[jgeerts]

If we ever want Bitcoin to evolve from a store of value to an actual payment method we have to come up with something that does at least better than VISA's 8000tx/s and that's just not solved with going from 7tx/s to Bitcoin Cash's ~62tx/s. We have to be able to compete with every payment method out there and we should be able to handle peak throughput during sales period.

Another important factor is the 10 minutes confirmation time, nobody wants to wait for 10 minutes at the counter before they trust you walking out. We need something with instant verification and low fees and increasing the blocksize will never do that.

[brendanw]

It exists. It is called nano: no fees and instant transactions through the block lattice. https://nano.org/en/whitepaper

I am surprised more folks on HN are not familiar with nano considering it is one of the few teams in crypto with endorsements from familiar faces: Zack Shapiro on the core team (ex-Product Hunt), Garry Tan (YC, angel investor in Coinbase), and Charlie Lee (former director of engineering @ Coinbase).

[nosuchthing]

Nano / Raiblocks is a scam in the sense it is created for free, and old users need new users to dump their nano at a profit to new bag holders.

  The initial distribution of XRB was performed through 
  "manual mining" limited via a captcha. 
  The distribution rate was 
  17 XRB (Raiblocks) per hour per ip4.

This method was easy to automate, and easy to bypass with the plethora of VPNs and users who own hundreds of IP4/IP6 addresses. Presumably the dev team has the vast majority, millions of Rai/Nano.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raiblock+captch...

https://github.com/nanocurrency/raiblocks/wiki/Design-featur...

These users need new people to buy their Raiblocks / Nano in order to profit off this scam.

[brendanw]

If we had a token either strictly or loosely tied to real-world identity, then I too would criticize the initial distribution. I would call for an airdrop that provides an equal allocation of a new currency to every identity token. I don't believe there currently exists a good way to do a universal airdrop. The counter argument to doing a universal airdrop is that all economic systems move towards inequality of outcome, so in due time, the initial distribution is meaningless.

ICO's that promise guaranteed returns are scams. Nano is an open source project that aims to give people an alternative to government currency. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=raiblocks The most interest as measured by google search activity in the world for raiblocks/nano is in Venezuela; you'll find a similar pattern of top search results coming from countries where citizens are looking for alternative currencies -- Kosovo, Cyprus, Greece, etc -- with other useful cryptocurrencies.

disclaimer: I interviewed with the team back in January and turned down a contractor role but was impressed with their mission and roadmap.

[DennisP]

To a close approximation, the first couple million bitcoins were created for free as well.

[nosuchthing]

It's funny to think of all the people getting into Bitcoin in 2018 thinking they're "getting in early" when the math behind Bitcoin granted those early users nearly the entire supply for pennies and anyone buying in recently or in the future will exchange real capital in exchange for these tokens generated for nearly 0 capital effort.

Measurably less CAPEX and OPEX for the first users to run the software "securing" the least important era of the network earned the greatest percentage of the supply?

Satoshi is even quoted as to the design of the ponzi like scheme:

  Satoshi Nakamoto
  Thu Jan 8 14:27:40 EST 2009
  I made the proof-of-work difficulty ridiculously easy to 
  start with, so for a little while in the beginning a 
  typical PC will be able to generate coins in just a few 
  hours. It'll get a lot harder when competition makes the 
  automatic adjustment drive up the difficulty.


  first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins
  next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins
  next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins
  next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins

[def_true_false]

Sounds like a pretty good way to drive adoption.

[nosuchthing]

Only for early adopters who know they'll be able to exploit late adopters. Users clearly become incentivized to market their free tokens as an opportunity at wealth, as they exit and sell them to late bag holders.

Satoshi could easily have designed the PoW to distribute more slowly, and favor long term growth as more users join the network. Instead only early adopters control the supply. The risk of this is catastrophic.

  One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion 
  people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or 
  Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And  
  if we just include all balances, we include many dust 
  balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 
  0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The 
  imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient 
  among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH 
  per address. So this is the distribution of ownership 
  among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 
  2017.


  In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like 
  this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the 
  ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking 
  information on all holders with balances >$20,000. 
  Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini 
  coefficient would mean that a government would only need 
  to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a 
  large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with 
  it the ability to tank the price.

  With that said, two points. First, while one would not 
  want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as 
  then only one person would have all of the digital 
  currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost 
  the network), in practice it appears that a very high 
  level of wealth centralization is still compatible with 
  the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we 
  show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better 
  metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder 
  concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of 
  arbitrarily choosing a threshold.


  ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious 
  issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion 
  of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini 
  coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it 
  does not directly measure the number of individuals or 
  entities required to compromise a system.


  Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a 
  subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini 
  coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners 
  with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that 
  compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be 
  sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the 
  maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges 
  rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.


  Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries 
  with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, 
  then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would 
  again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a 
  Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in 
  >51% of mining being compromised.

https://medium.com/@balajis/quantifying-decentralization-e39...

[tobik999]

You are describing the problem of all currencies, ie also dollar. If no one accepts your dollar you are screwed.

[nosuchthing]

Riiight... well everyone accepts the USD.

Not even the darknet vendors accept Nano / Raiblocks.

Do you know any places where Nano XRP Raiblocks are being accepted?

You might want to read these:

http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/...

https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

tl;dr cryptocurrencies don't really work for the real world.

[brendanw]

Why do you have such a strong emotionally negative response to cryptocurrencies? It is pretty clear you are communicating disingenuously. The reasons for ending BTC support for many merchants and platforms were high fees and long tx confirmation times, which is what many altcoins have focused on addressing (eg Ether, Stellar, Litecoin, Nano)

[nosuchthing]

Because most of the cryptocoin projects are designed as way to scam other users.

Why doesn't Nano Raiblocks allow more users to generate new Nano/Raiblocks? Would that hurt your investment if every user had equal access to the production of the supply?

Why are you so emotionally invested in trying to sell these beanie babies to other people? Is it because you need to profit off other buying into your scam?

Still no list of businesses accepting Nano/Raiblocks?

[hndamien]

And Charlie Lee is a scam artist, so no surprises there.

In light of the downvotes with no response, here is some reasoning. He bought in at around $30, and the first thing he did was clone BTC with minor negligible modifications. Philosophically at that time, this shows a remarkable lack of commitment to the underlying goal. Then, during the recent boom he completely cashes out of his own project while the market cap shows nothing close to the transformative goal of the creation of Bitcoin. Ultimately what he does doesn't matter, but his actions speak louder than words. In addition, the tactics employed within Coinbase for the LTC listing and his involvement in a proof of stake coin leave me completely unsurprised. This isn't to say Nano has no merit, I congratulate the team there, but proof of stake, unfortunately, results in all rewards to creators and an unsatisfying amount of control among people where distribution was guaranteed for no "work".

[nosuchthing]

Cognitive dissonance among Bitcoin minimalists is quiet amusing.

You think Bitcoin is good but fear Litecoin for creating a new alternative system?

You think deregulating into a anarcho-capitalist deflationary market is good, but then complain when someone does something you don't agree with?

  but proof of stake, unfortunately, results in all rewards 
  to creators and an unsatisfying amount of control among 
  people where distribution was guaranteed for no "work".

Apparently you haven't bothered to look at how Bitcoin is created? The supply is generated in such a way that a small group of users spent minimal work (CAPEX+OPEX) to generate the majority of the supply. All "rewards" of the supply went to the smallest population of the world. Satoshi just created a new system for oligarchical wealth extraction.

[hndamien]

Not quite. Your points are very valid, but you need to compare it with the current system. The new system of oligarchs comes with new constraints. The initial creators in some ways deserve to be significantly rewarded for such an innovation, as the new constraints are that supply is limited, thereby the rising tide lifts all boats of participants. Proof of Stake does this but takes away a significant randomness in distribution and guarantees that the majority is held initially by one authority - this is not guaranteed at all with POW, and if not premined, then even better.

Your other crticism of maximalists fearing an alternative, this is really just BS. I will gladly tell you (as many maximalists will) that Monero is actually better on most fronts that Bitcoin tries to win on. Scalability is really the only thing it leads on, and this is not out of the realms of possibility for Monero. So you can choose your oligarchs, and you can choose how they are constrained. Hopefully your community will grow such that you all benefit.

[tlrobinson]

Nano and other non-linear/DAG chains are interesting, but it seems more difficult to reason about the consensus properties. Have any (neutral) 3rd parties done thorough analyses of them?

I saw Charlie Lee's reddit post asking questions about Nano (https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/80c6fg/questi...). Did he follow up with an endorsement?

[danibx]

Yep, he posted on twitter after the questions on reddit: https://twitter.com/satoshilite/status/968931625001140224?la...

[tobik999]

Devs said they are researching for a audit company currently, but there will be a major change in the protocol pretty soon, so I guess it will be done afterwards.

[sireat]

Endorsements and nifty tech are nothing without actual use.

Nano suffers from the same problem that 99.9% of cryptocurrencies suffer from: no useful information on how an average person might actually USE it.

Google brings various ways you can BUY Nano in order to speculate. I want to see real world usage, I want to buy VPN/Hosting/Alpaca Socks using Nano.

PS Nano is also 100% pre-mined which means one would have to investigate on who holds what percentages of these pre-mined coins. (case in point: Ripple)

[jflejmer]

There are a lot of merchants that accept Nano and this number is rising very fast. Check this link: https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/83w51x/25_mon...

[tobik999]

Funny fact, there is a VPN provider accepting Nano, there are hosting providers accepting Nano, there is even a sport socket shop accepting Nano (sadly no Alpaca from what I know) In regards to premine, yes it was premined, but because 95% were distributed by the captcha faucet, 5% went to the dev fund. Since the nano protocol does not need miners it was in my eyes a pretty good idea to get even non crypto people on board.

[brendanw]

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=raiblocks https://www.statista.com/statistics/268225/countries-with-th...

You do not see it because you likely fall outside of the demographic of cryptocurrency first users: businesses and citizens in countries facing hyperinflation, black markets, gambling, porn users seeking anonymity, legal pot businesses in the west cut-off from traditional banking in the west, legal porn businesses cut-off from traditional banking in the west.

Bear in mind there is a lag in adoption of the best technology. Just 4-5 months ago bitcoin was still the dominant currency on darknet markets, now it is monero.

[sireat]

See, I remember the huge growth in merchant adoption in 2013 for Bitcoin and how for a moment in time Bitcoin was useful as a currency. I actually used Bitcoin back then from my 2011 minings.

Now I agree that there is a niche for Monero in black markets.

Then there should be a huge opportunity for some crypto currency to take over Bitcoin in the role as a medium of exchange for general public.

Thus it really irks me that I am not seeing these supposedly revolutionary crypto currencies attempt to do anything useful.

Why doesn't any cryptocurrency focus on usability for a regular audience first?

[polyomino]

Because these altcoins are default scams. Nano is basically iota + proof of stake. None of which have been shown to work in a decentralized fashion.

[brendanw]

Anyone who has read both whitepapers at a minimum, or audited either code base, knows they are far different technologies.

[dfhdr446543]

Your description of Nano as "iota plus PoS" reveals how informed you really are.

I suggest you actually read the Nano and IOTA white papers. They're very different.

[SnowProblem]

0-conf transactions are instant and work great on BCH.

[walls]

So it has to go from 7 tx/sec to 7k tx/sec or it's not worth doing?

[Ajedi32]

No, but if you're someone who wants to see Bitcoin succeed then you probably don't want to use a scaling solution which only works if you assume Bitcoin will never achieve mainstream adoption.

[walls]

> you probably don't want to use a scaling solution which only works if you assume Bitcoin will never achieve mainstream adoption

But, that's exactly what happened with segwit. Why is that worth doing but increasing the block size is not?

[eklitzke]

The main thing Segwit fixes is transaction malleability (which is necessary for Lightning).

[Ajedi32]

If I recall correctly, Segwit was a prerequisite to Lightning. A block size increase is not.

[SuddsMcDuff]

You recall incorrectly. A malleability fix was a prerequisite to Lightning. SegWit is just one of many possible malleability fixes.

[Ajedi32]

Were there any other serious proposals for fixing transaction malleability without Segwit?