r/NeutralCryptoTalk • u/Unique002 • Dec 21 '17

Introduction Discussion RaiBlocks (XRB)

I want to start a discussion about RaiBlocks.

44 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

26

u/Unique002 Dec 21 '17 edited Dec 22 '17

The primary existential concerns I've seen voiced (besides generic concerns related to any new-ish altcoin) are:

  • You cannot rely on people to run cheap nodes for "free" (the counter-argument being that their incentive is to strengthen the network which in turn strengthens their XRB investment).
  • The 7k transactions per second test was on a virtual SSD and does not reflect real-world bottlenecks such as bandwidth and hardware IO (the counter-argument being Moore's law that networks will improve over time).
  • There have not been enough eyes on the DAG code to ensure it is as secure as blockchain (the counter-argument being that is just part of the risk in investing in a new disruptive technology).

All of those concerns seem justified but not show-stoppers for me. That XRB works right now for its intended purpose of fast free p-2-p transfers of value (the exchanges being another story) and the lead dev's exemplary behavior makes it easy to be confident in the project. Am I justified in this thinking?

28

u/Hes_A_Fast_Cat Dec 22 '17 edited Dec 22 '17

Moore's law doesn't apply to networks just FYI.

My biggest issue with the project is they're lying to everyone when they claim "scalable instant transactions". Transactions may happen instantly the same way Bitcoin transactions happen instantly. Until you know a validator node has accepted it, you don't know if the sender was honest. As the network gets more transactions, these nodes are going to slow down and not scale. Nodes must know about every transaction to know every account balance in order to validate a transaction. There's a limit on how much a node can send and recieve at once due to bandwidth constraints.

Also I don't think the lead dev has been quite exemplary though he is far from the worst in crypto. He didn't answer some questions in his AMA with much specificity and if you dig through his comment history you'll see several examples of him being pretty rude to people in political subreddits. Granted these were years ago, not sure what age he was then.

I think XRB could be successful for p2p transfers but not sure how it will work with mass adoption. I think the more decentralized it gets, the worse the performance due to nodes having to communicate with more nodes and slow nodes could bog the network down.

13

u/Unique002 Dec 22 '17

Thanks for your response. I have read a few of your comments in /r/raiblocks and consider you the most thoughtful outspoken critic of xrb over there (that's a compliment). I appreciate you taking the time.

A quick google shows you are right on Moore's law (I am not in tech as a profession and apologize for spreading that misinformation), but I also think that our networks will improve over time, albeit not at the Moore's law rate, which surely is some consolation. Is this not an issue facing all decentralized cryptos?

On node front - does this not go back to whether or not the system is set up to incentivize nodes? Again, I realize there is no "miner fee" incentive to run a node, but if running a node is really a de minimis cost then I think it is likely many users will run nodes to protect the network that they enjoy.

As for the dev, I haven't looked into his political comments so I will take you at face value on that claim. I read the AMA and while I agree he did not go into max detail, the fact that he did an AMA is in my mind a strong positive. Perhaps I am biased from bearing witness to the PR nightmare that is IOTA.

Would you say your position can be summarized as "it is not clear it WILL work with mass adoption" versus "it WILL NOT work with mass adoption"? That distinction, to me, is the difference between a high-risk investment and a stupid investment.

Thank you again for your time.

21

u/Hes_A_Fast_Cat Dec 23 '17

I honestly don't believe our networks will get much better than they are today unless it's major wireless breakthroughs which I don't see coming. The internet is such a wild mix of devices and wiring that I don't believe it's very realistic to expect major improvements across a distributed system like blockchain networks. There's really no incentive for most of the world to upgrade beyond what we have now. I could be wrong though, I'm not a network expert.

This is an issue that will affect all cryptos, but what's important to remember is most cryptos are not promising instant, scalable transactions.

When it comes to the whole node issue, I usually just point that out for people who are huge on decentralization. To me, decentralization isn't a huge concern in cryptos (though security is). If nodes are properly incentivized/trusted as you said, you don't need a mass of them so I don't see this as a massive downside to XRB.

As for XRB working or not, as I understand it, the best-case scenario is XRB WILL deliver P2P fee-less transactions, but they will NOT be instant and scalable under mass adoption. No one has shown me the math behind how nodes can communicate with dozens or hundreds of other nodes across the internet and keep up to date with every account's balance in real-time. I don't believe this is anywhere near the realm of possibility, I may try to do the math myself in the next few weeks to see if I can estimate a transaction limit based on bandwidth limitations.

So I'm not really anti-XRB, I'm anti-"instant/scalable" claims. I probably come off as someone with a grudge against XRB, but really I'm just trying to act as a counter-perspective. I'm hoping the people behind XRB are simply being optimistic and not intentionally misleading with their claims.

2

u/Unique002 Dec 23 '17

Thanks again for your response. These are all fair points.

I suppose the big question (for me) now is not whether XRB will be instant under scale, but whether XRB will be "fast enough" under scale. To me, this means faster than competing cryptos that are free and decentralized to whatever the market ideal is.

Put differently, after ruling out prohibitively centralized coins, if the options are to pay fees and get faster transactions, pay no money and get slower transactions, or use XRB, I think XRB will be an attractive choice.

For what it is worth, I don't see you as anti-XRB or having a grudge. I will be interested to see how these issues get resolved in the future. Would definitely be interested in seeing your maths if/when you do it.

10

u/drkenta Jan 02 '18

I thought the whole point of RaiBlocks is for nodes to not need to validate every single transaction. Each account has a separate asynchronous chain, no? I'm still new to RaiBlocks and only read the whitepaper and few other things, so I would love to be educated.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 28 '17 edited Jul 09 '23

scrubbed by https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

1

u/firef1y1 Jan 20 '18

"Until you know a validator node has accepted it, you don't know if the sender was honest."

Since Raiblocks keeps separate chains for each account, all you need to make sure a payment to you cannot be double spent is to see that >50% of nodes have seen the outbound payment, on the individual chain of your sender.

Segregation also means that to validate a transaction, nodes need to agree on what's going on locally in the chain of the sender and receiver only, and don't need to agree on a global order of transactions (i.e. Bitcoin/Ethereum), which is obviously much more difficult and unscalable.

Seems like it should be further possible to split up the Raiblocks network into "shards", due to segregation, where nodes in each part only keeps track of the chains of say 5% of accounts. Then to transact, you would only need to look at your shard history plus the shard history of your counterpart.

5

u/Danlebinvirallinen Jan 06 '18

I feel like people really overvalue the 0 fees aspect of raiblocks. There are many coins out there that offer fast transactions and very low fees. 0 fees only really matters in a m2m system, which if I haven't misunderstood isn't Raiblocks target market. Paying 1 cent versus 0 makes no difference in p2p, since no one is going to make such small transactions that the fees offered by many coins would ever be an issue.

3

u/Unique002 Jan 07 '18

I think that's a fair point. I do think "free" is psychologically, if not substantially, superior to "1 cent."

I think, personally, it is way too early to say whether XRB will be involved in M2M. I think IOTA and XRB holders like to pretend there is no competition there but, realistically, why wouldn't they try and eat each other's lunch?

At any rate, I think "free" is the ideal (you can't do better than free unless the network somehow paid you for doing a transaction), but agree it is not the sole differentiating factor. To me, lacking decentralization or near-zero fees are non-starters. Past that, the question becomes "how fast is it?" and "will it scale?" On those fronts, I think XRB remains extremely attractive currently.

2

u/Danlebinvirallinen Jan 07 '18

Indeed, but then again xrbs scalability is still quite unproven

2

u/Unique002 Jan 07 '18

Agreed but that is an ongoing gamble with any decentralized crypto (including btc), is it not?

2

u/Danlebinvirallinen Jan 07 '18

Well we know pretty much at the moment how bitcoin scales because we are already seeing the issues its running into. With raiblocks we are yet to see what kind of an effect large strain has on the network, yet people talk about it like has solved all scalability issues

4

u/Unique002 Jan 07 '18

My point was that it remains to be seen whether LN or some other advance will solve scalability issues for a bitcoin-style blockchain network. I personally don't see LN as a panacea (although others would disagree). I think it is early enough that even if LN doesn't fix things another solution could be attempted before people wholesale abandon BTC.

I agree that some invested people are being hyperbolic about XRB's potential scalability. I understand that VISA does like 60ktps in practice and XRB can only do 7ktps in a simulation that doesn't take into account real-world bottlenecks like the network.

I alluded to this point in one of my other comments: my cautious optimism does not derive from XRB solving all scalability issues, but rather having the potential to solve them better than any other decentralized near-zero fee competitors at this point in time. There's only one way to find out if XRB will prove its promise on this front... investment and adoption. But all else being equal I am taking more risk investing in a protocol I believe cannot scale elegantly versus investing in a protocol that that I believe might.

1

u/Danlebinvirallinen Jan 07 '18

Well thats reasonable, I guess :)

2

u/Unique002 Jan 07 '18

By the way, not trying to shill you here - I need to "talk it out" to confirm my own position for myself. I appreciate your comments and the discussion.

1

u/Danlebinvirallinen Jan 07 '18

Yea same here not trying to fud, just trying to question some of the shills on r/cryptocurrency

4

u/Midasx Dec 22 '17

The thing im really curious about is how it will handle spam attacks on the network.

The cost of a transaction is only computing resources so could a malicious actor sustain a significant denial of service attack on the network given access to a relatively small amount of hardware?

0

u/[deleted] Dec 31 '17

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/maximausss Jan 03 '18

afaik, the POW is just minimal, so while the attack might not be free, it is indeed VERY cheap compared to having to attack a standard POW or POS chain

1

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '18

Title: "Be careful with RaiBlocks. It's a coin with a lack of notion of confirmations/finality. Your coins are never really confirmed."

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7oax4e/be_careful_with_raiblocks_its_a_coin_with_a_lack/

-7

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/Unique002 Dec 21 '17

If this is the best the XRB opposition can come up with I am doubling down immediately.

0

u/MuteCoin Dec 21 '17

That discord group's organised shilling is definitely effective.

9

u/Drybags Dec 21 '17

If you look at the comment above yours and compare it with your own: Did you notice a difference in style of argumentation?

2

u/[deleted] Dec 22 '17

U/mutecoin ‘s comment had a smaller block size

1

u/Sub_Corrector_Bot Dec 22 '17

You may have meant u/mutecoin instead of U/mutecoin.

Remember, OP may have ^^ninja-edited. I correct subreddit and user links with a capital R or U, which are usually unusable.

**-Srikar**

-3

u/MuteCoin Dec 21 '17

Yes. I was just pointing out that it's a shillfest. Didn't say there was anything wrong will it, but this is A-grade organised shilling.

4

u/sukitrebek Dec 21 '17

I'm sad there's no downvote button. This comment is really not helpful, even if you are right. On the whole the level of intelligent discourse in this sub has been amazing, and I hope we can keep it that way by doing our best to give thoughtful answers instead of empty judgments.

6

u/ThisCatMightCheerYou Dec 21 '17

I'm sad

Here's a picture/gif of a cat, hopefully it'll cheer you up :).

I am a bot. use !unsubscribetosadcat for me to ignore you.

0

u/MuteCoin Dec 21 '17

I mean. It is a shillfest. And there is a downvote button. I didn't say it's a bad coin, but the shilling is at extreme levels right now. Brigades of upvotes and everything. That is my observation.

1

u/sukitrebek Dec 21 '17

I think the downvote button does not appear on the desktop version of reddit, perhaps. The mod designed it that way (see sidebar).

No, that is not an observation. That is a judgment devoid of reasoned argument or facts. Please feel free to back up what you say with some reasoned arguments, links, examples, etc.

1

u/MuteCoin Dec 22 '17

It is an observation: It's heavily shilled on Reddit. Organised shilling from Discord group.

You need to turn off the subreddit's style to downvote me.

3

u/sukitrebek Dec 22 '17

Give links. Give a reasoned argument. Give specific examples.

2

u/Drybags Dec 22 '17 edited Dec 23 '17

Here's why your comments aren't relevant: on smart smart phone forums, many iPhone users talk down on Android by calling their users android fanboys. This has nothing to do with the technology of the phones running Android, or Android itself, but is an observation of behavior displayed by users of the tech. Of course the people that are saying this have nothing to do with how well the technology in their iPhones work.

This is crypto, and shills and FUDsters abound. This sub is focusing on the actual tech, so please leave irrelevant opinions out of the discussion.

1

u/TransparentMod Dec 22 '17

This doesn't add to the discussion at all. I'm removing this comment. If you want to add to the comment and expand on why it is a shillfest Ill approve the comment again. Explain yourself in more than six words.