Cardano terminologies are quite peculiar and really could attract curious individuals to go searching for its meaning or where these were derive from. I myself have searched this the first time I encountered Cardano.
As per the future of Cardano, I hope they do what they preached and I hope they become successful with their experiments, and leaders will remain faithful, because if not this will become just like another failed companies who made big promises but did not happen during the dot com era. Gains could be big but investing is quite a high risk. Bitcoin I guess was quite less risky to enter with during its inception because of its decentralized nature which is not run by any company nor any individual, fast forward now at least tested already for 10 years.