RaiBlocks certainly is an interesting project, I wrote about it a week ago or so and regret not getting it back then! But I considered it to be a gamble, and didn't like how you had a minimum withdrawal of 100 RAI, on exchanges I'd rather not touch if I could avoid it.
I must disagree with your analysis of RaiBlocks, at least in part, though! You mention RaiBlocks alongside IOTA as if they are competitors, which they really aren't at all. They use similar technology, different from blockchain, but the difference between them is in their function: IOTA is meant for an Internet-of-Things world to create a machine economy where one machine can pay another machine.
RaiBlocks on the other hand focuses on one thing only: peer-to-peer payment between humans.
I believe RaiBlocks is making an attempt at digital cash whereas IOTA is making an attempt at machine economy. A lot of IOTA investors misunderstand this, I believe, and I personally don't believe we'll be ordering coffee with IOTA.
Similarly, RaiBlocks won't be used for the machine economy (much), for the same reason that Bitcoin won't. It's just not meant, built or suited for it - although you could probably create some ways to do it if you really wanted.
What makes RaiBlocks interesting especially in my eyes, is it's ability to pre-load the PoW necessary for a transaction, which means that when you're ready to make the transaction the PoW is already done and the transaction should be instant.
What concerns me about RaiBlocks is that despite revolutionary tech, it's still not Bitcoin. What I mean by that is, that it lack the adoption, network effect, security of the network and overall development that Bitcoin has. As far as I can tell, this was a project with 1 programmer who only recently hired two or three more. That's more than $1 billion USD, on 'some guy(s)', on a purely speculative hunch. Better than Bitcoin? Sure, just like every other altcoin out there. ..
Still, I'm likely to pick some up if/when it hits normal exchanges. I hear it will be on HitBTC soon?
You've made some very good points here. I wasn't clear on the fact that it isn't specifically designed for IOT but one thing that makes me question this is the extraordinary quantity of RAI available. It was certainly built to scale much larger than IOTA! Anyways, I appreciate your detailed analysis here and have upvoted to show my appreciation. Please feel free to contribute more anytime as this is extremely helpful to my readers.