7 ms·

RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]

91 points by onuryavuz 9y ago

mooneater 9y ago
I would love to see a balanced discussion of pros and cons of the unusual lattice design used by raiblocks.
- joeblau 9y ago
  I would too, but this is the Cryptocurrency space; When has anything ever been balanced?
  - MadSudaca 9y ago
    Bitcoin was pretty balanced in the beginning, then money took over. Lets hope we can one day disentangle the technology from its potential for speculation.
- EthanHeilman 9y ago
  I often find myself judging cryptocurrency whitepapers by the number and breath of citations. Has the author's read previous attack papers and developed appropriate countermeasures. How does it compare to other schemes? Are the authors aware of the definitions and methods used in distributed systems? However this approach should be tempered by the fact that the Bitcoin whitepaper would score poorly on this metric.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    BTC was also closer to the ground floor of this research, you wouldn't expect it to be able to cite too many papers in similar subjects.
joeblau 9y ago
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 my transactions through before someone else. Again... I'm not a PHD, nor am I even that smart so can someone break this down.
- cies 9y ago
  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 transactions through before someone else. Yes. Either way, as long as you tx comes through "quick enough"... :)
  - joeblau 9y ago
    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 for the problem it's solving? [1] - https://cryptostream.com/token-utility/ https://cryptostream.com/token-utility/
    - sova 9y ago
      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.)
  - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
    Where is it specified how much people get paid in created coins?
- rapsey 9y ago
  > 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.
cies 9y ago
Glad to see a coin that has it's own codebase (not some fork). And the lattice approach sure is innovative :)
- neuronexmachina 9y ago
  For the curious, the repo is here: https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks Looking at the commit stats, it looks like almost all the work so far is by clemahieu. It'll be interesting to see if his codebase is solid enough to allow more contributors to easily hop in. I thought their wiki page listing potential attacks was also pretty interesting: https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks/wiki/Attacks https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks/wiki/Attacks
Mizza 9y ago
So - the currency is entirely "mined" and distributed already? And that period is over? So is a small handful of a few developers/early-adopters that are trying to sell off a currency that they already own in its entirety? Okay.
- touchofevil 9y ago
  RaiBlocks was distributed using a captcha faucet. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381323.msg14252334#msg14252334 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381323.msg14252334#...
  - pramttl 9y ago
    The only people who would have solved the captcha faucet to get coins at virtually next to nothing value at that time would be the ones who believed in the project right from the start which to me is a fair distribution scheme. ICO based distribution is usually more greed driven. In this case the developers and team were more motivated in building a new innovative blockchain protocol as opposed to raising money by simply issuing ERC20 tokens. Speaks a lot about the project in itself. And the team has even succeeded in building a beautiful, disruptive scalable protocol and currency with no transaction fee. I've tried RaiBlocks and so far have been impressed.
  - istorical 9y ago
    Which in itself is a mechanism that just spreads the incentive to hype and post to all social media channels trying to pump a coin amongst a larger pool of individuals, many of whom are desperate enough to get rich that they are willing to sit and click through captchas for pennies. Or in other words, just gets you a larger initial pool of astroturfers online.
  - coolspot 9y ago
    I.e. indian captcha solving shops.
- vorotato 9y ago
  Is it really a currency if there isn't inflation? What prevents hyperdeflation and the inevitable death of the "currency" without inflation?
oculusthrift 9y ago
the concept seems cool but the creator doesn’t inspire much hope to me
- MadSudaca 9y ago
  why's that?
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7nnf4v/yes_there_is_a_bug_in_the_xrb_node_software_no_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7nnf4v/yes_...
    - realusername 9y ago
      How is that an issue? It looks like they are trying to help.
pgt 9y ago
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 proof-of-stake voting. If you don't run a full node, you choose a representative to vote on your behalf. Today I spent the afternoon playing around with a conceptual design in ClojureScript for a better desktop wallet: http://petrustheron.com/posts/xrb-wallet-concept/ http://petrustheron.com/posts/xrb-wallet-concept/ From a contrarian investor point-of-view, RAIBlocks is interesting because it is at the juncture of a terrible wallet experience, a weird name, dubious exchanges (at least UI wise), an okay website - but an excellent whitepaper and a working protocol that's free to transact on. If it scales, I predict it will do well. My biggest concern is C++ as an implementation language, compared to, say OCaml that is easier to verify. I also don't have a strong feel for the robustness of the conflict resolution mechanism. However, the author is proficient and the codebase is readable. The closest DAG impl. AFAIC, is Hashgraph, based on supermajority consensus that counts transactions that were "strongly witnessed", but it is patented with no coin presently for sale.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  One thing that I don't get is what is the incentive to vote on tx?
  - pgt 9y ago
    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.
    - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
      So there is a conflicting tx, your software is going to vote on it automatically. How do you pick which tx is the 'clean' one and which one is the 'dirty' one?
macawfish 9y ago
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!
- KitDuncan 9y ago
  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.
  - macawfish 9y ago
    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.
CryptoPunk 9y ago
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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

91 points by onuryavuz 9y ago

mooneater 9y ago

I would love to see a balanced discussion of pros and cons of the unusual lattice design used by raiblocks.

joeblau 9y ago
I would too, but this is the Cryptocurrency space; When has anything ever been balanced?
- MadSudaca 9y ago
  Bitcoin was pretty balanced in the beginning, then money took over. Lets hope we can one day disentangle the technology from its potential for speculation.
EthanHeilman 9y ago
I often find myself judging cryptocurrency whitepapers by the number and breath of citations. Has the author's read previous attack papers and developed appropriate countermeasures. How does it compare to other schemes? Are the authors aware of the definitions and methods used in distributed systems? However this approach should be tempered by the fact that the Bitcoin whitepaper would score poorly on this metric.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  BTC was also closer to the ground floor of this research, you wouldn't expect it to be able to cite too many papers in similar subjects.

joeblau 9y ago

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 my transactions through before someone else. Again... I'm not a PHD, nor am I even that smart so can someone break this down.

cies 9y ago
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 transactions through before someone else. Yes. Either way, as long as you tx comes through "quick enough"... :)
- joeblau 9y ago
  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 for the problem it's solving? [1] - https://cryptostream.com/token-utility/ https://cryptostream.com/token-utility/
  - sova 9y ago
    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.)
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  Where is it specified how much people get paid in created coins?
rapsey 9y ago
> 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.

cies 9y ago

Glad to see a coin that has it's own codebase (not some fork). And the lattice approach sure is innovative :)

neuronexmachina 9y ago
For the curious, the repo is here: https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks Looking at the commit stats, it looks like almost all the work so far is by clemahieu. It'll be interesting to see if his codebase is solid enough to allow more contributors to easily hop in. I thought their wiki page listing potential attacks was also pretty interesting: https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks/wiki/Attacks https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks/wiki/Attacks

Mizza 9y ago

So - the currency is entirely "mined" and distributed already? And that period is over? So is a small handful of a few developers/early-adopters that are trying to sell off a currency that they already own in its entirety? Okay.

touchofevil 9y ago
RaiBlocks was distributed using a captcha faucet. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381323.msg14252334#msg14252334 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381323.msg14252334#...
- pramttl 9y ago
  The only people who would have solved the captcha faucet to get coins at virtually next to nothing value at that time would be the ones who believed in the project right from the start which to me is a fair distribution scheme. ICO based distribution is usually more greed driven. In this case the developers and team were more motivated in building a new innovative blockchain protocol as opposed to raising money by simply issuing ERC20 tokens. Speaks a lot about the project in itself. And the team has even succeeded in building a beautiful, disruptive scalable protocol and currency with no transaction fee. I've tried RaiBlocks and so far have been impressed.
- istorical 9y ago
  Which in itself is a mechanism that just spreads the incentive to hype and post to all social media channels trying to pump a coin amongst a larger pool of individuals, many of whom are desperate enough to get rich that they are willing to sit and click through captchas for pennies. Or in other words, just gets you a larger initial pool of astroturfers online.
- coolspot 9y ago
  I.e. indian captcha solving shops.
vorotato 9y ago
Is it really a currency if there isn't inflation? What prevents hyperdeflation and the inevitable death of the "currency" without inflation?

oculusthrift 9y ago

the concept seems cool but the creator doesn’t inspire much hope to me

MadSudaca 9y ago
why's that?
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7nnf4v/yes_there_is_a_bug_in_the_xrb_node_software_no_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7nnf4v/yes_...
  - realusername 9y ago
    How is that an issue? It looks like they are trying to help.

pgt 9y ago

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 proof-of-stake voting. If you don't run a full node, you choose a representative to vote on your behalf. Today I spent the afternoon playing around with a conceptual design in ClojureScript for a better desktop wallet: http://petrustheron.com/posts/xrb-wallet-concept/ http://petrustheron.com/posts/xrb-wallet-concept/ From a contrarian investor point-of-view, RAIBlocks is interesting because it is at the juncture of a terrible wallet experience, a weird name, dubious exchanges (at least UI wise), an okay website - but an excellent whitepaper and a working protocol that's free to transact on. If it scales, I predict it will do well. My biggest concern is C++ as an implementation language, compared to, say OCaml that is easier to verify. I also don't have a strong feel for the robustness of the conflict resolution mechanism. However, the author is proficient and the codebase is readable. The closest DAG impl. AFAIC, is Hashgraph, based on supermajority consensus that counts transactions that were "strongly witnessed", but it is patented with no coin presently for sale.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
One thing that I don't get is what is the incentive to vote on tx?
- pgt 9y ago
  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.
  - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
    So there is a conflicting tx, your software is going to vote on it automatically. How do you pick which tx is the 'clean' one and which one is the 'dirty' one?

macawfish 9y ago

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!

KitDuncan 9y ago
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.
- macawfish 9y ago
  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.

CryptoPunk 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]