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Nano/Raiblocks has been around for years, the original developer was also one of the first to work on Bitcoin, apparently, and the network has been live for som

Nano/Raiblocks has been around for years, the original developer was also one of the first to work on Bitcoin, apparently, and the network has been live for some years and successfully transacting. I don’t think it’s a matter of the technology being unproven or unreliable. There was recently a 22 million dollar transaction that was both feeless and recorded to the network in <5 seconds. It seems obvious though that to adopt the protocol means sacrificing a plutocratic winner-take-all mining regime and everyone in the crypto space wants to be that winner. Why go through the trouble of developing a photonic mining system if there’s already a viable alternative to PoW/PoS in the real world being used? Why all these outlandish schemes to “green” PoW networks (that never come to fruition) when there’s a viable technology transacting at a literal 6 millionth of the cost of a single btc transaction? At a certain point, you begin to see that a large part of this space is not committed to the aims they espouse but to a kind of delirious financial brinksmanship that yields little in the way of progress but makes small numbers of people very wealthy.

meowface 5y ago
I'm sure there are many people who share the mentality you describe, but I don't think it applies to most core developers of cryptocurrency protocols, and such developers also don't make more money the more expensive mining is.
nybble41 5y ago
> Why go through the trouble of developing a photonic mining system if there’s already a viable alternative to PoW/PoS in the real world being used? Nano has some interesting ideas but also some fairly obvious flaws, most notably the fact that there is no built-in economic incentive to run a Representative node and participate in the voting. Running a node is an expensive operation (in CPU time, memory, and bandwidth) and the protocol basically leaves this important function up to individual enthusiasm or goodwill. As a result there are a limited number of active voting nodes making decisions for the network. The faucet-based initial distribution of Nano (XRB) is also arguably less egalitarian than Bitcoin's PoW-based mining rewards. If you weren't aware of Nano (RaiBlocks) while they were running the faucet then you had no chance to participate in that initial distribution. This is not quite as bad as full pre-mining where all the initial coins go to the developers and other may or may not be able to mine more later at a higher difficulty, but it seems likely that the developers and other early adopters would have received the majority of the output from the XRB faucet, which by design is all the XRB which will ever be produced.

meowface 5y ago

I'm sure there are many people who share the mentality you describe, but I don't think it applies to most core developers of cryptocurrency protocols, and such developers also don't make more money the more expensive mining is.

nybble41 5y ago

> Why go through the trouble of developing a photonic mining system if there’s already a viable alternative to PoW/PoS in the real world being used? Nano has some interesting ideas but also some fairly obvious flaws, most notably the fact that there is no built-in economic incentive to run a Representative node and participate in the voting. Running a node is an expensive operation (in CPU time, memory, and bandwidth) and the protocol basically leaves this important function up to individual enthusiasm or goodwill. As a result there are a limited number of active voting nodes making decisions for the network. The faucet-based initial distribution of Nano (XRB) is also arguably less egalitarian than Bitcoin's PoW-based mining rewards. If you weren't aware of Nano (RaiBlocks) while they were running the faucet then you had no chance to participate in that initial distribution. This is not quite as bad as full pre-mining where all the initial coins go to the developers and other may or may not be able to mine more later at a higher difficulty, but it seems likely that the developers and other early adopters would have received the majority of the output from the XRB faucet, which by design is all the XRB which will ever be produced.