The RAIblocks whitepaper is worth reading just as a reference on how a technical paper should be written.<p>(Disclosure: I became interested in RAI on NYE and recently invested some money in it)<p>The RAI secret sauce is the "block lattice" design where each account is its own blockchain and you only need to care about the chains you want to do business with, unless you encounter conflicts. Conflicts are resolved by proof-of-stake voting. If you don't run a full node, you choose a representative to vote on your behalf.<p>Today I spent the afternoon playing around with a conceptual design in ClojureScript for a better desktop wallet: <a href="http://petrustheron.com/posts/xrb-wallet-concept/" rel="nofollow">http://petrustheron.com/posts/xrb-wallet-concept/</a><p>From a contrarian investor point-of-view, RAIBlocks is interesting because it is at the juncture of a terrible wallet experience, a weird name, dubious exchanges (at least UI wise), an okay website - but an excellent whitepaper and a working protocol that's free to transact on.<p>If it scales, I predict it will do well. My biggest concern is C++ as an implementation language, compared to, say OCaml that is easier to verify. I also don't have a strong feel for the robustness of the conflict resolution mechanism. However, the author is proficient and the codebase is readable.<p>The closest DAG impl. AFAIC, is Hashgraph, based on supermajority consensus that counts transactions that were "strongly witnessed", but it is patented with no coin presently for sale.
So - the currency is entirely "mined" and distributed already?<p>And that period is over? So is a small handful of a few developers/early-adopters that are trying to sell off a currency that they already own in its entirety?<p>Okay.
A word of caution: while DAG-only chains are a promising area of research for cryptocurrency data structures, there are many unresolved problems with them.<p>IOTA solves it with a centralized coordinator and claims to have decentralized solutions being planned. RaiBlocks is, in my opinion, more honest about its vulnerabilities and its progress in solving them (they say they're working on it). Since RaiBlocks has no centralized coordinator, it could come under attack as soon as a shorting market emerges for it.
Can someone help me understand.<p>If a block chain (or whatever you want to call your token of choice) doesn't have any fees, how is it different from just having a database. No fees mean that every transaction has the same value so there is no transaction prioriization other than time. This seems like a glorified eventually consistent database synchronization algorithm. In a fee based blockchain, I can pay more to get my transactions through before someone else.<p>Again... I'm not a PHD, nor am I even that smart so can someone break this down.