I've been getting deeper and deeper into RaiBlocks and how it works (and obviously I've been in Steem for a long time now), so I'd just like to point out a few more things that might be impactful on rates of adoption between these two technologies as an actual currency.
- Steem's blockchain is growing fast (which is awesome and terrifying at the same time) because it contains much more than just transfers. Steem has actual content, votes, etc, where as RaiBlocks simply has transfers. This is important when we're talking about the size of the blockchain and exchanges willingness to integrate. Steem's coming up on almost 2 years now and at a size of 57gb and our blocks aren't even full. I can't imagine how fast this is going to grow if we actually start filling blocks.
- With RaiBlocks (and many other cryptocurrencies), you can just download the wallet and an address is generated for you. This unfortunately isn't the case with Steem, which makes it's adoption much harder. If I am out with a friend, I can literally just have them download the wallet and then instantly send them XRB (or BTC or whatever). With Steem, I have to either create an account for them (and pay) or have them sign up and wait for it's approval (and fee paid) by Steemit Inc.
Great post, I enjoyed reading your take on the comparison of the two!
Nice comparison, indeed XRB has that edge going for them when it comes to account creation / wallets. It's easy to adopt in that sense, although adoption in the sense of return and frequency of use might be lacking since there's not much else to it. I've always thought the content bloat could be solved at some point. Pruning, compression, etc. And must the entire 57gb be on high-performance memory?
I can hope for the day when we have some sort of instant and free account creation here on steemit (even if it's an account name that looks like an address)!
To answer your question, no, the entire 57gb doesn't have to be kept in high performance memory if you're running a seed node or a witness node. For those types of servers we just breached 20gb though. If you're running a full node though, that's a different story. In order to run the account history plugin with in a high performance mode you need more than 256gb of RAM at this point, which is insane.
Will it be possible to have instant and free account on Steem? I think Raiblocks' design that moves away from a global data structure has its perks then which it can scale right away. Although they mentioned that it's only engineered for the simple task of transfer, I wonder if what kind of applications can be built on top of it.
That's a great question, I'd like to believe Steem can do free/instant accounts, but I know others may disagree. It's a big hinderance for Steem that it requires payment for the creation of an account.
Flipping to RaiBlocks, I know I've read about people wanting to fork XRB for smart contracts, but it's all rumors and speculation at this point. It's likely possible to do with the block lattice structure, but who knows when we'll see it :)
Each account being a chain itself kinda complies with my long-term hold requirement of having atomic ownership (like with the case of https://pillarproject.io/) so it's pretty exciting stuff!
Thank you for the information