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RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

raiblocks.net

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Re: RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

#31

Post by pgt »

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg wrote: post #30
pgt wrote: post #26

The RAIblocks whitepaper is worth reading just as a reference on how a technical paper should be written. (Disclosure: I became interested in RAI on NYE and recently invested some money in it) The RAI secret sauce is the "block lattice" design where each account is its own blockchain and you only need to care about the chains you want to do business with, unless you encounter conflicts. Conflicts are resolved by proo…

One thing that I don't get is what is the incentive to vote on tx?

As I see it, if you don't vote the wrong president might win. Dirty txes jeopardise the asset value and you could be left with a tyrant in your chain who has even more voting stake. It's self-regulating in that way. But there may be another consistency issue I'm not aware of.

Re: RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

#32

Post by sova »

joeblau wrote: post #3

Can someone help me understand. If a block chain (or whatever you want to call your token of choice) doesn't have any fees, how is it different from just having a database. No fees mean that every transaction has the same value so there is no transaction prioriization other than time. This seems like a glorified eventually consistent database synchronization algorithm. In a fee based blockchain, I can pay more to get…

"RaiBlocks achieves consensus via a balance-weighted vote on conflicting transactions. This consensus system provides quicker, more deterministic transactions while still maintaining a strong, decentralized system. RaiBlocks continues this development and has positioned itself as one of the highest performing cryptocurrencies."

Which I would follow with more from the paper:

"H. Proof of Work All four transaction types have a work field that must be correctly populated. The work field allows the transaction creator to compute a nonce such that the hash of the nonce concatenated with the previous field in receive/send/change transactions or the account field in an open transaction is below a certain threshold value. Unlike Bitcoin, the PoW in RaiBlocks is simply used as an anti-spam tool, similar to Hashcash, and can be computed on the order of seconds [9]."

"B. Transaction Flooding A malicious entity could send many unnecessary but valid transactions between accounts under its control in an attempt to saturate the network. With no transaction fees they are able to continue this attack indefinitely. However, the PoW required for each transaction limits the transaction rate the malicious entity could generate without significantly investing in computational resources. Even under such an attack in an attempt to inflate the ledger, nodes that are not full historical nodes are able to prune old transactions from their chain; this clamps the storage usage from this type of attack for almost all users."

Re: RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

#33

Post by CryptoPunk »

A word of caution: while DAG-only chains are a promising area of research for cryptocurrency data structures, there are many unresolved problems with them.

IOTA solves it with a centralized coordinator and claims to have decentralized solutions being planned. RaiBlocks is, in my opinion, more honest about its vulnerabilities and its progress in solving them (they say they're working on it). Since RaiBlocks has no centralized coordinator, it could come under attack as soon as a shorting market emerges for it.

Re: RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

#34

Post by sova »

joeblau wrote: post #19
cies wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nodes are paid from "created coins", at the expense of everyone diluting. Could call it artificial inflation. > This seems like a glorified eventually consistent database synchronization algorithm. To some extend that is what a blockchain is. Also: immutable, no-need-to-trust-every-node, KV, and sometimes with the ability to perform smart contracts. > In a fee based blockchain, I can pay more to get my transactio…

Ah okay thanks for helping. I guess in the case of RaiBlocks, since you're only transacting currency (not Turing complete smart contracts) there isn't really a need for fees to prevent the halting problem like you have with Ethereum. I've made a list of tokens that I'm trying to categorize[1] so I think I've got RaiBlocks in the right place. Is Bitcoin slightly over designed in how the fee structure is implemented fo…

In BTC land PoW = fee. In RaiBlocks they use it more like a Captcha before sending a transaction, effectively getting rid of Fees because it's just as useful anti-spam. (However, I think that fee transactions are actually quite important in a blockchain because you don't want nodes wasting resource adding and checking nonsense even if the captcha was computed.)

Re: RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

#35

Post by sova »

rapsey wrote: post #6
joeblau wrote: post #3

Can someone help me understand. If a block chain (or whatever you want to call your token of choice) doesn't have any fees, how is it different from just having a database. No fees mean that every transaction has the same value so there is no transaction prioriization other than time. This seems like a glorified eventually consistent database synchronization algorithm. In a fee based blockchain, I can pay more to get…

> This seems like a glorified eventually consistent database synchronization algorithm. It is a form of eventually consistent databases. One that also solves the problem of nefarious actors trying to cheat.

It's more like a tsunami of Running Balances vying for event horizon. I'm not sure how this is ever supposed to be "consistent" unless you're talking about full historical nodes, in which case yes definitely, but non historical nodes are able to prune transactions after a while. Still a lot to dig out of this gem of a paper, any error in interpretation is my own.

Re: RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

#36

Post by KitDuncan »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #27

I feel stupid cause I brushed this one aside in the summer in favor of iota... If only I'd found out about the faucet!

Same. Even though HackerNews despises IOTA for rolling their own crypto, building on ternary and having a centralized coordinator, I still think that IF IOTA manages to solve their issues and can establish themselves as an IOT powerhouse, they'll be absolutely enormous.

Also IOTA and Rai aren't really competitors. So for the time being, I hold both.

Re: RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

#37

Post by cup-of-tea »

vorotato wrote: post #29
stale2002 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflationary currencies is a new development. We've had deflationary and gold backed currencies for thousands of years and it worked out fine for people who used them.

fine is relative. There was a tremendous amount of lost productivity due to the rising cost of gold. Also gold is traditionally a commodity, not a currency. If the value of your thing is that it functions as a transfer medium, and everyone is incentivized not to transfer it, it certainly sounds like it's bad at what it does.

Well you can't eat it and it doesn't keep you warm. At some point you'll have to spend it. I don't think people spend money because they are aware of inflation anyway. They spend it because they want something. If people are encouraged to think twice about what they need or want, is that really such a bad thing?

Re: RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

#39

Post by blurbleblurble »

KitDuncan wrote: post #36
blurbleblurble wrote: post #27

I feel stupid cause I brushed this one aside in the summer in favor of iota... If only I'd found out about the faucet!

Same. Even though HackerNews despises IOTA for rolling their own crypto, building on ternary and having a centralized coordinator, I still think that IF IOTA manages to solve their issues and can establish themselves as an IOT powerhouse, they'll be absolutely enormous. Also IOTA and Rai aren't really competitors. So for the time being, I hold both.

Cryptocurrency is about new, exciting ways of applying cryptography. People idolize the blockchain, but I think what's cooler than that is coming up with new ways to use crypto. DAGs are very cool. They can be used to compress volumetric data down to less than 1 bit/voxel! So its exciting to me that people are exploring DAGs + cryptography.

Anyway, the lesson for me was too look past the hype just a little deeper. At the time raiblocks was an underdog, so I closed the slack and forgot about it. At the very least, I could have learned a little more about it.

Lately I've really been curious about pascalcoin's approach. Its blockchain is trimmed constantly, acting as a short term, working memory. Its supposed to be very fast. Unfortunately, it's written in pascal, which has very crusty tools! Someone should clone pascalcoin in another obscure but modern language with cross platform tools. I think it'd be a hit. Haskellcoin? That rhymes with Pascal coin and Haskell is cooler. Ocamlcoin? Doesn't rhyme but Ocaml is cool too.

Re: RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

#40

Post by dpc_pw »

vorotato wrote: post #29
stale2002 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflationary currencies is a new development. We've had deflationary and gold backed currencies for thousands of years and it worked out fine for people who used them.

fine is relative. There was a tremendous amount of lost productivity due to the rising cost of gold. Also gold is traditionally a commodity, not a currency. If the value of your thing is that it functions as a transfer medium, and everyone is incentivized not to transfer it, it certainly sounds like it's bad at what it does.

You think that people were sitting and doing nothing, because everyone was hording gold, because it would be worth 1% more in year? Really?

The main function of money is not transferring value. It's keeping track what society as a whole ows to whom. Transferring is just a secondary job. And there's absolutely no need to incentivize it. That's why some cultures used stuff like big rocks as money.

Money is a good money, when you don't want to part with it. And its crappy money, if everybody are just looking for a way to get rid of it.

All the speculative bubbles that we're seeing are caused by lack of real-money. People are trying to get rid of their fiat, and park the value anywhere else.

And it's not very productive when young famillies can't afford to live anywhere, because the houses are used as speculative investment and essentially.. money. It was actually much better when otherwise useless pet rock was taking a function of keeping track of debt in the society and inflated and deflated according to real market conditions.

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