, those bad guys, have the strange habit of printing more money, time by time. So, each of us will be able to buy less and less chocolate, over time, if we stick to the traditional $!
How can AMPL do that trick?
Yes, we may speak of a trick, dear reader. This wonderful trick is possible thanks to a new technology called "Blockchain" . Instead of giving trust to our bad banker, we all give trust one another: this is called "decentralizing". Nobody can change the state of the facts, once it's written on the Blockchain.
The mechanism which makes AMPLs tokens to be always worth as a 2019 dollar is called "elastic supply". Thanks to the Blockchain, we can be all confident that nobody cheats, and we all agree to reduce or augment the amount of Ampls we own, everybody at the same time; indeed, every day.
So , theorem number 1, the amount of AMPLs you own is not a fixed number, but it is an elastic one!
Sometimes it is greater, sometimes it is smaller. This is not a big price to pay, if you consider that it saves us to use money printed by bankers and worth every year less and less! The proportion by which your AMPLs owning changes is called "rebase" . Whatever the rebase is, don't worry, if your preferite shop accept AMPLs, you'll always be able to buy the same amount of candies! You'll never get richer or poorer because of the rebase, everybody are subject to this effect in the same way: if your friend can afford to buy twice your candies, or maybe just one half, this will always be true in the future.
Why an elastic supply should give to AMPLs a fixed value?
Good question, dear reader! The answer is in the so called "market": there are strange people in the world who like to speculate on the value of assets, AMPL included. It is like a crazy zoo, where there are both Bulls and Bears, fighting to push the price upward or downward, respectively. But they behave strangely: when the price is too high, bears sell back what they have, and the price falls again; if it is too low, bulls come in and they push the price again up. That's all.
But you don't have to worry too much about this, the AmpleForth creators are smart enough and they made this elastic mechanism good at fighting both Bulls and Bears :-).
So , my dear reader, I hope you know understand the greatness of the idea behind Ampleforth, and why it is worth always the same. Your candies are safe!
...for the smartest 5 years old readers or grandparents...
We can call Ampleforth a stablecoin-2.0 ; moreover, I believe that this is the project which uses mostly the POWER of the blockchain, of the trustless mechanism of the chain. Is one of the few things in the crypto world which we couldn't achieve without the blocks :-) Think about it.
The comparison with the Einstein theory of Relativity is that, even if space and time are measured in different ways by different observers, and so the word Relativity, there is actually a quantity which is indipendent of the observer. This is called the space-time invariant distance, without great immagination.
In the same way, it is not important the exact amount of AMPLs you own on a given day, because it fluctuates. But there is an invariant quantity, that is, your proportion of Ampls with respect to the total number of them in circulation at a given time.
