[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...

[def_true_false]

On the other hand, late adopters will benefit from the stronger network effects.

[nosuchthing]

Due to the Gini coefficient being so high, the network effect is severely constrained.

The systemic risk is outlined in the comment above.

[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?

[brendanw]

I am excited about the technology. I had taken a light look at the space 4-5 years ago and did not form a strong impression. I didn't take a look at the technology again until last September.

One of the topics I enjoyed deep diving on the most was the lightning network. The two pain points I observed for lightning were: (1) It takes a non-trivial amount of energy to understand hashed time lock contracts well enough to be able to prove the concept to yourself. Not having as easy mastery of a topic off the bat leads to feeling less secure about one's ability to reason about security. (2) The specter of rising on-chain fees for commitment transactions to open payment channels.

With regard to Nano, I was happy to see a different approach to the same problem that was more intuitive. I run a small business and am waiting for the desktop and mobile wallets to come out of beta before I offer the ability to pay with Nano.

I'd be happy if something came along that was better than Nano. I have it on my todo list to look into Byteball Bytes. I am optimistic about larger scale benefits that society will enjoy from the cryptocurrency space if certain projects are successful (eg improved ease of financial auditing, information-sharing platforms with strongly reduced odds of astroturfing, disappearance of credit card fees, increased financial transparency, reduced exchange fees when traveling, banking for the unbanked, etc). Since I am optimistic about the societal benefits from the space as a whole, I want to see more developers interested in getting involved.

[nosuchthing]

Thanks for explaining where you're coming from.

It's a weird space. I see the general concept behind cryptocurrencies as bringing the same benefits you've outlined and from a technology and software perspective these projects are fascinating.

My contention with most of these projects and users is that in these specific implementations nearly every single one of the cryptocoin projects are designed to enable oligarchical wealth extraction from downstream investors - especially in the case of uninformed users/speculators who join the network later.

The question becomes of sustainability - if there's no underlying value to the asset and it relies on speculation and the supply is heavily centralized among a small pool of early adopters than there will likely be a point where buy pressure runs dry and most of the late adopters will be unable to exchange the same amount of wealth they traded into the system.

[tobik999]

You are wrong, not everyone accepts USD. If you are outside of the US it can be hard to spend those.

Rearding usenano.org, you have to keep in mind that adaption barely started like 4 months ago after the distribution ended.

You get access to Nano like with every other currency, work to receive a bit of it or exchange it with another currency.

[Poikanen]

https://usenano.org/ there you go.

[clarky07]

There is no new generation of nano. All of it is already created. There is no new production of supply. https://usenano.org/

[nosuchthing]

The point being made is, new users shouldn't opt into the system.

Old users can simply horde the supply, do nothing, and wash trade to manipulate the spot price.

Classic penny stock scam.

[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.