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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 d

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+captcha https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raiblock+captch... https://github.com/nanocurrency/raiblocks/wiki/Design-features 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 9y ago
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 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 9y ago
To a close approximation, the first couple million bitcoins were created for free as well.
- nosuchthing 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Sounds like a pretty good way to drive adoption.
    - nosuchthing 9y ago
      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-e39db233c28e https://medium.com/@balajis/quantifying-decentralization-e39...
tobik999 9y ago
You are describing the problem of all currencies, ie also dollar. If no one accepts your dollar you are screwed.
- nosuchthing 9y ago
  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/1464096684955433613 http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/... https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support tl;dr cryptocurrencies don't really work for the real world.
  - brendanw 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - Poikanen 9y ago
hndamien 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.

brendanw 9y ago

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 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 9y ago

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

nosuchthing 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Sounds like a pretty good way to drive adoption.
  - nosuchthing 9y ago
    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-e39db233c28e https://medium.com/@balajis/quantifying-decentralization-e39...

tobik999 9y ago

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

nosuchthing 9y ago
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/1464096684955433613 http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/... https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support tl;dr cryptocurrencies don't really work for the real world.
- brendanw 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Poikanen 9y ago

hndamien 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.