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.
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.
You personally, perhaps none. But, there are plenty of businesses today (Exchanges, Payment gateways, Casinos) that run nodes because they make a lot more from the profits Nano brings their business than the relatively minor cost of running a node.
None of these businesses would trust a 3rd party to tell them the network state.
As cryptocurrency adoption rises and more business start adding it as a payment option (eg. online shops) it's not hard to imagine the larger ones, eg. Amazon, would run a node rather than pay 1% fee to a payment gateway service.
It's also important to note that Bitcoin also does not provide financial incentives for running full nodes (miners != nodes) and in both Nano and Bitcoin's case, there are plenty of nodes on the network.
I prefer to frame the issue differently. Feeless, not free.
Why should I pay 3rd parties to send my own crypto to my users, from my own node? I'm already paying the hosting. It isn't free. I've invested in the server.
Fees make microtransactions impossible. Running a node gives me direct access to the Nano network.
"Nano has a unique consensus mechanism called Open Representative Voting (ORV). Every account can freely choose a Representative at any time to vote on their behalf, even when the delegating account itself is offline. These Representative accounts are configured on nodes that remain online and vote on the validity of transactions they see on the network. Their voting weight is the sum of balances for accounts delegating to them, and if they have enough voting weight they become a Principal Representative. The votes these Principal Representatives send out will subsequently be rebroadcasted by other nodes.
As these votes are shared and rebroadcasted between nodes, they are tallied up and compared against the online voting weight available. Once a node sees a block get enough votes to reach quorum, that block is confirmed. Due to the lightweight nature of blocks and votes, the network is able to reach confirmation for transaction ultrafast, often in under a couple seconds. Also note that delegation of voting weight does not mean staking of any funds - the account delegating can still spend all their available funds at any time without restrictions.
Because Nano accounts can freely delegate their voting weight to representatives at any time, the users have more control over who has power with consensus and how decentralized the network is. This is a key advantage to the design of Open Representative Voting (ORV). With no direct monetary incentive for nodes, this removes emergent centralization forces for longer-term trending toward decentralization of the network."
Open Representative Voting is just a proprietary term for Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus [1]. Basically transaction validator nodes are elected by votes weighted by the sum of the amount of tokens in the voters' wallet.
Apparently Nano wanted to highlight the fact that anyone can become a validator instead of a preselected list by coining a new term.
While better than most DPoS chains there is still a higher risk of centralisation than with PoW. [2]
PoS doesn’t work for money. It works as system of value transfer for the wealthy at best. Ask the millions of stranded wallets that can’t move funds because of fees. The other arguments around centralisation are moot then, if you can’t actually use the system.
Bitcoin cannot scale well enough to be used as a global currency
.Consumes a huge amount of energy
.Is extremely slow at processing transactions, degrading usability
.Has high transaction fees, which would be even higher if it were to be more adopted
.Most people in the industry do not think that Bitcoin is/can be a day-to-day currency
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.
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.
>Transaction fee savings for businesses and organizations accepting Nano as payment
Can someone sense check me? So following that argument, a payment processor (e.g. Amazon, Stripe, all the way down to the mom and pop stores) would be incentivized to run a node in order to accept Nano and be part of the Network. Correct? But hypothetically...if Stripe knows that Amazon is running a node, why would Stripe run its own node? And if Stripe isn't running a node, why would a smaller player want to participate? I'd love to understand this as it's my only missing gripe with Nano.
> Bitcoin's big invention is that miners are economically incentivized to work in the best interest of the network.
That sure is a powerful invention, but this does not mean decentralized networks cannot exist without it. Most are running fine without any financial incentive.
There are always incentives to aid the network simply by being a user.
If Nano can provide security with a different model, why would that be "dumb"?
Incentivization of miners creates a centralization force due to economies of scale effects.
Ironically, nanos approach is itself an improvement on bitcoin's approach to consensus. Bitcoins nakamoto coefficient has been bending toward centralization whereas Nano's is bending toward decentralization. Nano's level of decentralization depends on the weighted opinion of its holders.
Bitcoin is not capable of scaling upwards. If the price of bitcoin reaches 1 millions us dollar. How much do i need to pay for one single transaction or how many miners do i need to keep bitcoin alive?
Government tries to fight climate change and bitcoin destroys all hard earned energy reductions. The network needs more energy then a whole country (today). I don't want imaging how much energy it will consume in 10 years.
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:
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
1. Get an international coalition behind a ban on PoW mining. Would make sense as part of a climate agreement.
2. Once enforcement crashes the hash rate, fire up government controlled miners to perform a 51% attack on BTC. Repeat as many times as it takes to make the point.
The question is, which states need to be convinced to join the coalition, and how hard is that? I can see pariah states like e.g. Russia seeing an opportunity in encouraging mining instead of banning it.
~65% of BTC mining capacity in operation today is operated within China, so there's no coalition needed. A single nation's governance needs to decide (or be persuaded) that it's in their interests to do so.
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.
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.
Central banks print Trillions of dollars to buy bonds right at this moment and get away with it. They live in a vacuum and can do what they want without much democratic oversight. Since all the relevant mining is happening in China nowadays the fate of bitcoin lies in the hands of the autocratic Chinese regime. If they instruct all miners to use their Chinese version of Bitcoin that e.g. dismisses all transactions and only produces empty blocks, Bitcoin is over.
One relatively cheap way to attack Bitcoin without ever owning any mining equipment at all is to create a pool (or several) and advertise no or even negative pool fees. Over time it would be possible to undercut legitimate pools and amass 51%.
Well, all current data-centric global consensus cryptocurrencies are vulnerable.
In the Holochain model (https://holo.host/) of distributed agent-centric consensus, a single non-fraudulent DHT node can detect any fraudulent transaction, and all other non-fraudulent nodes are informed of the self-incriminated fraudulent agent and transaction, confirm the fraud, and no longer respond to the fraudulent node.
So, only a 100% attack will succeed. And, the ill-gotten gains are permanently useless.
Well, in that sense Nano is immune too: every honest node agrees that only the owner of the private key can change the wallet balance. Only thing 51% can do is stall the network, it doesn't allow double spends or creating new money or reverting history.
And Holochain is not a cryptocurrency as far as I understand: while they say something about mutual-credit cryptos they definitely not the main scope of the project.
For some cryptocurrencies, a 51% attack would only be able to halt the network (prevent new transactions) but wouldn't be able to cause a double spend or other safety failures.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, the FED is debasing the currency, that's just a fact, it doesn't matter who is shouting about it, you don't need to be poor in 3rd world country.
I guess it comes down to: if you understand the markets well and can invest in them to generate a good return, more power to you. That's not the case for everyone, so if you want to hold on to your money for whatever reason, you should be able to protect yourself against endless money printing.
How much were you being paid 15-20 years ago and what could that buy you? It’s not just the third world that suffer from currency debasement, it’s all of us.
There would be an economy where only investments that return better than Bitcoin would make sense, for example: you wouldn't have the Vancouver vacant property problem, that money would go to Bitcoin instead and leave the home for someone who has an actual use for it. People also wouldn't be hoarding gold, it's value would go down and you can use it more easily in electronics.
Gold is physical, has no place as a store of value in a digital world in my opinion. You can't transfer it as easily, securing it requires people and storage, you can't divide into very small parts to trade with, etc.
Indeed, depreciation (inflation) and (hopefully) being able to control it is an important feature of fiat money: this is what motivates people to invest it as opposed to just keep it under the mattress, i.e. out of the system.
Economists may be wrong, of course (a lot of times it seems that their math models are pretty crude), but no theory seems to support that keeping your wealth locked away is good for the society. (I deliberately didn't say economy, because optimizing for economic growth alone can indeed hurt the society if we don't channel all the important aspects in somehow. Think global warming.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
> Comparing IOTA to Nano is like comparing a rock with an atomic bomb (being IOTA the bomb).
For future, when comparing A1 with B1, it's nicer if the order is maintained when comparing A2 with B2 (instead of stating that you're comparing B2 with A2, and that A2 is equivalent of A1)
"Comparing Nano to IOTA is like comparing a rock with an atomic bomb."
Combined with your follow up sentence, describing how Nano has one feature, while IOTA has that same one feature, as well as more features, there's no requirement to explicitly state that you view IOTA to be the bomb in this analogy.
I have no view on the substance of what you wrote, just the way it was written, and wanted to help. I hope this helps, and apologise if it doesn't.
Haha, I love that one of the top questions asked on that book is "Why is this book praised so much? At least textbooks have pictures", which mostly speaks to the absurdity of the platform that goodreads has become.
Either way, thanks for the tip, will add to the list!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.