1 00:00:00,159 --> 00:00:00,674 Hey, guys! 2 00:00:01,063 --> 00:00:04,158 So as some of you may know, I previously covered IOTA in a video. 3 00:00:04,638 --> 00:00:06,540 And I was surprised to find out that the community 4 00:00:06,566 --> 00:00:08,809 didn't seem to like the review, even though 5 00:00:08,835 --> 00:00:11,325 I thought my information was unbiased and honest. 6 00:00:11,410 --> 00:00:13,459 And around the same time a project called RaiBlocks, 7 00:00:13,485 --> 00:00:15,753 which is now NANO, was catching a lot of traction. 8 00:00:16,538 --> 00:00:18,652 That caught my eye, because I was interested 9 00:00:18,652 --> 00:00:21,485 in the DAG technology as it relates to possibly 10 00:00:21,511 --> 00:00:24,358 hedging blockchain tech, but I liked the fact that 11 00:00:24,358 --> 00:00:27,997 NANO used the DAG tech in a different capacity than IOTA did. 12 00:00:28,094 --> 00:00:30,530 So in this video, as the title has already explained to you, 13 00:00:30,857 --> 00:00:31,674 I will be covering NANO. 14 00:00:32,098 --> 00:00:34,334 I already mentioned briefly that it was called RaiBlocks, 15 00:00:34,334 --> 00:00:36,169 but I just want to say that it's been officially 16 00:00:36,169 --> 00:00:39,099 rebranded and is now called NANO completely. 17 00:00:39,354 --> 00:00:40,643 So let's get into a little history. 18 00:00:41,048 --> 00:00:43,119 Colin LeMahieu is the founder of the project 19 00:00:43,145 --> 00:00:44,842 NANO and also the lead developer. 20 00:00:45,031 --> 00:00:47,180 The original whitepaper and also the first beta 21 00:00:47,180 --> 00:00:50,390 implementation of the project were published in December of 2014. 22 00:00:50,567 --> 00:00:52,486 Surprisingly enough, that means it's one of the 23 00:00:52,486 --> 00:00:54,949 first cryptocurrencies to start using DAG tech. 24 00:00:55,524 --> 00:00:58,025 Other notable ones are Byteball and IOTA, 25 00:00:58,150 --> 00:00:59,539 but I'll get into that in a little bit. 26 00:00:59,875 --> 00:01:02,829 That fact stuck out to me a lot because it felt like 27 00:01:03,015 --> 00:01:06,418 RaiBlocks, or NANO, seemingly came out of nowhere. 28 00:01:06,443 --> 00:01:09,069 And to know that the project had been around since 2014 29 00:01:09,279 --> 00:01:10,795 just sparked my interest a lot more. 30 00:01:11,030 --> 00:01:12,372 During the time the network was live 31 00:01:12,372 --> 00:01:13,674 after the genesis of the project, 32 00:01:13,804 --> 00:01:15,558 it had very little development going on. 33 00:01:15,842 --> 00:01:17,629 It also ran into a few technical issues. 34 00:01:17,844 --> 00:01:19,479 At one point, Colin actually stopped 35 00:01:19,479 --> 00:01:21,764 working on development for personal reasons. 36 00:01:21,789 --> 00:01:24,918 Then around 2016 - 2017, people from the community 37 00:01:24,918 --> 00:01:27,656 started to band together to try to push the project forward. 38 00:01:28,005 --> 00:01:30,457 And that's actually how the NANO faucet came about. 39 00:01:30,642 --> 00:01:32,960 A community member proposed this idea because they thought 40 00:01:32,960 --> 00:01:35,028 it would be a good way to distribute RaiBlocks 41 00:01:35,028 --> 00:01:37,409 at the time to everyone with low liability. 42 00:01:37,679 --> 00:01:39,274 He also volunteered to manage it. 43 00:01:39,377 --> 00:01:41,635 At that point, development just started to pick back up 44 00:01:41,969 --> 00:01:45,138 and there's contributors who have been joining more rapidly ever since. 45 00:01:45,560 --> 00:01:48,408 That brings us to present day where we've seen this rapid 46 00:01:48,408 --> 00:01:50,677 momentum and growth that's come out of NANO. 47 00:01:50,785 --> 00:01:52,269 Let's talk about distribution a little bit. 48 00:01:52,468 --> 00:01:54,014 So unlike a lot of other projects, 49 00:01:54,348 --> 00:01:55,980 NANO did not run an ICO. 50 00:01:56,375 --> 00:01:58,585 The original distribution was performed by using an 51 00:01:58,585 --> 00:02:01,422 online mining mechanism, or what's called a faucet. 52 00:02:01,638 --> 00:02:03,490 Essentially it was just a website you would go to, 53 00:02:03,490 --> 00:02:05,559 you would complete a Captcha, and then you would receive 54 00:02:05,559 --> 00:02:07,694 a small amount of the coin as a reward. 55 00:02:07,860 --> 00:02:10,901 Faucets were really popular during the genesis of the cryptocurrency movement. 56 00:02:11,354 --> 00:02:13,033 It gave people a way to get involved in the project, 57 00:02:13,133 --> 00:02:15,936 and have a little bit of the project without any liability 58 00:02:15,936 --> 00:02:18,438 or any of those pesky Know Your Customer requirements. 59 00:02:18,526 --> 00:02:22,559 When NANO started it was premined and all the available coins were kept in a genesis wallet. 60 00:02:22,861 --> 00:02:25,078 And the private key for that genesis wallet was kept 61 00:02:25,078 --> 00:02:27,314 in a safety deposit box that was held by Colin. 62 00:02:27,483 --> 00:02:29,416 Then as distribution by the faucet continued, 63 00:02:29,750 --> 00:02:31,752 he would occasionally have to go to the safety deposit box, 64 00:02:32,152 --> 00:02:34,788 take out the private key, send a transaction to the 65 00:02:34,788 --> 00:02:36,823 landing wallet so that he could fund the faucet, 66 00:02:36,823 --> 00:02:39,726 and then he would put the private key back in the safety deposit box. 67 00:02:39,805 --> 00:02:41,895 The faucet actually managed to reach a lot of people. 68 00:02:42,220 --> 00:02:46,715 The team estimates somewhere in the range of 330,000 accounts accessed the faucet. 69 00:02:47,191 --> 00:02:51,258 Those accounts were hailing mostly out of countries like Venezuela, The Philippines, and Korea. 70 00:02:51,345 --> 00:02:54,741 The faucet became very popular, for good reason, and unfortunately 71 00:02:54,741 --> 00:02:56,443 like all good things it must come to an end. 72 00:02:56,576 --> 00:02:59,346 There was a lot of issues with people accumulating 73 00:02:59,446 --> 00:03:03,083 NANO off the faucet and then immediately going to an exchange and selling it. 74 00:03:03,398 --> 00:03:07,612 They were putting a lot of sell pressure on the exchanges, and this was suppressing the price. 75 00:03:07,691 --> 00:03:10,557 Not to mention, there were endless attempts to hack the faucet which meant 76 00:03:10,557 --> 00:03:14,261 the developers of NANO, instead of appropriately spending their time working on the project, 77 00:03:14,695 --> 00:03:17,097 they were focused on trying to keep the faucet up and running. 78 00:03:17,210 --> 00:03:19,633 NANO actually got delisted from Cryptopia because 79 00:03:19,633 --> 00:03:22,302 the faucet users were abusive toward the exchange support. 80 00:03:22,684 --> 00:03:25,660 But eventually they managed to get listed on Mercatox and BitGrail. 81 00:03:25,898 --> 00:03:27,474 And unfortunately, because of all the issues 82 00:03:27,474 --> 00:03:28,775 that they were running into with the faucet, 83 00:03:28,775 --> 00:03:30,811 they ended up deciding to turn it off early. 84 00:03:31,189 --> 00:03:34,414 Only about 39% of the total original circulating 85 00:03:34,414 --> 00:03:36,861 amount of NANO is out there right now. 86 00:03:36,886 --> 00:03:39,152 They then publicly released the address to the genesis account, 87 00:03:39,286 --> 00:03:41,388 the landing wallet, and the faucet account. 88 00:03:41,735 --> 00:03:43,857 That way there's complete transparency within the community, 89 00:03:44,124 --> 00:03:47,094 and I'll put those addresses below in the description so you can see for yourself. 90 00:03:47,204 --> 00:03:48,728 No portion of the NANO coins have been kept 91 00:03:48,728 --> 00:03:50,230 from the original genesis of the project, 92 00:03:50,597 --> 00:03:54,301 and all the NANO that is in circulation right now is the total that will be distributed. 93 00:03:54,505 --> 00:03:55,539 On to the technology. 94 00:03:55,802 --> 00:03:59,858 NANO is a trustless, low-latency, third generation cryptocurrency. 95 00:04:00,136 --> 00:04:03,143 And unlike a lot of other cryptocurrencies that use normal blockchain, 96 00:04:03,510 --> 00:04:06,313 NANO utilizes what's called a block lattice structure. 97 00:04:06,526 --> 00:04:10,963 NANO's focus is for fast, free, trustless transactions from peer-to-peer. 98 00:04:11,352 --> 00:04:15,322 And that's where they mainly differ from IOTA because IOTA's focus is more machine to machine. 99 00:04:15,488 --> 00:04:17,791 The team has stated that they are more focused on micropayments 100 00:04:18,058 --> 00:04:19,659 instead of dealing with the internet of things, 101 00:04:19,926 --> 00:04:21,827 but they haven't completely ruled that out as a possible 102 00:04:21,827 --> 00:04:23,964 use case if people are interested in doing so. 103 00:04:24,063 --> 00:04:26,466 In my IOTA video I had explained what a DAG was, 104 00:04:26,466 --> 00:04:29,845 which is Directed Acyclic Graph, but I'll quickly summarize again. 105 00:04:29,870 --> 00:04:33,640 Directed means that new transactions validate preceding transactions. 106 00:04:33,806 --> 00:04:35,608 Acyclic means that it's not a circle. 107 00:04:35,893 --> 00:04:39,469 And graph refers to the fact that the block lattice also doubles as the ledger. 108 00:04:39,636 --> 00:04:43,730 When one wallet wants to send a transaction to another, that wallet creates two blocks. 109 00:04:43,872 --> 00:04:45,786 One block will go on the sender's blockchain, 110 00:04:46,052 --> 00:04:48,006 and one block will go on the receiver's blockchain. 111 00:04:48,031 --> 00:04:49,422 When the receiving party comes online, 112 00:04:49,422 --> 00:04:50,891 and their blockchain connects to the network, 113 00:04:51,158 --> 00:04:54,025 the wallet will then pocket the funds and the transaction is completed. 114 00:04:54,050 --> 00:04:57,225 Transferring funds on NANO's protocol creates two separate transactions. 115 00:04:57,614 --> 00:04:59,699 The first one deducts the amount from the sender's wallet, 116 00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:02,746 and then the second one adds the amount to the receiver's wallet. 117 00:05:02,771 --> 00:05:04,838 Each send transaction must reference the owner's 118 00:05:04,838 --> 00:05:07,508 previous block in order to prevent a double spend. 119 00:05:07,786 --> 00:05:10,975 NANO uses a Delegated Proof of Stake system, or DPoS. 120 00:05:11,412 --> 00:05:14,181 If you don't know what that means, pop over to my Crypto 101 video 121 00:05:14,181 --> 00:05:16,817 where I cover consensus protocols so you can get a better idea. 122 00:05:16,957 --> 00:05:19,553 Basically, this just means that users have the ability to choose 123 00:05:19,553 --> 00:05:21,863 a representative node to vote on their behalf. 124 00:05:21,888 --> 00:05:23,332 The voting system is balance weighted. 125 00:05:23,768 --> 00:05:26,026 And what that means is the weight of the representative vote 126 00:05:26,026 --> 00:05:29,456 is directly proportional to the amount of NANO that's linked to their account. 127 00:05:29,481 --> 00:05:32,876 The greater the amount of NANO linked to the representative, the stronger the vote will be. 128 00:05:33,210 --> 00:05:34,835 There's a public list of the representatives, 129 00:05:34,835 --> 00:05:36,520 and I will leave that link in the description. 130 00:05:36,545 --> 00:05:38,438 It's important to note that the NANO architecture 131 00:05:38,438 --> 00:05:41,408 also utilizes Proof of Work in a very minor capacity. 132 00:05:41,767 --> 00:05:43,504 They use it as an anti-spam measure. 133 00:05:43,750 --> 00:05:47,380 Essentially because the NANO network doesn't require transaction fees, 134 00:05:47,614 --> 00:05:49,449 somebody could indefinitely spam it. 135 00:05:49,566 --> 00:05:50,884 With the Proof of Work implementation, 136 00:05:51,051 --> 00:05:53,186 each block requires a very small amount of work. 137 00:05:53,751 --> 00:05:56,509 Five seconds to generate, and one microsecond to validate. 138 00:05:56,629 --> 00:05:58,392 This would force a malicious actor to dedicate 139 00:05:58,392 --> 00:06:00,293 a lot of computing power to carry out an attack, 140 00:06:00,794 --> 00:06:04,431 while simultaneously only requiring a very small amount from individual users, 141 00:06:04,865 --> 00:06:06,766 overall preventing a much bigger problem. 142 00:06:06,912 --> 00:06:10,070 NANO has desktop wallets that are available to Macs, Linux, and Windows. 143 00:06:10,070 --> 00:06:12,123 And there's also the availability of a web wallet. 144 00:06:12,266 --> 00:06:15,208 The team is very active on their Discord server and within their community. 145 00:06:15,449 --> 00:06:19,130 They were a great resource for me to help ask questions to get some information for this video. 146 00:06:19,607 --> 00:06:21,181 Not to mention that they just rebranded, 147 00:06:21,181 --> 00:06:24,255 so I think overall that shows dedication for the project long term. 148 00:06:24,280 --> 00:06:25,796 So that brings us to the present day. 149 00:06:25,939 --> 00:06:29,759 And the current market cap sits at about USD$133 million. 150 00:06:30,204 --> 00:06:32,355 And Nano is at number 23 on CoinMarketCap. 151 00:06:32,783 --> 00:06:35,092 Not to mention the rebranding which I touched on before. 152 00:06:35,338 --> 00:06:37,507 That just happened, well, today. 153 00:06:37,943 --> 00:06:40,033 Looking forward to 2018 on their Roadmap, 154 00:06:40,200 --> 00:06:42,168 they would like to create a lite wallet at some point. 155 00:06:42,598 --> 00:06:44,337 They also said that they would like to do some 156 00:06:44,337 --> 00:06:46,837 chain pruning on the network to reduce the size of it. 157 00:06:46,862 --> 00:06:47,883 On to the Pros. 158 00:06:48,091 --> 00:06:50,794 I would like to start off by saying that the team was very receptive. 159 00:06:50,988 --> 00:06:52,446 Everybody was very easy to get a hold of 160 00:06:52,446 --> 00:06:55,015 and there's a lot of communication going on in the Discord server. 161 00:06:55,410 --> 00:06:58,551 They were also very transparent and forthcoming about the genesis of the project, 162 00:06:58,919 --> 00:07:01,488 how they started, and they were willing to answer questions for me, 163 00:07:01,821 --> 00:07:03,287 the things that I couldn't find online. 164 00:07:03,312 --> 00:07:07,127 I would also like to point out so far there's been no significant drama with the team, 165 00:07:07,394 --> 00:07:10,030 and within the crypto community that's a pretty big accomplishment. 166 00:07:10,116 --> 00:07:11,797 I also love the way that the project started. 167 00:07:11,964 --> 00:07:13,701 I think that utilizing the faucet idea 168 00:07:13,967 --> 00:07:16,803 was a great way to get people involved and distribute the coin 169 00:07:17,070 --> 00:07:20,014 without anybody feeling like maybe there was a risk involved. 170 00:07:20,039 --> 00:07:22,009 Another pro would be their rebranding for me 171 00:07:22,009 --> 00:07:23,418 because I think that the old name 172 00:07:23,443 --> 00:07:25,312 RaiBlocks was a bit of a misnomer 173 00:07:25,645 --> 00:07:27,781 considering they didn't use a traditional blockchain 174 00:07:28,081 --> 00:07:29,390 and they used a block lattice. 175 00:07:29,415 --> 00:07:30,817 And unlike some of it's competitors, 176 00:07:30,884 --> 00:07:32,218 it doesn't have a central authority 177 00:07:32,485 --> 00:07:34,688 managing transactions or maintaining the network. 178 00:07:34,921 --> 00:07:37,590 So this is a fully decentralized cryptocurrency. 179 00:07:37,736 --> 00:07:38,743 On to the Cons. 180 00:07:38,910 --> 00:07:42,603 I would have started off by saying that they need to rebrand, but they already did that. 181 00:07:43,200 --> 00:07:46,232 And in the same light, as much as I like the faucet idea, 182 00:07:46,366 --> 00:07:48,702 it still is essentially a premined coin. 183 00:07:48,815 --> 00:07:51,137 I mentioned this in my IOTA video, so I'll mention it here. 184 00:07:51,695 --> 00:07:56,417 DAG technology does not have the amount of testing let's say that the blockchain does. 185 00:07:56,694 --> 00:08:00,080 So we don't know if it gets to Bitcoin-sized transactions 186 00:08:00,413 --> 00:08:02,482 if the speed or the efficiency of the network 187 00:08:02,749 --> 00:08:04,145 is going to be compromised. 188 00:08:04,170 --> 00:08:07,387 Another issue is if in theory an attacker bought up millions 189 00:08:07,387 --> 00:08:09,522 of NANO they could carry out a voting attack. 190 00:08:09,809 --> 00:08:13,026 NANO does recognize this as a weakness and a possible issue, 191 00:08:13,318 --> 00:08:15,053 but they don't see it as a large threat 192 00:08:15,195 --> 00:08:17,999 because of the fact that an attacker would have to buy up an 193 00:08:18,025 --> 00:08:20,908 extraordinarily large amount of money to pull that off. 194 00:08:20,934 --> 00:08:22,135 All in all, if you're interested 195 00:08:22,135 --> 00:08:24,604 in DAG technology as a hedge for the blockchain, 196 00:08:24,871 --> 00:08:28,008 and you don't really like IOTA, then NANO might be for you. 197 00:08:28,161 --> 00:08:31,269 My normal disclaimer applies to this video and all of my other videos. 198 00:08:31,594 --> 00:08:33,746 Please do not take my opinion as trading advice, 199 00:08:33,746 --> 00:08:36,616 and please do your own research if you're going to invest in something. 200 00:08:36,812 --> 00:08:39,251 As always, I appreciate you guys coming to watch my videos. 201 00:08:39,379 --> 00:08:41,321 If you disagree with me and you want to tell me why, 202 00:08:41,688 --> 00:08:43,365 feel free to come on my Discord and hang out. 203 00:08:43,390 --> 00:08:44,691 We're in there pretty frequently. 204 00:08:45,038 --> 00:08:48,094 And also I've started making podcast versions of these videos. 205 00:08:48,094 --> 00:08:49,686 Obviously, it's just audio only. 206 00:08:50,003 --> 00:08:52,593 But I put them on my Patreon account and they are there for contributors. 207 00:08:52,763 --> 00:08:55,458 So if you are interested, I will link my Patreon in the description. 208 00:08:55,823 --> 00:08:57,904 And again, thank you for coming and stopping by, 209 00:08:59,372 --> 00:08:59,877 and I will see you guys soon.