Now to the more interesting topics:
1) I love the simplicity of the system. If there are 0 fees for transfers, what incentivizes nodes to be up and running?
2) Could you try to describe the actual protocol between the nodes? I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. The whitepaper is interesting but doesn't give you the full picture. (At least not to the uninitiated)
3) What constitutes a quorum - is it between a pre-selected subset of accounts? Or is it >50% of all balances?
4) Have you done some simulation and find the limits? How many transactions per second can it actually handle? Does it get better when there are more running nodes?
5) Is all of the supply distributed in the way described, or are there portions reserved for development? If yes, would there be bounties?
Great work!
1) I love the simplicity of the system. If there are 0 fees for transfers, what incentivizes nodes to be up and running?
2) Could you try to describe the actual protocol between the nodes? I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. The whitepaper is interesting but doesn't give you the full picture. (At least not to the uninitiated)
3) What constitutes a quorum - is it between a pre-selected subset of accounts? Or is it >50% of all balances?
4) Have you done some simulation and find the limits? How many transactions per second can it actually handle? Does it get better when there are more running nodes?
5) Is all of the supply distributed in the way described, or are there portions reserved for development? If yes, would there be bounties?
Great work!
1) Our worry with mining as an incentive is it only incentives one specific thing, indeed, a miner has no obligation or penalty to do such essentials as republishing the block chain. We're focusing our effort on minimizing footprint and resource usage and we hope this gives small interest groups the ability to usefully run a node for the out-of-chain incentives like direct fees and ideology.
2) Primary differences is in our protocol 1 block = 1 transaction, it fits inside a single UDP packet, and each transaction is processed individually. Bitcoin mining does two things, it defines an order for transactions and it also makes sure no two transactions use the same unspent output. This means even benign transactions need arbitration by the network to determine their order. We circumvent this huge class of arbitration by having each account specify an order for their own transactions, this means the network only needs to arbitrate if an account specifies more than one order, i.e. they hacked their node and are generating double spends. When this is detected, representatives send out voting rounds and change their chosen block to match the winner that they've tallied from other voters. Since transactions are processed individually this means the rest of the network can continue on while this account is being arbitrated, again focusing on keeping good-actors moving along.
3) Quorum is determined by balances, since not everyone can be online, every account can name a representative account that can vote with, but not spend their balance. The goal is to have exchanges and banks name their public node as the representative so we get a good balance of small representative nodes.
4) If there's no arbitration being done i.e. you're not generating forks there's no inherent limit on how fast it can go. It's limited only by bandwidth and i/o. Each account is anti-spam limited with a small proof of work generated by the transaction generator to rate limit a single node. If you're generating forks it processes them at 32/min at the moment to limit vote traffic.
5) Our goal is to distribute the supply this way, there's no hold for developers. Details are here https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks/wiki/Distribution-and-Mining I've paid a couple bounties from my own pocket but no, we don't reserve any of the supply for bounties. We're focusing on trying to distribute to the maximum number of people. If we see indications of someone monopolizing it we might have to tweak it but that's our goal.
