ATFF
Austrian volunteer firefighters
Cardano stake pool

Well, since there is basically no risk associated with staking and since the costs are low (transaction fee of ~0.17 ADA to sign up for staking, and a 2 ADA deposit that you get back when you unstake eventually), the answer is a clear yes. Of course, with smaller amounts it may take a long time until you get these initial costs back, but if you are planning to hold for longer, it is always better to stake than not to.

A total of 45 billion ADA exist and around 32 billion ADA (~71%) are currently in circulation. The remaining ~29% are in the reserves, which are addresses on the Cardano blockchain that are self-managed by the Ouroboros algorithm. 0.3% of the amounts in the reserves are used for reward payout every epoch, so the total rewards are becoming smaller over time. However, rewards are also funded by the transaction fees and while the transaction fees now do not sustain reward payout yet, this will be different as Cardano is adopted and used more and more. For more info have a look at Cardano's monetary policy at cardano.org.

If you, like us, believe in Cardano's mission, you probably also believe that ADA's price will increase over time, so the best advice is probably to hold it for a long time and not to spend it. However, there are more and more options and ways to pay with ADA for services (in addition to exchanging it on a cryptocurrency exchange like Kraken, Binance, Coinbase, Bitpanda, and others), and you can find many options here: https://cryptwerk.com/pay-with/ada/ and https://acceptedhere.io/catalog/currency/cardano/

There are several reasons. First of all, Yoroi and Daedalus are native wallets, wallets that are officially supported. They are updated quickly so if the Cardano team develops new features, they are usually available for native wallet apps first. Then, Cardano has integrated governance, which means that its users can vote on proposals to improve or change Cardano, and this is only possible with native wallets. For more information on voting, please have a look at this blog post by IOHK on project Catalyst, and check out the Cardano improvement proposals (CIPs) at Ideascale. And finally, there are some wallets that don't give you many other options to delegate your ADA to stake pools like ours, but only with their own pools.

Staking and reward payout is handeled by the protocol itself, with no interference by someone, so staking and reward payout is bullet proof. However, there are some other risks that are noteworthy:

• If a pool operator does a poor job and misses blocks they were assigned to produce, the pool and its delegators receive no or smaller rewards. This can be because the servers are not up to date, were down or had expired KES keys, among other reasons. If the pool is oversaturated, rewards are diminished as well. I am well aware of my responsibilities here and promise to deliver a flawless pool perfomance.
• Your ADA never leave your wallet when staking, so if there is a security issue with the pool you delegated with, your ADA are still secure. However, you could also be hacked and someone can try and get access to your wallet, you have to follow safe practices also as a delegator. To be fair, this actually hasn't to do with whether staking is secure or not.
• If you lose access to your wallet (because your computer or phone breaks down or because you lost your spending password) AND lose your wallet seed phrase, your ADA is locked up forever. This is however also not a risk due to staking itself.

Yoroi and Daedalus currently do not offer to split the amounts in a certain wallet to delegate parts to different pools yet, but you could generate a second wallet and delegate the content of one wallet to one pool, and the content of the other to a different pool.

In principle, all the larger exchanges can be recommended, but it doesn't hurt to do some research upfront, because the fees are different. If you don't care about trading but want to get some and hold for a longer time, I would choose an exchange with low fees. There are several steps, you have to make a transfer of fiat money to the exchange first, and I'd have a look what the cheapest options are there. I use € for example and most exchanges offer SEPA transfer of fiat with zero fees, and signing up to be able to use SEPA definitely makes sense. Most important is though whether an exchange allows the transfer of ADA to a private wallet, and some exchanges don't offer that yet.

Then, on some exchanges there might be a difference in the fee depending on the order type you use. There is a maker fee for limit orders that is usually lower, and a taker fee for market orders that is usually higher. A (post) limit order is usually cheaper than a market order for that reason, but the differences are small: On Kraken, the maker fees start at 0.16% and the taker fees start at 0.26% for example (source).

Then, there is usually also a fee for withdrawing from an exchange, in the case of Kraken the fee for withdrawing ADA and transferring it to your wallet is 0.6 ADA.

I use Kraken because I like their trading platform, but Binance works well too and is cheaper, but I heard of issues with not being able to withdraw ADA for a few days after purchase or around the epoch boundaries, that might not be an issue for you though. I also once tried buying ADA via Bitpanda and they have comparatively high fees, and it turned out that I couldn't transfer ADA to my wallet (but as I have been told, this should be possible now), so I had to exchange it to a different coin, transfer that to Kraken, exchange it for ADA and then transfer the ADA to my Yoroi wallet. As you can imagine, the fees accumulate in such a case, so please be smarter...