6 ms·

Cheap and near-instant transactions.

M4v3R 9y ago
I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  Let's stop and think for a moment about how practical it is to promise everyone free and instant transactions. If they prevent spam with proof of work, why couldn't someone just do the proof of work and constantly spam the network anyway?
  - cmer 9y ago
    It quickly gets very expensive to do so.
    - CyberDildonics 9y ago
      How? If the proof of work only takes a few seconds, what prevents someone from spamming a new transaction every few seconds?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - darawk 9y ago
        Transaction fees.
        gruez 9y ago
        I thought the whole point is free (or very low) transaction fees?
      - xur17 9y ago
        I am very curious about this as well. In this example [0] someone was able to precompute 30k transactions in 5 hours with a single 1070. A mining farm with 100 video cards (capital cost of $40k) could generate a sustained load of 10k transactions per second. With precomputation, you could easily do an order of magnitude more damage. All of these transactions are stored permanently on the ledger as far as I can tell. Nanoblocks does serve some purpose in my mind, but it has major issues to solve, and in no way is a catch-all solution for the scaling problems that Bitcoin has. [0] https://hackernoon.com/stress-testing-the-raiblocks-network-568be62fdf6d https://hackernoon.com/stress-testing-the-raiblocks-network-...
        tobik999 9y ago
        Your calculation is wrong. One 1070 is able to produce about 1.6 txs, so 100 x 1070 are able to produce 160 txs. For a full transaction you need to do two time POW (send and receive), so if you use the same cards to receive the tx also you are only able to produce 80 txs. Right now I do not think you would harm the network up to about 10k - 50k txs (a simple laptop is able to monitor about 1k txs). So you may want to target at least 10k txs, therefore you would need more than 10k graphic cards at a cost of about $500 each at least, this sums up to $5,000,000 and as I said it is not clear that this would harm the net in any substantial way.
        xur17 9y ago
        My calculations are based on the numbers from the article I linked to. I'm guessing they might have changed the difficulty since that blog post was written? Regardless though, I can precompute the PoW for each transaction, so I could preprocess for a month to get a higher tps.
        tobik999 9y ago
        It was not changed yet, 30,000tx/18,000seconds=1.6txs
        xur17 9y ago
      - AndrewSChapman 9y ago
        The Raiblocks / Nano white paper says: 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. and "D. Penny-Spend Attack A penny-spend attack is where an attacker spends infinites- imal quantities to a large number of accounts in order to waste the storage resources of nodes. Block publishing is rate-limited by the PoW, so this limits the creation of accounts and transactions to a certain extent. Nodes that are not full historical nodes can prune accounts below a statistical metric where the account is most likely not a valid account. Finally, RaiBlocks is tuned to use minimal permanent storage space, so space required to store one additional account is proportional to the size of an open block + indexing = 96B +32B = 128B. This equates to 1GB being able to store 8 million penny-spend account. If nodes wanted to prune more aggressively, they can calculate a distribution based on access frequency and delegate infrequently used accounts to slower storage."
- gruez 9y ago
  >I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it. It's worth nothing that lattice/DAG based cryptocurrencies offer different security guarantees compared to blockchain based ones, so it's not fair to compare them on transaction fee/volume alone. Sort of like it's not fair to compare SQL vs NoSQL.
  - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
    It's fair to compare them in terms of tx fee/volume, but excluding the different security guarantees is pretty bs. It's also interesting to note that Nano doesn't incentives miners.
    - raulvbrito1705 9y ago
      Nano has no miners ;)
      - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
        Fair enough. Nothing to incentive full nodes.
- mbrock 9y ago
  Every comment I see like this makes me less interested in looking into "Raiblocks" because it sounds exactly like vested interest shilling. Low content promotion of semi-obscure altcoins repeated in every single cryptocurrency discussion thread...
  - M4v3R 9y ago
    If you browse my history you'll see I'm not a shill for Nano. This is the first time I ever brought it up in a comment on HN. I genuinely just like the technology - while it has some small drawbacks, the benefits (free, fast and no-mining) far outweigh them in my opinion.
blattimwind 9y ago
So, basically a SEPA wire transfer just without using actual money?
- siwatanejo 9y ago
  Right, but using a "virtual" money that doesn't have counterparty risk, and cannot be counterfeited by anyone.
  - blattimwind 9y ago
    Since when eliminates Bitcoin counterparty risk? Also, counterfeit notes may be an issue, but counterfeit transfers are not.
    - gruez 9y ago
      I think he meant counterparty risk on the payment side (ie. no chargebacks).
      - blattimwind 9y ago
        Wire transfers don't have chargebacks.
        def_true_false 9y ago
        From the SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme Rulebook[1]: A Recall occurs when the Originator Bank requests to cancel a SEPA Credit Transfer. The Recall procedure must be initiated by the Originator Bank within 10 Banking Business Days after execution date of the SCT subject to the Recall. ... A bank may initiate a Recall procedure for following reasons only: • Duplicate sending • Technical problems resulting in erroneous SCT(s) • Fraudulent originated Credit Transfer [1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/sites/default/files/KB/files/EPC125-05%20SCT%20RB%20v8.2%20Approved.pdf https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/sites/default/files/K...

I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.

CyberDildonics 9y ago
Let's stop and think for a moment about how practical it is to promise everyone free and instant transactions. If they prevent spam with proof of work, why couldn't someone just do the proof of work and constantly spam the network anyway?
- cmer 9y ago
  It quickly gets very expensive to do so.
  - CyberDildonics 9y ago
    How? If the proof of work only takes a few seconds, what prevents someone from spamming a new transaction every few seconds?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - darawk 9y ago
      Transaction fees.
      - gruez 9y ago
        I thought the whole point is free (or very low) transaction fees?
    - xur17 9y ago
      I am very curious about this as well. In this example [0] someone was able to precompute 30k transactions in 5 hours with a single 1070. A mining farm with 100 video cards (capital cost of $40k) could generate a sustained load of 10k transactions per second. With precomputation, you could easily do an order of magnitude more damage. All of these transactions are stored permanently on the ledger as far as I can tell. Nanoblocks does serve some purpose in my mind, but it has major issues to solve, and in no way is a catch-all solution for the scaling problems that Bitcoin has. [0] https://hackernoon.com/stress-testing-the-raiblocks-network-568be62fdf6d https://hackernoon.com/stress-testing-the-raiblocks-network-...
      - tobik999 9y ago
        Your calculation is wrong. One 1070 is able to produce about 1.6 txs, so 100 x 1070 are able to produce 160 txs. For a full transaction you need to do two time POW (send and receive), so if you use the same cards to receive the tx also you are only able to produce 80 txs. Right now I do not think you would harm the network up to about 10k - 50k txs (a simple laptop is able to monitor about 1k txs). So you may want to target at least 10k txs, therefore you would need more than 10k graphic cards at a cost of about $500 each at least, this sums up to $5,000,000 and as I said it is not clear that this would harm the net in any substantial way.
        xur17 9y ago
        My calculations are based on the numbers from the article I linked to. I'm guessing they might have changed the difficulty since that blog post was written? Regardless though, I can precompute the PoW for each transaction, so I could preprocess for a month to get a higher tps.
        tobik999 9y ago
        It was not changed yet, 30,000tx/18,000seconds=1.6txs
        xur17 9y ago
    - AndrewSChapman 9y ago
      The Raiblocks / Nano white paper says: 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. and "D. Penny-Spend Attack A penny-spend attack is where an attacker spends infinites- imal quantities to a large number of accounts in order to waste the storage resources of nodes. Block publishing is rate-limited by the PoW, so this limits the creation of accounts and transactions to a certain extent. Nodes that are not full historical nodes can prune accounts below a statistical metric where the account is most likely not a valid account. Finally, RaiBlocks is tuned to use minimal permanent storage space, so space required to store one additional account is proportional to the size of an open block + indexing = 96B +32B = 128B. This equates to 1GB being able to store 8 million penny-spend account. If nodes wanted to prune more aggressively, they can calculate a distribution based on access frequency and delegate infrequently used accounts to slower storage."
gruez 9y ago
>I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it. It's worth nothing that lattice/DAG based cryptocurrencies offer different security guarantees compared to blockchain based ones, so it's not fair to compare them on transaction fee/volume alone. Sort of like it's not fair to compare SQL vs NoSQL.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  It's fair to compare them in terms of tx fee/volume, but excluding the different security guarantees is pretty bs. It's also interesting to note that Nano doesn't incentives miners.
  - raulvbrito1705 9y ago
    Nano has no miners ;)
    - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
      Fair enough. Nothing to incentive full nodes.
mbrock 9y ago
Every comment I see like this makes me less interested in looking into "Raiblocks" because it sounds exactly like vested interest shilling. Low content promotion of semi-obscure altcoins repeated in every single cryptocurrency discussion thread...
- M4v3R 9y ago
  If you browse my history you'll see I'm not a shill for Nano. This is the first time I ever brought it up in a comment on HN. I genuinely just like the technology - while it has some small drawbacks, the benefits (free, fast and no-mining) far outweigh them in my opinion.

blattimwind 9y ago

So, basically a SEPA wire transfer just without using actual money?

siwatanejo 9y ago
Right, but using a "virtual" money that doesn't have counterparty risk, and cannot be counterfeited by anyone.
- blattimwind 9y ago
  Since when eliminates Bitcoin counterparty risk? Also, counterfeit notes may be an issue, but counterfeit transfers are not.
  - gruez 9y ago
    I think he meant counterparty risk on the payment side (ie. no chargebacks).
    - blattimwind 9y ago
      Wire transfers don't have chargebacks.
      - def_true_false 9y ago
        From the SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme Rulebook[1]: A Recall occurs when the Originator Bank requests to cancel a SEPA Credit Transfer. The Recall procedure must be initiated by the Originator Bank within 10 Banking Business Days after execution date of the SCT subject to the Recall. ... A bank may initiate a Recall procedure for following reasons only: • Duplicate sending • Technical problems resulting in erroneous SCT(s) • Fraudulent originated Credit Transfer [1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/sites/default/files/KB/files/EPC125-05%20SCT%20RB%20v8.2%20Approved.pdf https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/sites/default/files/K...