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by jxub 3064 days ago
Nano previously called Raiblocks is an amazing candidate for fee-less, instant transactions. The block-lattice approach is a fundamental breakthrough that overcomes the limitations of blockchain in terms of cost and speed.

Stellar is also a worthy contender although it wasn't designed with the purpose of payments, but decentralised currency/crypto exchanges.

The Lightning Network daemon codebase on Github is a beautiful well commented piece of Golang code though.
2 comments
gruez 3064 days ago
>The block-lattice approach is a fundamental breakthrough that overcomes the limitations of blockchain in terms of cost and speed.

Not really. DAG/lattice based cryptocurrencies offer different security guarantees compared to blockchain based ones.

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buckie 3064 days ago
They also have different scaling tradeoffs as they scale really well (the graph can be arbitrarily wide as tx's can run in parallel) when most transactions are causally unrelated but hit bottlenecks with every "killer app" that gains traction (graph narrows as more and more transactions become causally related).

I'm not sure what domains see this problem crop up but I've seen it in quant finance strategy execution. Say you have 1k strats that you want to run in parallel but risk needs to bound the bank's per-equity positions globally. When the strats work on different subsets, DAG approaches aren't a problem, but when most of the strats trade APPL/IBM your once very wide (parallel execution) graph narrows significantly (becomes more sequential) as the strats need to check with risk w.r.t. AAPL/IBM sequentially.

NB: for this reason, causal approaches are pretty rare to see today (though it depends on the domain as high latency contexts don't really care).

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jxub 3064 days ago
I know that there might be spam problems if one manages to precompute the local PoW hashes (solved by pruning the chain), but I would love if you explained more this security problems. Are they consensus-related as some people in reddit suggested? If this is the case, it might be good for Nano to get someone like @aphyr to audit the code.
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jameshayton 3064 days ago
My understanding is that Stellar is both a payment solution and a platform for facilitating decentralized exchanges. The two go hand in hand.

Nano is also interesting, but limited. In terms of moving value around, I think Stellar is more compelling.

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