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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

So, what can I do with this?

Cheap and near-instant transactions.

I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.

Let's stop and think for a moment about how practical it is to promise everyone free and instant transactions.

If they prevent spam with proof of work, why couldn't someone just do the proof of work and constantly spam the network anyway?

It quickly gets very expensive to do so.

How? If the proof of work only takes a few seconds, what prevents someone from spamming a new transaction every few seconds?

Transaction fees.

I thought the whole point is free (or very low) transaction fees?

I am very curious about this as well. In this example [0] someone was able to precompute 30k transactions in 5 hours with a single 1070. A mining farm with 100 video cards (capital cost of $40k) could generate a sustained load of 10k transactions per second. With precomputation, you could easily do an order of magnitude more damage. All of these transactions are stored permanently on the ledger as far as I can tell.

Nanoblocks does serve some purpose in my mind, but it has major issues to solve, and in no way is a catch-all solution for the scaling problems that Bitcoin has.

[0] https://hackernoon.com/stress-testing-the-raiblocks-network-...

Your calculation is wrong. One 1070 is able to produce about 1.6 txs, so 100 x 1070 are able to produce 160 txs. For a full transaction you need to do two time POW (send and receive), so if you use the same cards to receive the tx also you are only able to produce 80 txs. Right now I do not think you would harm the network up to about 10k - 50k txs (a simple laptop is able to monitor about 1k txs). So you may want to target at least 10k txs, therefore you would need more than 10k graphic cards at a cost of about $500 each at least, this sums up to $5,000,000 and as I said it is not clear that this would harm the net in any substantial way.

My calculations are based on the numbers from the article I linked to. I'm guessing they might have changed the difficulty since that blog post was written?

Regardless though, I can precompute the PoW for each transaction, so I could preprocess for a month to get a higher tps.

It was not changed yet, 30,000tx/18,000seconds=1.6txs

You're right. I did my math wrong.

>I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.

It's worth nothing that lattice/DAG based cryptocurrencies offer different security guarantees compared to blockchain based ones, so it's not fair to compare them on transaction fee/volume alone. Sort of like it's not fair to compare SQL vs NoSQL.

It's fair to compare them in terms of tx fee/volume, but excluding the different security guarantees is pretty bs.

It's also interesting to note that Nano doesn't incentives miners.

Nano has no miners ;)

Fair enough. Nothing to incentive full nodes.

Every comment I see like this makes me less interested in looking into "Raiblocks" because it sounds exactly like vested interest shilling. Low content promotion of semi-obscure altcoins repeated in every single cryptocurrency discussion thread...

If you browse my history you'll see I'm not a shill for Nano. This is the first time I ever brought it up in a comment on HN. I genuinely just like the technology - while it has some small drawbacks, the benefits (free, fast and no-mining) far outweigh them in my opinion.

So, basically a SEPA wire transfer just without using actual money?

Right, but using a "virtual" money that doesn't have counterparty risk, and cannot be counterfeited by anyone.

Since when eliminates Bitcoin counterparty risk? Also, counterfeit notes may be an issue, but counterfeit transfers are not.

I think he meant counterparty risk on the payment side (ie. no chargebacks).

Wire transfers don't have chargebacks.

From the SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme Rulebook[1]:

A Recall occurs when the Originator Bank requests to cancel a SEPA Credit Transfer. The Recall procedure must be initiated by the Originator Bank within 10 Banking Business Days after execution date of the SCT subject to the Recall.

...

A bank may initiate a Recall procedure for following reasons only:

• Duplicate sending

• Technical problems resulting in erroneous SCT(s)

• Fraudulent originated Credit Transfer

[1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/sites/default/files/K...

Fraudulent payments mean things like e.g. a bank itself was hacked.

As an account holder you cannot recall a transfer. It is not possible.

In the past it was sometimes possible to cancel a transfer before it was processed by your bank (so the transfer was not booked yet), but nowadays transfers are processed essentially immediately. Some banks have never permitted this.

Bitcoin is the only non-physical currency you can hold without counterparty risk. (If you have a bank account with EUR, and that bank freezes your account or shuts down because of bankruptcy, yo don't have access to your money.)

instead of immediately sending bitcoin itself you and an network of others basically end up trading signed transactions. when you finally want to settle you send the latest transaction to the network where it is settles on chain.

edit: i should say the final state of the wallets is settled on chain.

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