Various things have brought me to reconsider, alternatives to Bitcoin’s proof of work and this points me at rchain.coop, because I know it. They are implementing a proof of stake based blockchain with a co-op based governance structure. Here are my notes …
It seemed it failed. Here is its twitter, and it’s goodbye announcement, Aug 2022 which is on its discord space.
The RChain Board and Cooperative are dissolved. After the President of RChain Cooperative left, we discovered that RChain as a company was in an unrepairable state. We cannot bring it back to life due to existing legal, financial and logistical issues, and the inability to control assets promptly. Our best assets are the community and our development team, and we are more than ever determined to keep the technology alive, and we will deliver LLBM (Leaderless Block Merge) and decentralization. We want you to join in to make this project successful for everyone. We encourage people to keep their wallets safe by using an offline wallet and we are taking daily snapshots. Our cooperation as individuals is just beginning.
I wonder if this story is part of the explanation. It’s dated 2019, how the hell did I get involved in this?
While reviewing David Rosenthal’s article, Crypto: my part in its downfall, I wrote,
It would seem that the start of rchain’s failure was the crypto-crash and its contractually flawed funding arrangements involving private coins and a guaranteed code delivery. Both failures led to a loss of control from the coders and the co-op to the venture capitalists, there remain some stories about strange investments, but again the problem would seem to have been the interface between the real and virtual currency. (The funding arrangement included a transfer of ownership control from the coop to the funding entities which had no interest in innovating the infrastructure or proving if a co-op based on proof of stake could/would work).
Another part of the problem is seems is that despite calling the project a co-op, they sold/gave/staked coins i.e. ownership stake to 3rd parties and allowed individuals or companies to hold more than one vote. It became a plutocracy and not a co-op.
Links
- https://rchain.coop/, includes the join me button
- https://rchain.coop/community
- https://blog.rchain.coop/
- The RChain code at github
- Proof of stake by wikipedia
One of my things is can this be used to distribute DNS, and I was pointed at this rchain app, Dappy. , which seems so much more than that, maybe its a whale-proof blog platform unlike steemit, and digg.
They have implemented a chat app, over zulip.
On proof of stake, there is a penalty to affirming an error block, what does this mean.
I need to work out how to help them prove a stake.
One of the vulnerabilities of bitcoin/blockchain is the governance model, and here is an illustration of bitcoin’s code history.
On reading the geekwire story, see above, I wrote, “For various reasons, I played with rchain three years ago. I find it hard to believe that the story wasn’t more broadly known at the time. It seems it went under, fundamentally, due to theft; which seems a bit of trend. DAO, STX and RChain, to which we can add Steemit. The latter at least seemingly being a ponzi scheme, although I am not sure how value is created on that blockchain.
The article finished with, a quote from, Kenny Rowe, who ex RChain COO on his resignation said,
On the basis of history, I am beging to wonder whether it’s possible to build a democratic block chain.
Inspired by Rosenthal, I added some comments on rchain’s failure due to a weakening of the governance model.