Tron Black on Ravencoin’s peer-to-peer asset transfer platform

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Tron black the developer from Raven coin Tron thank you so much for being on the show today it's a pleasure to have you here I had a Ashton expert for having me here it's a pleasure to be here you're very welcome I'm excited to learn

0:22a little bit about Raven coin the first time that I had heard of Raven coin was because it was all over social media that everybody was mining Raven coin is it an easy coin to mine or was it lucrative or is it lucrative to mine and why did it get so popular uh it has been lucrative I believe it is lucrative now we changed an algorithm to remove some

0:44of the Asics so it should be lucrative now it can be mined by anyone with the GPU originally could mine it with the CPU but the GPUs came in about three weeks into it and yes it should be should be lucrative for GPU miners which is mostly just a gaming rig or a machine you throw a bunch of video cards in mm-hmm great and for people that aren't familiar with Raven coin I know that

1:06it's based off of bitcoins codebase but it you've added in a bunch more functions one of them allowing you to create your own coins and from the blockchain could you explain a little bit more about why you chose to base it off Bitcoin and what is better than Bitcoin sure so yeah Bitcoin is just a really really solid codebase so we started with that and we we did a code fork not a chain

1:34work with a code for a big point and we added a few things we increased the issuance schedule so it's 21 billion with ABI coins we increase the block the block issuance so instead of ten minutes it's every one minute and we added the ability to create assets which is probably its most important feature so the ability to create your own token and we increase the block size as well so

2:01it's two megabyte blocks instead of one very interesting 20x is fast as big okay a lot of people want to do similar things to Bitcoin but they're afraid that either increasing the sighs or making it confirm transactions faster is going to increase centralization or you know be the downfall of Bitcoin did you guys think of that of those issues or what people

2:25would think of when you change the code based with Raven coin absolutely yeah I mean I was following those those debates for two years actually know where they started why they started going where they ended up we but we've also you know kind of analyzed the research of what it takes to propagate a block across the network those speeds etc and so yeah

2:47we're well within the limits it's been running for almost two years with no problems at all the centralization thing I think is really related to kind of if the miners have to store a very very large chain then they might not choose to do that but I when they're mining and so that can be a problem but I mean these days with disk space to terabyte of this space being a you know

3:10$50 hard drive from Costco really isn't totally and you guys have done something really interesting with the consensus algorithm for the people that are mining this x16 are you know as opposed to just basic proof of work could you talk a little bit about how you came up with this x16 are what makes it so interesting for the miners to mine and and why people are preferring that sure

3:39yes so the goal with it was actually to make we had to do two things we had them a new algorithm because we didn't want to launch a new baby chain where it could be dominated by sha-256 ASIC miners so that was that was you know one initial goal and the other one was to to kind of keep Asics at bay meaning we really didn't want you know custom hardware that could dominate you know

4:00that does lead to centralization typically big you know the thing centralizes so we basically one of the ideas from bruce fenton was to change the algorithm like every month or something Isabel problem with that if you just completely change the algorithm there's not miners for it then you lose all the security that you had built up so anyway we're having this discussion

4:23with Joel Wade he's a CTO at Ventures and what we came up with was a way to change the algorithm not just every month but every block but basically by reordering the algorithms the order that it goes through the hashes go through the algorithms based on the previous block which everybody has to know anyway otherwise they can't attempts that block to the next next part so we take the

4:46last eight bytes of the previous block I would just essentially random because it was what the mountain miners found last one and we chop that up into 16 pieces so each one being four bits which is 16 choices and so then we take 16 of those choices and take 16 algorithms in kind of it makes it random so we be forced the hash do hash to hash through that in

5:10that order and so it changes every block and then we had recently meaning last summer we had some Asics did show up and so we decided to make another chain so right now we're running x16 rv2 where we just added some bits equally tiger hash to some of those just to kind of obviously existing hardware ok so people that are mining so with this consensus

5:36item it's supposed to be more decentralized in one of the main senses is that people can't use Asics to sort of control more of the network are there still mining pools like in Bitcoin where there's a you know oh yeah there's four or five different major groups that control it and how easy is it to to try and take control or do a Sybil attack or a 51% attack on raven

5:57coin yeah it'd be it'd be pretty tough at times we've been between the fourth fourth what's most difficult a six-month the most difficult claim to attack which isn't too bad we have you know the the mining distribution is a Sierras GPU so those are kind of distributed worldwide so we don't have a large pulse of farms the pools are also pretty well distributed we have lots of tools some

6:21that we know about some that are you know hidden we don't know the names of them but they're you know they have small percentages so there's graphs that kind of show what our what our mining cool distribution isn't it's it's pretty good hmm very interesting and although you guys are based off bitcoins codebase you changed a lot of the the block sizes

6:41and the time and stuff but because of this x16 our consensus algorithm it's not as centralized and as Bitcoin and and it also doesn't have the scalability issues that we see in Bitcoin where you know there's only so much can be in a block and you have to wait ten minutes there's a huge backlog of transactions and a lot of people it's not really feasible to

7:02pay for a coffee or to pay with something with Bitcoin because you have to wait a long time for confirmations can you talk a little bit about the scalability with Ravin coin is it anywhere near where you would consider needing to up it or is it infinitely scalable and there will be no problem with the throughput as people use in transactions in their day-to-day life

7:22yeah I wish I could say it was infinitely scalable but it's not none of them are its 20x the capacity of Bitcoin and we can add to it from there I don't think we're at the limits of what we can scale to just by increasing a block size that you know that kind of thing or speeding something up there are limits though to all of these and it's how fast you can propagate the block and that's

7:46multiplied so it's a combination of both both the block time which we've made 10x and the block size which we've made 2x so that's where we get the 20 20x scale though it runs just fine there's there's other experiments and other projects out there that are running at higher capacities from that so those are things we can learn from and kind of know what

8:05the what the actual scalability limits are as much as people tend to hate it Bitcoin SD is one that's kind of pushing the limits on what's possible and so you know we basically can learn from that see what's possible definitely and you mentioned one of the other things that's different than Bitcoin is that you can create your own assets and that seems

8:26huge for business adoption and being able to create tokens similar to how aetherium has grown the whole cryptocurrency industry with the ability to easily create assets can you talk a bit a little bit about that part so far are there people creating Ravin coin assets is it helping with the adoption yeah so that was its original purpose I mean that's why we built it was to build

8:48to build a platform for creating assets we took the if people are familiar us are familiar with either counterparty or sea 20 master coin open assets any of those so really there was some that were built on top of Bitcoin we basically integrated the kind of the capabilities of those two together and then we were able to remove some of the alcohol just

9:09clunkiness that came from having a second layer and so yeah people have created assets were over 20,000 assets have been created by different people they have to have a unique unique name so some people I think are just kind of name squatting on the assets but there's also real projects that are created tokens that represent various things there's ones that represent buying

9:34futures that's wine that's in the barrel but it's not ready to drink it is aging so those tokens represent that didn't adopt wine that has that and there's there's a bunch of projects best way to find them this is our Raven wiki just look up Raven Raven wiki and we've got the projects that we kind of know about we don't nobody has to ask us permission

9:56to create an asset new stuff so you probably don't know about all of them but people are creating assets and the one we do know about you put on the Raven wiki so and if you want to go to Raven coin dot asset ash Explorer comm then you can see all the assets that are created and because we have another capability that er c20 doesn't have which is the ability to attach metadata

10:20or the information about what that's open is for in that Explorer if you see an IP FS link you can click on that and it'll tell you you know it may be it may be something that's for sale and maybe a PDF of why the token exists it might be a photograph that can be anything but that data is immutably attached to the token or so very cool I didn't know

10:38there was 20,000 assets already that sounds like it's growing nicely do you guys provide is it just like assets or are there actually people creating full decentralized applications and you guys have SDKs and and developer communities how big does this oh we have yeah we have a huge developer community a long time most of the work is actually done by the by the community we have a

10:58telegram it's not run by us we have discs or not run by us we have all kind of all those things Twitter and things like that very big community huge community in South Korea I went to a huge in South Korea soar is a meet-up of over a thousand people over the waiting list to get in the venue because they filled it up really popular over there yeah people are building second tier stuff

11:20we're helping to build second tier stuff meaning the api's that explores all of those exists yeah there's a lot a lot going on that's kind of outside just like the core protocol that we're working that's great and I read on the site that you know it's open source community driven sort of all the attributes you would want of a fully decentralized project yeah we didn't

11:42raise any money so we didn't do an ICO it's all every Raven has been mined into existence from day one no developer set-aside no pre mine no masternode that's paying developers or anything like that we have a very generous backer in Medici ventures which is owned by overstock.com the furniture retailer online retailer and they're backing Raven claim just just some

12:09developers are working on the core protocol yeah yeah I was going to ask you that you know about like a Raven coin foundation that's able to sustain itself and continue growing you know so is there financial incentive in a return for Medici and an overstock to to inject capital into Raven coin I think over over stalker Medici owns some tokens but there is no foundation yet there is talk

12:34in the community of the community actually forming a foundation just to be able to kind of make sure that we have just a place for people to come and you know talk about and think about and vote on or whatever kind of future things but it's not something that we've set up yeah and working on the software totally and how far along would you say in terms

12:58of you know fully ready for the public is the software nad already working on for two years but like is there a bunch of things in the development roadmap that are really big that are still coming out in 2020 or what are you guys working on yeah yeah so there are a few things coming out it's fully baked for Raven and straining on you know like 40 different exchanges and all of that kind

13:18of thing so the part that works like Bitcoin like a currency or whatever that that's fully baked creating your own asset creating you know the metadata about what your asset it is being able to create it on your own you pay 500 grave and create your own asset fully-baked been working since November 5th of last year it works great 20,000 plus tokens have been created you

13:36can go you know see all of those are and see what they're about there are a few more features that we're adding that are on testing it now they're I would say they're fully done but need more testing about a month worth of testing we're gonna run a bounty program just to lip or eyeballs look at it but that's messaging ability for the issuer to send a message to their token holders memos

13:57which is the ability to put information large pieces of information like an entire document with every transfer of an asset or a raven a tags and restricted assets which is really more for compliance that you're creating like a securities token and you need to make sure this thing is moving into places that we don't have kyc or accredited and might you as an issuer might be

14:17violating rules we have a tool set that's being added into it we wanted to do a second layer but there's certain things like the ability to restrict the transfer to tagged addresses that we couldn't do second layer because once you had it you could transfer it's just the way Bitcoin works and the way it's our tokens work so we're adding this kind of additional feature and then

14:36people can layer on top of that for all kinds of different things like clothing and stuff very cool and what would you say is one of Raven coins biggest needs right now in terms that growing is it more developers more strategic partners or just more people to actually use Raven coin and use the assets yeah I would say one thing we don't have because of the way we were launched and

14:58we didn't do an ICO we don't have a marketing department so this type of thing right here is how people find out about it it's a great issuance platform if you if you are looking at doing you know kind of an sto or an NGO or something like that yeah to be able to issue your own token on it you can check with your attorneys about kind of the reason and rules and things around doing

15:17that you know getting in trouble paid but it's a great platform that will help you stay compliant with those rules so it's it's that's we're building it now does that capability and that's what people are waiting for so it will compete with some of the other platforms out there that help you stay compliant awesome and if people are interested in that kind of

15:38stuff what's the best way to start following along and get involved or just learn more about it when when that comes out yeah so raven coined org and the raven wiki are kind of the two main places from there you can jump to the discord the telegram there's you know sub jack male sub you have channels within that if you're interested in specifically in in mining or issuance or

15:59tokens or or whatever there's people in there LP community is amazing friendly you know there's been kind of like you know fights and some of the other communities this one's been pretty open and super helpful it's it's almost like the early days of Bitcoin where people were like oh yeah anything so it's great that's great to hear well I'll leave those links in the

16:19description box below and that's all the time that we have today Tron but I appreciate you taking the time to talk about Raven coin and looking forward to following up in the near future all right thanks Aston appreciate