6 ms·

Nano is what Bitcoin hoped to be

89 points by donutloop 6y ago

donutloop 6y ago
Further read https://nano.org/ https://nano.org/
Clewza313 6y ago
But Nano has a fixed supply, which given what we now know of Bitcoin acts as a serious disincentive for actual use. Nobody's going to spend a currency if its value fluctuates wildly based on speculative investment booms and busts, and Nano has gone up 700% since the beginning of January: https://www.coindesk.com/price/nano https://www.coindesk.com/price/nano
- creepto 6y ago
  Yep, Nano is useless as a currency.
  - mandmandam 6y ago
    Do you guys think cutting pizza into more slices feeds more people too? For the record, Nano is the most useful and currency-like of the many crypto coins that I have seen.
    - frankbreetz 6y ago
      If one person has all the pizza and you cut it into more pieces and give it to other people wouldn't it feed more people?
      - mandmandam 6y ago
        Nano had one of the fairest and most well thought-through early distribution systems of any coin.
        lawn 6y ago
        It's incredibly funny and sad how people believe that solving a captcha on a centrally controlled website is a fair way to distribute coins. They probably took most of it themselves and nobody will ever know.
    - tom_mellior 6y ago
      What feeds people is fair access to food. If all Nano supply is controlled by people who happened to chance on the right corners of the internet in 2017, then this is not about feeding people but about rent seeking.
      - mandmandam 6y ago
        Try looking up how Nano was distributed in it's early days. It's a very different story - miles more egalitarian - than BTC or ETH, or the vast, vast majority of other assets.
        tromp 6y ago
        Airdrop by captchas is miles less egalitarian than making people mine for coins in a fair competition over decades. Worse yet, there's no way to verify that a majority of coins didn't end up in the hands of just a few people
Tepix 6y ago
Nano sounds interesting. Whitepaper at https://content.nano.org/whitepaper/Nano_Whitepaper_en.pdf https://content.nano.org/whitepaper/Nano_Whitepaper_en.pdf Has there been peer review? Does it support smart contracts? How does its consensus algorithm (and the other parts) compare to Avalanche? It sounds as if Nano is still vulnerable to a 51% attack. Does it lead to a catastrophic compromise?
- sprash 6y ago
  > It sounds as if Nano is still vulnerable to a 51% attack. Every cryptocurrency is vulnerable to a 51% attack including Bitcoin.
  - rawtxapp 6y ago
    As much as people like to complain about Bitcoin's energy usage, it makes a 51% attack prohibitively expensive and if you were to invest all that money, you'd want to make money with it rather than cause a short term disruption to the network.
    - sprash 6y ago
      If you are a central bank that can print money out of thin air you can use that money to buy the majority of the mining capacity and make bitcoin useless with a 51% attack. People that want to destroy bitcoin have no interest in making money "with it". They invest that money to destroy it.
      - rawtxapp 6y ago
        Except central banks don't live in a vacuum. If they print tons of money to buy it, that would push the price even higher, incentivizing even more miners. And I don't think central banks would want to destroy it. In many ways, many useful transactions in crypto occur in stablecoins pegged to the dollar. If anything, central bank might want to participate and innovate with everyone rather than try to destroy Bitcoin.
solarman5000 6y ago
Monero is what everyone thinks BTC is
- sprash 6y ago
  Schnorr signatures make bitcoin coinjoin transactions as efficient as Monero. Monero on the other hand might have problems with scaling because off-chain infrastructure like Lightning does not exist yet.
  - lawn 6y ago
    Just no. Monero has privacy for all transactions while hiding sender, receiver and transaction amount. Bitcoin with schnorr won't get close to that level of privacy. And Lightning Network doesn't scale well because decentralized route finding in an adverserial environment doesn't exist. (So LN will become centralized.)
    - sprash 6y ago
      So how does Monero solve the scaling problem? >So LN will become centralized. Route finding in adverserial environments lead to a more hierarchical as opposed to a mesh-like network structure, true. But it is still decentralized because if all else fails you can create your own route.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        I don't know why people pretend that LN is decentralized. Just own the fact that it's federated. Lightning was always about adding a little trust in exchange for efficiency.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chrismorgan 6y ago
> Nano only uses PoW as a means to discourage spammers similar to how it's used in emails. Email does not use any such scheme. Although people have invented a couple of things along these lines (most notably, Hashcash was an email thing a decade before it was used in Bitcoin), none is widely deployed or likely to be any time soon. Yes, there is some cryptography preventing counterfeiting emails (DKIM, ARC), but that’s just signing, not deliberately-expensive-to-compute proof of work hashing.
- atleta 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure he refers to hashcash. And while you are right, PoW is not widely used in email, I think the quote just wants to say that it's used the same way as it's used with email if/when used with email. (So the claim does not intend to be that PoW is used with email generally.)
aero- 6y ago
I think IOTA in this case is a better project focusing on a more important problem in the future (IOT) and machine to machine transacting.
- Darmody 6y ago
  With Nano you have fast transactions. With IOTA you have fast and fee-less transactions and a whole ecosystem to build things on top of. Franfurt Airport has been using IOTA to track COVID results[1] IoT hardware that works through the Tangle (IOTA's network)[2] And other nice things like fognet[3] [1]https://cointelegraph.com/news/iota-blockchain-used-to-track-covid-19-test-results-at-frankfurt-airport https://cointelegraph.com/news/iota-blockchain-used-to-track... [2]https://theindependentrepublic.com/boschs-new-iot-adaptor-xdk110-and-how-it-is-related-to-iota-miota/ https://theindependentrepublic.com/boschs-new-iot-adaptor-xd... [3]https://fognet.world/ https://fognet.world/
  - enlyth 6y ago
    Doesn't IOTA use a ternary number system for some strange reason? To me it seems like it's shitcoins all the way down
    - Darmody 6y ago
      No, they wanted to but in the end they've decided not to. Why do you thinks it is a shitcoin?
      - donutloop 6y ago
        IOTA is centralised
        Darmody 6y ago
        It is not production ready so yes, there is still a part that is centralized and it is being worked on. It is not a secret, they are very transparent about it. You can read the white paper. https://files.iota.org/papers/20200120_Coordicide_WP.pdf https://files.iota.org/papers/20200120_Coordicide_WP.pdf
theXspidy 6y ago
https://thesnippets.substack.com/p/bitcoin-records-a-new-high-of-over https://thesnippets.substack.com/p/bitcoin-records-a-new-hig...
rawtxapp 6y ago
The Bitcoin Genesis block references The Times article on 03/Jan/2009, "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". It's p2p digital cash, but at the same time, you can't ignore the reason why it's created. It's meant to be a decentralized, uncontrollable currency. When it comes to currency/store of value, you could argue that security and trustworthiness is more important than speed and fees. If you want faster and cheaper transactions, use lightning network, it's functional and growing in adoption. If you want to use a crypto that's not volatile, you can always use stablecoins. There are both centralized and decentralized stablecoins pegged to the dollar.
- orange_tee 6y ago
  But why are people so concerned about this whole currency depreciation thing? Only idiots keep their money under the mattress. Anyone with sense has their money invested in assets. I honestly don't get the big deal.
  - rawtxapp 6y ago
    If you want to invest your money in assets, you should be able to do that. If you want to hold on to your money for whatever reason, you should be able to do that too, right? Many people in the world don't have access to banking services, let alone investment services. In many cases, people with smaller net worths don't necessarily know or understand how these assets work and are easily taken advantage of by "investment advisors". If you're in a first world country making a good amount of income and have access to financial markets easily, you might not necessarily see the use case as clearly.
    - orange_tee 6y ago
      But the people shouting about the FED debasing their currency are not poor unbanked people in 3rd world countries so I don't see how your comment is relevant.
      - rawtxapp 6y ago
lawn 6y ago
Bitcoin's big invention is that miners are economically incentivized to work in the best interest of the network. Nano throws that away and says people will invest to protect the network just because. Genius? Nah, it's just dumb.
- xeromal 6y ago
  Yup, how do you obtain trust in a trustless society. Bitcoin nailed it. It's just unfortunate that sending one bitcoin at the moment uses as much power as charging a 100kwh tesla few times.
  - harwoodleon 6y ago
    Bitcoin is one of a number of ways.
- gillesjacobs 6y ago
  I see a lot of centralised digital currency projects gaining traction in the current bull market. The innovation of Bitcoin was the game theoretical incentive of mining to teach consensus on blockchain state. It would cost you more to attack the network than to cooperate. The whole value add over traditional money is the decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies. For code platforms it is the potential of fully autonomous apps that operate as long as people are paying for their use without central control. It is sad to centralised chains take off such as the Binance Smart Chain that runs on delegated proof-of-stake on just 21 validators picked by Binance. You are just playing with someone else's funny money that they control.
  - harwoodleon 6y ago
    Bitcoin is not money. It’s a system of value transfer. Nano is money, as you and I know it. Nakomoto Coefficient of nano is on a par or higher than bitcoin without the centralising forces behind mining and the insane fees.
    - donutloop 6y ago
alpineidyll3 6y ago
Gee, do you think this guy has some nano?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
binhdna 6y ago
It is sad that btc was designed to be the “internet currency”. But it has been turned into assets (store of value)
moralsupply 6y ago
Nano doesn't maintain transaction history. It only stores the current state of the ledger. Any bug or attack on the network may not be detectable immediately, and can't be recovered. Meaning: it may already be compromised, have inflation or double-spend bugs, etc. and we simply don't know it yet, but once we do, the value of the ledger immediately reaches zero. How is that "better" than Bitcoin in general?
- aww_dang 6y ago
  https://www.nanolooker.com/account/nano_11jfbz4ohcdxjjxz8kua3qw36yshyceqnxpecdjuha13zshctdz4e6y6kdi6 https://www.nanolooker.com/account/nano_11jfbz4ohcdxjjxz8kua...
- donutloop 6y ago
  Before you spread any kind of information's. Please provide some proven facts about all your assumptions otherwise it just malicious gossip and no one will trust in your advises. Ref: https://blogs.findlaw.com/injured/2009/04/when-does-gossip-cross-the-legal-line.html https://blogs.findlaw.com/injured/2009/04/when-does-gossip-c...
- Xopte 6y ago
  >Nano doesn't maintain transaction history. It only stores the current state of the ledger. False
pcstl 6y ago
I might be interested in Nano if it wasn't shilled so openly all over the internet. We're at a point where if you have even a passing interest in cryptocurrency, you'll get constantly bombarded by obvious bots spewing pre-written screeds on Nano. It really soured me on the currency as a whole.
- donutloop 6y ago
  > bots spewing pre-written screeds on Nano Please provide some cases of such attacks
student2k 6y ago
I was a nano(I preferer the raiblocks name) I realised that: -speed of transacion and low fee are really far behind in the priorities list of a store of value item. (most important are security, adaptability for example, that why I think decred will be world changing) -it is really hard for me to approve the original distribution of coins, pos problem, for me the best would be pow really hard to mine, so futures generations are not that much handicap.
- vlmutolo 6y ago
  The initial distribution of coins is my biggest problem with it for sure. I’m looking forward to someone coming up with a fair way to do coin distribution that doesn’t rely on proof of work.
brighton36 6y ago
Bitcoin hoped for number go up. Is nano number go up? Bitcoin is number go up...
- aww_dang 6y ago
  That's certainly what the narrative has become. There was a time when it was intended as a medium of exchange.
donutloop 6y ago
Nano introduction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAk2ou6EFMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAk2ou6EFMY
aww_dang 6y ago
At the end of the day NANO is useful for me. The node's API is sane. There are no big promises, hype, gotchas or surprises. It just does what it claims to do and nothing more. If that's not what you're looking for, that's fine. I'm not selling anything. Price is not equal to value or utility. I won't argue with speculators or those who ascribe to SoV rationales. We have different expectations and that's fine. Nano works for me as a permissionless, feeless medium of exchange. I'm disappointed by the quality of this discussion. Most of the false assumptions could have been resolved with cursory research. Perhaps if some of these ideas were presented in the form of a question instead of an accusation, a better discussion would have ensued. For a site that puts on airs about "intellectual curiosity" and tech literacy this is a bit disappointing. When you get into the weeds and actually write software against cryptocurrency node APIs and look at what is actually possible, many of these comments will read as flippant dismissals at best.
- mandmandam 6y ago
  Strongly agreed on every point. * Nano does what it says. Explanations of the technical aspects are easy to find. * The fact that this comment is right near the bottom while obviously clueless comments are full of discussion at the top is wild. * The early distribution was far more fair than the vast majority of other coins. * On a meta level the conversation around this topic - especially here - really ought to be better by now.
- cropcirclbureau 6y ago
  This thread is actually pretty decent compared to the usual thrashing crypto usually gets on HN.
- gnrlst 6y ago
  I have no vested interested in any cryptocurrency, but I have been researching them in the last few months due to the bull run. The polarized views on Nano are actually what drew me to research it more in depth compared to other alt coins. My findings are quite positive. - Over the last 3-4 years the community (both of users and developers) has been chugging away consistently, regardless of bull/bear markets (something that can't be said of 90% of other altcoins). - It had more of a grassroots start, and the community is creating some pretty cool projects (e.g. WeNano app) which are directly geared towards use, not promises/announcements. - It's certainly a lot greener than others (not sure how other BTC contenders measure on the energy spectrum, so won't comment further) - It's fee-less, which if you ask me is a critical aspect of a P2P, decentralized currency. I understand the game theory behind BTC's proof of work is great, but haven't the last bull runs shown what the effect is? the mining power becomes centralized and the fees become astronomical. My only gripe with Nano is with the incentives (the fee-less nature)..i.e. why should I run a node? Having said that the internet is thriving on free-based services through advertising, so maybe that's one potential avenue for running a node? Curious to hear someone experienced with Nano answer this for me.
jiofih 6y ago
I lost $1500 when their main partner exchange executed their scam exit. The coin was still called XRB / RaiBlocks. The timing of the whole pump and the exchange freezing transactions was very suspicious. Not touching this again with a 50m pole.
fsociety 6y ago
Feels like Reddit is spilling into HN a bit too much, shilling cryptocurrencies so that you can sell your investment and make a large bag of cash.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  We could say the same about the uniformed, knee-jerk, anti-Nano sentiment here. Engage with good faith on the merits. Castigating those you disagree with as shills or bots isn't the start of a high quality discussion.
noxer 6y ago
Unfortunately Nano's fee-less is a "lie". Long before Nano was created the XRPL team created the first blockchain (DLT) without PoW or PoS and without incentives (fees) for node operators. This lead to a new problem, spam transactions. If transactions are free nothing stops people from sending coins in circles which puts load on the network and thus costs other people real money. The 2 obvious ways to mitigate this is to either add a fee or make the sender solve a little time-consuming math problem (PoW). the XRPL devs wanted to avoid PoW for all the obvious reasons, but fees have also their downside. mainly it creates an incentive and it suddenly makes every transaction that does not include at lest X amount of fee (more than the processing cost) a "negative" Tx i.e. one that all node operators have a reasonable reason to exclude. This kind of potentially exclude valid Tx, even if there is plenty of capacity, is bad for the network. Users loose the confidence of knowing that a valid Tx will always be included. They would need to intentionally overpay in fees. The XRPL devs decided to mitigate this by adding a fee but its burnt instead of paid to someone. By burning "money" you proof that your Tx is actually worth something to you. How much you burn is basically irrelevant. The network decided whats the minimum and as long as the network inst at full capacity the minimum guarantees that the Tx will be included by all nodes. Only if the network reaches max throughput it would priories the Tx that burn more. This way an spammer would need to send thousands of Tx every second AND each one of them must burn more than every other legit Tx is willing to burn, to stop everyone from makings Tx go trough. Now to Nano. They had basically the same problem but choose PoW instead so they can claim its "fee-less" while in reality you pay the "fee" as PoW (energy+hardware+time). Its so minuscule that most user dont even notice that there is a PoW needed. But its there anyway and it comes with the flaws PoW has. Mainly its wasting resources and it does a objectively worse job at preventing spam. Remember above I explained that a spammer on the XRPL would need to send thousands of Tx and burn (pay) more than every other valid Tx to block them. So the attacker has to be willing to pay more than all user combined. Nano's PoW means an attacker has to do more PoW than all legit user combined but that does NOT mean he has to pay more. PoW, unlike burning, can be optimized. Special hardware, location (cheap energy) and in general doing PoW at large scale, allays will be way way more efficient than what each legit user does. If thousand user do a total of 1000 Tx and it costs them 0.1 cent (PoW) combined then a single user doing PoW for 1000Tx can certainly do it for way way less then 0.1 cent. However if 1000 user do a total of 1000 Tx each burns 0.0001 cent (total 0.1 cent) there is no shortcut. A single user would have to burn exactly the same 0.1 cent no way to optimize. Another negative effect of PoW is that it is not future proof for low-power device. Imagine some kind of smart sensor or other IoT device that does Tx. It has some tiny tiny "CPU" that may be able to do the PoW for a Tx in a reasonable time. But what about in 10 years? The PoW per Tx inevitably has to rise over time. Compare that to burning X times more in fees per Tx 10 years from now - doesn't matter the tiny "CPU" will work exactly the same. (yes, I know you could offload the PoW to another device yada yada yada but K.I.S.S.) tl;dr: Nano made a bad decision to make transaction "fees" be paid in PoW for the "benefit" of calling it fee-less.

89 points by donutloop 6y ago

Further read https://nano.org/ https://nano.org/

But Nano has a fixed supply, which given what we now know of Bitcoin acts as a serious disincentive for actual use. Nobody's going to spend a currency if its value fluctuates wildly based on speculative investment booms and busts, and Nano has gone up 700% since the beginning of January: https://www.coindesk.com/price/nano https://www.coindesk.com/price/nano

creepto 6y ago
Yep, Nano is useless as a currency.
- mandmandam 6y ago
  Do you guys think cutting pizza into more slices feeds more people too? For the record, Nano is the most useful and currency-like of the many crypto coins that I have seen.
  - frankbreetz 6y ago
    If one person has all the pizza and you cut it into more pieces and give it to other people wouldn't it feed more people?
    - mandmandam 6y ago
      Nano had one of the fairest and most well thought-through early distribution systems of any coin.
      - lawn 6y ago
        It's incredibly funny and sad how people believe that solving a captcha on a centrally controlled website is a fair way to distribute coins. They probably took most of it themselves and nobody will ever know.
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    What feeds people is fair access to food. If all Nano supply is controlled by people who happened to chance on the right corners of the internet in 2017, then this is not about feeding people but about rent seeking.
    - mandmandam 6y ago
      Try looking up how Nano was distributed in it's early days. It's a very different story - miles more egalitarian - than BTC or ETH, or the vast, vast majority of other assets.
      - tromp 6y ago
        Airdrop by captchas is miles less egalitarian than making people mine for coins in a fair competition over decades. Worse yet, there's no way to verify that a majority of coins didn't end up in the hands of just a few people

Tepix 6y ago

Nano sounds interesting. Whitepaper at https://content.nano.org/whitepaper/Nano_Whitepaper_en.pdf https://content.nano.org/whitepaper/Nano_Whitepaper_en.pdf Has there been peer review? Does it support smart contracts? How does its consensus algorithm (and the other parts) compare to Avalanche? It sounds as if Nano is still vulnerable to a 51% attack. Does it lead to a catastrophic compromise?

sprash 6y ago
> It sounds as if Nano is still vulnerable to a 51% attack. Every cryptocurrency is vulnerable to a 51% attack including Bitcoin.
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  As much as people like to complain about Bitcoin's energy usage, it makes a 51% attack prohibitively expensive and if you were to invest all that money, you'd want to make money with it rather than cause a short term disruption to the network.
  - sprash 6y ago
    If you are a central bank that can print money out of thin air you can use that money to buy the majority of the mining capacity and make bitcoin useless with a 51% attack. People that want to destroy bitcoin have no interest in making money "with it". They invest that money to destroy it.
    - rawtxapp 6y ago
      Except central banks don't live in a vacuum. If they print tons of money to buy it, that would push the price even higher, incentivizing even more miners. And I don't think central banks would want to destroy it. In many ways, many useful transactions in crypto occur in stablecoins pegged to the dollar. If anything, central bank might want to participate and innovate with everyone rather than try to destroy Bitcoin.

solarman5000 6y ago

Monero is what everyone thinks BTC is

sprash 6y ago
Schnorr signatures make bitcoin coinjoin transactions as efficient as Monero. Monero on the other hand might have problems with scaling because off-chain infrastructure like Lightning does not exist yet.
- lawn 6y ago
  Just no. Monero has privacy for all transactions while hiding sender, receiver and transaction amount. Bitcoin with schnorr won't get close to that level of privacy. And Lightning Network doesn't scale well because decentralized route finding in an adverserial environment doesn't exist. (So LN will become centralized.)
  - sprash 6y ago
    So how does Monero solve the scaling problem? >So LN will become centralized. Route finding in adverserial environments lead to a more hierarchical as opposed to a mesh-like network structure, true. But it is still decentralized because if all else fails you can create your own route.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      I don't know why people pretend that LN is decentralized. Just own the fact that it's federated. Lightning was always about adding a little trust in exchange for efficiency.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

chrismorgan 6y ago

> Nano only uses PoW as a means to discourage spammers similar to how it's used in emails. Email does not use any such scheme. Although people have invented a couple of things along these lines (most notably, Hashcash was an email thing a decade before it was used in Bitcoin), none is widely deployed or likely to be any time soon. Yes, there is some cryptography preventing counterfeiting emails (DKIM, ARC), but that’s just signing, not deliberately-expensive-to-compute proof of work hashing.

atleta 6y ago
I'm pretty sure he refers to hashcash. And while you are right, PoW is not widely used in email, I think the quote just wants to say that it's used the same way as it's used with email if/when used with email. (So the claim does not intend to be that PoW is used with email generally.)

aero- 6y ago

I think IOTA in this case is a better project focusing on a more important problem in the future (IOT) and machine to machine transacting.

Darmody 6y ago
With Nano you have fast transactions. With IOTA you have fast and fee-less transactions and a whole ecosystem to build things on top of. Franfurt Airport has been using IOTA to track COVID results[1] IoT hardware that works through the Tangle (IOTA's network)[2] And other nice things like fognet[3] [1]https://cointelegraph.com/news/iota-blockchain-used-to-track-covid-19-test-results-at-frankfurt-airport https://cointelegraph.com/news/iota-blockchain-used-to-track... [2]https://theindependentrepublic.com/boschs-new-iot-adaptor-xdk110-and-how-it-is-related-to-iota-miota/ https://theindependentrepublic.com/boschs-new-iot-adaptor-xd... [3]https://fognet.world/ https://fognet.world/
- enlyth 6y ago
  Doesn't IOTA use a ternary number system for some strange reason? To me it seems like it's shitcoins all the way down
  - Darmody 6y ago
    No, they wanted to but in the end they've decided not to. Why do you thinks it is a shitcoin?
    - donutloop 6y ago
      IOTA is centralised
      - Darmody 6y ago
        It is not production ready so yes, there is still a part that is centralized and it is being worked on. It is not a secret, they are very transparent about it. You can read the white paper. https://files.iota.org/papers/20200120_Coordicide_WP.pdf https://files.iota.org/papers/20200120_Coordicide_WP.pdf

theXspidy 6y ago

https://thesnippets.substack.com/p/bitcoin-records-a-new-high-of-over https://thesnippets.substack.com/p/bitcoin-records-a-new-hig...

rawtxapp 6y ago

The Bitcoin Genesis block references The Times article on 03/Jan/2009, "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". It's p2p digital cash, but at the same time, you can't ignore the reason why it's created. It's meant to be a decentralized, uncontrollable currency. When it comes to currency/store of value, you could argue that security and trustworthiness is more important than speed and fees. If you want faster and cheaper transactions, use lightning network, it's functional and growing in adoption. If you want to use a crypto that's not volatile, you can always use stablecoins. There are both centralized and decentralized stablecoins pegged to the dollar.

orange_tee 6y ago
But why are people so concerned about this whole currency depreciation thing? Only idiots keep their money under the mattress. Anyone with sense has their money invested in assets. I honestly don't get the big deal.
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  If you want to invest your money in assets, you should be able to do that. If you want to hold on to your money for whatever reason, you should be able to do that too, right? Many people in the world don't have access to banking services, let alone investment services. In many cases, people with smaller net worths don't necessarily know or understand how these assets work and are easily taken advantage of by "investment advisors". If you're in a first world country making a good amount of income and have access to financial markets easily, you might not necessarily see the use case as clearly.
  - orange_tee 6y ago
    But the people shouting about the FED debasing their currency are not poor unbanked people in 3rd world countries so I don't see how your comment is relevant.
    - rawtxapp 6y ago

lawn 6y ago

Bitcoin's big invention is that miners are economically incentivized to work in the best interest of the network. Nano throws that away and says people will invest to protect the network just because. Genius? Nah, it's just dumb.

xeromal 6y ago
Yup, how do you obtain trust in a trustless society. Bitcoin nailed it. It's just unfortunate that sending one bitcoin at the moment uses as much power as charging a 100kwh tesla few times.
- harwoodleon 6y ago
  Bitcoin is one of a number of ways.
gillesjacobs 6y ago
I see a lot of centralised digital currency projects gaining traction in the current bull market. The innovation of Bitcoin was the game theoretical incentive of mining to teach consensus on blockchain state. It would cost you more to attack the network than to cooperate. The whole value add over traditional money is the decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies. For code platforms it is the potential of fully autonomous apps that operate as long as people are paying for their use without central control. It is sad to centralised chains take off such as the Binance Smart Chain that runs on delegated proof-of-stake on just 21 validators picked by Binance. You are just playing with someone else's funny money that they control.
- harwoodleon 6y ago
  Bitcoin is not money. It’s a system of value transfer. Nano is money, as you and I know it. Nakomoto Coefficient of nano is on a par or higher than bitcoin without the centralising forces behind mining and the insane fees.
  - donutloop 6y ago

alpineidyll3 6y ago

Gee, do you think this guy has some nano?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

binhdna 6y ago

It is sad that btc was designed to be the “internet currency”. But it has been turned into assets (store of value)

moralsupply 6y ago

Nano doesn't maintain transaction history. It only stores the current state of the ledger. Any bug or attack on the network may not be detectable immediately, and can't be recovered. Meaning: it may already be compromised, have inflation or double-spend bugs, etc. and we simply don't know it yet, but once we do, the value of the ledger immediately reaches zero. How is that "better" than Bitcoin in general?

aww_dang 6y ago
https://www.nanolooker.com/account/nano_11jfbz4ohcdxjjxz8kua3qw36yshyceqnxpecdjuha13zshctdz4e6y6kdi6 https://www.nanolooker.com/account/nano_11jfbz4ohcdxjjxz8kua...
donutloop 6y ago
Before you spread any kind of information's. Please provide some proven facts about all your assumptions otherwise it just malicious gossip and no one will trust in your advises. Ref: https://blogs.findlaw.com/injured/2009/04/when-does-gossip-cross-the-legal-line.html https://blogs.findlaw.com/injured/2009/04/when-does-gossip-c...
Xopte 6y ago
>Nano doesn't maintain transaction history. It only stores the current state of the ledger. False

pcstl 6y ago

I might be interested in Nano if it wasn't shilled so openly all over the internet. We're at a point where if you have even a passing interest in cryptocurrency, you'll get constantly bombarded by obvious bots spewing pre-written screeds on Nano. It really soured me on the currency as a whole.

donutloop 6y ago
> bots spewing pre-written screeds on Nano Please provide some cases of such attacks

student2k 6y ago

I was a nano(I preferer the raiblocks name) I realised that: -speed of transacion and low fee are really far behind in the priorities list of a store of value item. (most important are security, adaptability for example, that why I think decred will be world changing) -it is really hard for me to approve the original distribution of coins, pos problem, for me the best would be pow really hard to mine, so futures generations are not that much handicap.

vlmutolo 6y ago
The initial distribution of coins is my biggest problem with it for sure. I’m looking forward to someone coming up with a fair way to do coin distribution that doesn’t rely on proof of work.

brighton36 6y ago

Bitcoin hoped for number go up. Is nano number go up? Bitcoin is number go up...

aww_dang 6y ago
That's certainly what the narrative has become. There was a time when it was intended as a medium of exchange.

donutloop 6y ago

Nano introduction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAk2ou6EFMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAk2ou6EFMY

aww_dang 6y ago

At the end of the day NANO is useful for me. The node's API is sane. There are no big promises, hype, gotchas or surprises. It just does what it claims to do and nothing more. If that's not what you're looking for, that's fine. I'm not selling anything. Price is not equal to value or utility. I won't argue with speculators or those who ascribe to SoV rationales. We have different expectations and that's fine. Nano works for me as a permissionless, feeless medium of exchange. I'm disappointed by the quality of this discussion. Most of the false assumptions could have been resolved with cursory research. Perhaps if some of these ideas were presented in the form of a question instead of an accusation, a better discussion would have ensued. For a site that puts on airs about "intellectual curiosity" and tech literacy this is a bit disappointing. When you get into the weeds and actually write software against cryptocurrency node APIs and look at what is actually possible, many of these comments will read as flippant dismissals at best.

mandmandam 6y ago
Strongly agreed on every point. * Nano does what it says. Explanations of the technical aspects are easy to find. * The fact that this comment is right near the bottom while obviously clueless comments are full of discussion at the top is wild. * The early distribution was far more fair than the vast majority of other coins. * On a meta level the conversation around this topic - especially here - really ought to be better by now.
cropcirclbureau 6y ago
This thread is actually pretty decent compared to the usual thrashing crypto usually gets on HN.
gnrlst 6y ago
I have no vested interested in any cryptocurrency, but I have been researching them in the last few months due to the bull run. The polarized views on Nano are actually what drew me to research it more in depth compared to other alt coins. My findings are quite positive. - Over the last 3-4 years the community (both of users and developers) has been chugging away consistently, regardless of bull/bear markets (something that can't be said of 90% of other altcoins). - It had more of a grassroots start, and the community is creating some pretty cool projects (e.g. WeNano app) which are directly geared towards use, not promises/announcements. - It's certainly a lot greener than others (not sure how other BTC contenders measure on the energy spectrum, so won't comment further) - It's fee-less, which if you ask me is a critical aspect of a P2P, decentralized currency. I understand the game theory behind BTC's proof of work is great, but haven't the last bull runs shown what the effect is? the mining power becomes centralized and the fees become astronomical. My only gripe with Nano is with the incentives (the fee-less nature)..i.e. why should I run a node? Having said that the internet is thriving on free-based services through advertising, so maybe that's one potential avenue for running a node? Curious to hear someone experienced with Nano answer this for me.

jiofih 6y ago

I lost $1500 when their main partner exchange executed their scam exit. The coin was still called XRB / RaiBlocks. The timing of the whole pump and the exchange freezing transactions was very suspicious. Not touching this again with a 50m pole.

fsociety 6y ago

Feels like Reddit is spilling into HN a bit too much, shilling cryptocurrencies so that you can sell your investment and make a large bag of cash.

aww_dang 6y ago
We could say the same about the uniformed, knee-jerk, anti-Nano sentiment here. Engage with good faith on the merits. Castigating those you disagree with as shills or bots isn't the start of a high quality discussion.

noxer 6y ago

Unfortunately Nano's fee-less is a "lie". Long before Nano was created the XRPL team created the first blockchain (DLT) without PoW or PoS and without incentives (fees) for node operators. This lead to a new problem, spam transactions. If transactions are free nothing stops people from sending coins in circles which puts load on the network and thus costs other people real money. The 2 obvious ways to mitigate this is to either add a fee or make the sender solve a little time-consuming math problem (PoW). the XRPL devs wanted to avoid PoW for all the obvious reasons, but fees have also their downside. mainly it creates an incentive and it suddenly makes every transaction that does not include at lest X amount of fee (more than the processing cost) a "negative" Tx i.e. one that all node operators have a reasonable reason to exclude. This kind of potentially exclude valid Tx, even if there is plenty of capacity, is bad for the network. Users loose the confidence of knowing that a valid Tx will always be included. They would need to intentionally overpay in fees. The XRPL devs decided to mitigate this by adding a fee but its burnt instead of paid to someone. By burning "money" you proof that your Tx is actually worth something to you. How much you burn is basically irrelevant. The network decided whats the minimum and as long as the network inst at full capacity the minimum guarantees that the Tx will be included by all nodes. Only if the network reaches max throughput it would priories the Tx that burn more. This way an spammer would need to send thousands of Tx every second AND each one of them must burn more than every other legit Tx is willing to burn, to stop everyone from makings Tx go trough. Now to Nano. They had basically the same problem but choose PoW instead so they can claim its "fee-less" while in reality you pay the "fee" as PoW (energy+hardware+time). Its so minuscule that most user dont even notice that there is a PoW needed. But its there anyway and it comes with the flaws PoW has. Mainly its wasting resources and it does a objectively worse job at preventing spam. Remember above I explained that a spammer on the XRPL would need to send thousands of Tx and burn (pay) more than every other valid Tx to block them. So the attacker has to be willing to pay more than all user combined. Nano's PoW means an attacker has to do more PoW than all legit user combined but that does NOT mean he has to pay more. PoW, unlike burning, can be optimized. Special hardware, location (cheap energy) and in general doing PoW at large scale, allays will be way way more efficient than what each legit user does. If thousand user do a total of 1000 Tx and it costs them 0.1 cent (PoW) combined then a single user doing PoW for 1000Tx can certainly do it for way way less then 0.1 cent. However if 1000 user do a total of 1000 Tx each burns 0.0001 cent (total 0.1 cent) there is no shortcut. A single user would have to burn exactly the same 0.1 cent no way to optimize. Another negative effect of PoW is that it is not future proof for low-power device. Imagine some kind of smart sensor or other IoT device that does Tx. It has some tiny tiny "CPU" that may be able to do the PoW for a Tx in a reasonable time. But what about in 10 years? The PoW per Tx inevitably has to rise over time. Compare that to burning X times more in fees per Tx 10 years from now - doesn't matter the tiny "CPU" will work exactly the same. (yes, I know you could offload the PoW to another device yada yada yada but K.I.S.S.) tl;dr: Nano made a bad decision to make transaction "fees" be paid in PoW for the "benefit" of calling it fee-less.