WEBVTT 00:00:00.159 --> 00:00:00.674 Hey, guys! 00:00:01.063 --> 00:00:04.158 So as some of you may know, I previously covered IOTA in a video. 00:00:04.638 --> 00:00:06.540 And I was surprised to find out that the community 00:00:06.566 --> 00:00:08.809 didn't seem to like the review, even though 00:00:08.835 --> 00:00:11.325 I thought my information was unbiased and honest. 00:00:11.410 --> 00:00:13.459 And around the same time a project called RaiBlocks, 00:00:13.485 --> 00:00:15.753 which is now NANO, was catching a lot of traction. 00:00:16.538 --> 00:00:18.652 That caught my eye, because I was interested 00:00:18.652 --> 00:00:21.485 in the DAG technology as it relates to possibly 00:00:21.511 --> 00:00:24.358 hedging blockchain tech, but I liked the fact that 00:00:24.358 --> 00:00:27.997 NANO used the DAG tech in a different capacity than IOTA did. 00:00:28.094 --> 00:00:30.530 So in this video, as the title has already explained to you, 00:00:30.857 --> 00:00:31.674 I will be covering NANO. 00:00:32.098 --> 00:00:34.334 I already mentioned briefly that it was called RaiBlocks, 00:00:34.334 --> 00:00:36.169 but I just want to say that it's been officially 00:00:36.169 --> 00:00:39.099 rebranded and is now called NANO completely. 00:00:39.354 --> 00:00:40.643 So let's get into a little history. 00:00:41.048 --> 00:00:43.119 Colin LeMahieu is the founder of the project 00:00:43.145 --> 00:00:44.842 NANO and also the lead developer. 00:00:45.031 --> 00:00:47.180 The original whitepaper and also the first beta 00:00:47.180 --> 00:00:50.390 implementation of the project were published in December of 2014. 00:00:50.567 --> 00:00:52.486 Surprisingly enough, that means it's one of the 00:00:52.486 --> 00:00:54.949 first cryptocurrencies to start using DAG tech. 00:00:55.524 --> 00:00:58.025 Other notable ones are Byteball and IOTA, 00:00:58.150 --> 00:00:59.539 but I'll get into that in a little bit. 00:00:59.875 --> 00:01:02.829 That fact stuck out to me a lot because it felt like 00:01:03.015 --> 00:01:06.418 RaiBlocks, or NANO, seemingly came out of nowhere. 00:01:06.443 --> 00:01:09.069 And to know that the project had been around since 2014 00:01:09.279 --> 00:01:10.795 just sparked my interest a lot more. 00:01:11.030 --> 00:01:12.372 During the time the network was live 00:01:12.372 --> 00:01:13.674 after the genesis of the project, 00:01:13.804 --> 00:01:15.558 it had very little development going on. 00:01:15.842 --> 00:01:17.629 It also ran into a few technical issues. 00:01:17.844 --> 00:01:19.479 At one point, Colin actually stopped 00:01:19.479 --> 00:01:21.764 working on development for personal reasons. 00:01:21.789 --> 00:01:24.918 Then around 2016 - 2017, people from the community 00:01:24.918 --> 00:01:27.656 started to band together to try to push the project forward. 00:01:28.005 --> 00:01:30.457 And that's actually how the NANO faucet came about. 00:01:30.642 --> 00:01:32.960 A community member proposed this idea because they thought 00:01:32.960 --> 00:01:35.028 it would be a good way to distribute RaiBlocks 00:01:35.028 --> 00:01:37.409 at the time to everyone with low liability. 00:01:37.679 --> 00:01:39.274 He also volunteered to manage it. 00:01:39.377 --> 00:01:41.635 At that point, development just started to pick back up 00:01:41.969 --> 00:01:45.138 and there's contributors who have been joining more rapidly ever since. 00:01:45.560 --> 00:01:48.408 That brings us to present day where we've seen this rapid 00:01:48.408 --> 00:01:50.677 momentum and growth that's come out of NANO. 00:01:50.785 --> 00:01:52.269 Let's talk about distribution a little bit. 00:01:52.468 --> 00:01:54.014 So unlike a lot of other projects, 00:01:54.348 --> 00:01:55.980 NANO did not run an ICO. 00:01:56.375 --> 00:01:58.585 The original distribution was performed by using an 00:01:58.585 --> 00:02:01.422 online mining mechanism, or what's called a faucet. 00:02:01.638 --> 00:02:03.490 Essentially it was just a website you would go to, 00:02:03.490 --> 00:02:05.559 you would complete a Captcha, and then you would receive 00:02:05.559 --> 00:02:07.694 a small amount of the coin as a reward. 00:02:07.860 --> 00:02:10.901 Faucets were really popular during the genesis of the cryptocurrency movement. 00:02:11.354 --> 00:02:13.033 It gave people a way to get involved in the project, 00:02:13.133 --> 00:02:15.936 and have a little bit of the project without any liability 00:02:15.936 --> 00:02:18.438 or any of those pesky Know Your Customer requirements. 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. 00:02:22.861 --> 00:02:25.078 And the private key for that genesis wallet was kept 00:02:25.078 --> 00:02:27.314 in a safety deposit box that was held by Colin. 00:02:27.483 --> 00:02:29.416 Then as distribution by the faucet continued, 00:02:29.750 --> 00:02:31.752 he would occasionally have to go to the safety deposit box, 00:02:32.152 --> 00:02:34.788 take out the private key, send a transaction to the 00:02:34.788 --> 00:02:36.823 landing wallet so that he could fund the faucet, 00:02:36.823 --> 00:02:39.726 and then he would put the private key back in the safety deposit box. 00:02:39.805 --> 00:02:41.895 The faucet actually managed to reach a lot of people. 00:02:42.220 --> 00:02:46.715 The team estimates somewhere in the range of 330,000 accounts accessed the faucet. 00:02:47.191 --> 00:02:51.258 Those accounts were hailing mostly out of countries like Venezuela, The Philippines, and Korea. 00:02:51.345 --> 00:02:54.741 The faucet became very popular, for good reason, and unfortunately 00:02:54.741 --> 00:02:56.443 like all good things it must come to an end. 00:02:56.576 --> 00:02:59.346 There was a lot of issues with people accumulating 00:02:59.446 --> 00:03:03.083 NANO off the faucet and then immediately going to an exchange and selling it. 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. 00:03:07.691 --> 00:03:10.557 Not to mention, there were endless attempts to hack the faucet which meant 00:03:10.557 --> 00:03:14.261 the developers of NANO, instead of appropriately spending their time working on the project, 00:03:14.695 --> 00:03:17.097 they were focused on trying to keep the faucet up and running. 00:03:17.210 --> 00:03:19.633 NANO actually got delisted from Cryptopia because 00:03:19.633 --> 00:03:22.302 the faucet users were abusive toward the exchange support. 00:03:22.684 --> 00:03:25.660 But eventually they managed to get listed on Mercatox and BitGrail. 00:03:25.898 --> 00:03:27.474 And unfortunately, because of all the issues 00:03:27.474 --> 00:03:28.775 that they were running into with the faucet, 00:03:28.775 --> 00:03:30.811 they ended up deciding to turn it off early. 00:03:31.189 --> 00:03:34.414 Only about 39% of the total original circulating 00:03:34.414 --> 00:03:36.861 amount of NANO is out there right now. 00:03:36.886 --> 00:03:39.152 They then publicly released the address to the genesis account, 00:03:39.286 --> 00:03:41.388 the landing wallet, and the faucet account. 00:03:41.735 --> 00:03:43.857 That way there's complete transparency within the community, 00:03:44.124 --> 00:03:47.094 and I'll put those addresses below in the description so you can see for yourself. 00:03:47.204 --> 00:03:48.728 No portion of the NANO coins have been kept 00:03:48.728 --> 00:03:50.230 from the original genesis of the project, 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. 00:03:54.505 --> 00:03:55.539 On to the technology. 00:03:55.802 --> 00:03:59.858 NANO is a trustless, low-latency, third generation cryptocurrency. 00:04:00.136 --> 00:04:03.143 And unlike a lot of other cryptocurrencies that use normal blockchain, 00:04:03.510 --> 00:04:06.313 NANO utilizes what's called a block lattice structure. 00:04:06.526 --> 00:04:10.963 NANO's focus is for fast, free, trustless transactions from peer-to-peer. 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. 00:04:15.488 --> 00:04:17.791 The team has stated that they are more focused on micropayments 00:04:18.058 --> 00:04:19.659 instead of dealing with the internet of things, 00:04:19.926 --> 00:04:21.827 but they haven't completely ruled that out as a possible 00:04:21.827 --> 00:04:23.964 use case if people are interested in doing so. 00:04:24.063 --> 00:04:26.466 In my IOTA video I had explained what a DAG was, 00:04:26.466 --> 00:04:29.845 which is Directed Acyclic Graph, but I'll quickly summarize again. 00:04:29.870 --> 00:04:33.640 Directed means that new transactions validate preceding transactions. 00:04:33.806 --> 00:04:35.608 Acyclic means that it's not a circle. 00:04:35.893 --> 00:04:39.469 And graph refers to the fact that the block lattice also doubles as the ledger. 00:04:39.636 --> 00:04:43.730 When one wallet wants to send a transaction to another, that wallet creates two blocks. 00:04:43.872 --> 00:04:45.786 One block will go on the sender's blockchain, 00:04:46.052 --> 00:04:48.006 and one block will go on the receiver's blockchain. 00:04:48.031 --> 00:04:49.422 When the receiving party comes online, 00:04:49.422 --> 00:04:50.891 and their blockchain connects to the network, 00:04:51.158 --> 00:04:54.025 the wallet will then pocket the funds and the transaction is completed. 00:04:54.050 --> 00:04:57.225 Transferring funds on NANO's protocol creates two separate transactions. 00:04:57.614 --> 00:04:59.699 The first one deducts the amount from the sender's wallet, 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:02.746 and then the second one adds the amount to the receiver's wallet. 00:05:02.771 --> 00:05:04.838 Each send transaction must reference the owner's 00:05:04.838 --> 00:05:07.508 previous block in order to prevent a double spend. 00:05:07.786 --> 00:05:10.975 NANO uses a Delegated Proof of Stake system, or DPoS. 00:05:11.412 --> 00:05:14.181 If you don't know what that means, pop over to my Crypto 101 video 00:05:14.181 --> 00:05:16.817 where I cover consensus protocols so you can get a better idea. 00:05:16.957 --> 00:05:19.553 Basically, this just means that users have the ability to choose 00:05:19.553 --> 00:05:21.863 a representative node to vote on their behalf. 00:05:21.888 --> 00:05:23.332 The voting system is balance weighted. 00:05:23.768 --> 00:05:26.026 And what that means is the weight of the representative vote 00:05:26.026 --> 00:05:29.456 is directly proportional to the amount of NANO that's linked to their account. 00:05:29.481 --> 00:05:32.876 The greater the amount of NANO linked to the representative, the stronger the vote will be. 00:05:33.210 --> 00:05:34.835 There's a public list of the representatives, 00:05:34.835 --> 00:05:36.520 and I will leave that link in the description. 00:05:36.545 --> 00:05:38.438 It's important to note that the NANO architecture 00:05:38.438 --> 00:05:41.408 also utilizes Proof of Work in a very minor capacity. 00:05:41.767 --> 00:05:43.504 They use it as an anti-spam measure. 00:05:43.750 --> 00:05:47.380 Essentially because the NANO network doesn't require transaction fees, 00:05:47.614 --> 00:05:49.449 somebody could indefinitely spam it. 00:05:49.566 --> 00:05:50.884 With the Proof of Work implementation, 00:05:51.051 --> 00:05:53.186 each block requires a very small amount of work. 00:05:53.751 --> 00:05:56.509 Five seconds to generate, and one microsecond to validate. 00:05:56.629 --> 00:05:58.392 This would force a malicious actor to dedicate 00:05:58.392 --> 00:06:00.293 a lot of computing power to carry out an attack, 00:06:00.794 --> 00:06:04.431 while simultaneously only requiring a very small amount from individual users, 00:06:04.865 --> 00:06:06.766 overall preventing a much bigger problem. 00:06:06.912 --> 00:06:10.070 NANO has desktop wallets that are available to Macs, Linux, and Windows. 00:06:10.070 --> 00:06:12.123 And there's also the availability of a web wallet. 00:06:12.266 --> 00:06:15.208 The team is very active on their Discord server and within their community. 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. 00:06:19.607 --> 00:06:21.181 Not to mention that they just rebranded, 00:06:21.181 --> 00:06:24.255 so I think overall that shows dedication for the project long term. 00:06:24.280 --> 00:06:25.796 So that brings us to the present day. 00:06:25.939 --> 00:06:29.759 And the current market cap sits at about USD$133 million. 00:06:30.204 --> 00:06:32.355 And Nano is at number 23 on CoinMarketCap. 00:06:32.783 --> 00:06:35.092 Not to mention the rebranding which I touched on before. 00:06:35.338 --> 00:06:37.507 That just happened, well, today. 00:06:37.943 --> 00:06:40.033 Looking forward to 2018 on their Roadmap, 00:06:40.200 --> 00:06:42.168 they would like to create a lite wallet at some point. 00:06:42.598 --> 00:06:44.337 They also said that they would like to do some 00:06:44.337 --> 00:06:46.837 chain pruning on the network to reduce the size of it. 00:06:46.862 --> 00:06:47.883 On to the Pros. 00:06:48.091 --> 00:06:50.794 I would like to start off by saying that the team was very receptive. 00:06:50.988 --> 00:06:52.446 Everybody was very easy to get a hold of 00:06:52.446 --> 00:06:55.015 and there's a lot of communication going on in the Discord server. 00:06:55.410 --> 00:06:58.551 They were also very transparent and forthcoming about the genesis of the project, 00:06:58.919 --> 00:07:01.488 how they started, and they were willing to answer questions for me, 00:07:01.821 --> 00:07:03.287 the things that I couldn't find online. 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, 00:07:07.394 --> 00:07:10.030 and within the crypto community that's a pretty big accomplishment. 00:07:10.116 --> 00:07:11.797 I also love the way that the project started. 00:07:11.964 --> 00:07:13.701 I think that utilizing the faucet idea 00:07:13.967 --> 00:07:16.803 was a great way to get people involved and distribute the coin 00:07:17.070 --> 00:07:20.014 without anybody feeling like maybe there was a risk involved. 00:07:20.039 --> 00:07:22.009 Another pro would be their rebranding for me 00:07:22.009 --> 00:07:23.418 because I think that the old name 00:07:23.443 --> 00:07:25.312 RaiBlocks was a bit of a misnomer 00:07:25.645 --> 00:07:27.781 considering they didn't use a traditional blockchain 00:07:28.081 --> 00:07:29.390 and they used a block lattice. 00:07:29.415 --> 00:07:30.817 And unlike some of it's competitors, 00:07:30.884 --> 00:07:32.218 it doesn't have a central authority 00:07:32.485 --> 00:07:34.688 managing transactions or maintaining the network. 00:07:34.921 --> 00:07:37.590 So this is a fully decentralized cryptocurrency. 00:07:37.736 --> 00:07:38.743 On to the Cons. 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. 00:07:43.200 --> 00:07:46.232 And in the same light, as much as I like the faucet idea, 00:07:46.366 --> 00:07:48.702 it still is essentially a premined coin. 00:07:48.815 --> 00:07:51.137 I mentioned this in my IOTA video, so I'll mention it here. 00:07:51.695 --> 00:07:56.417 DAG technology does not have the amount of testing let's say that the blockchain does. 00:07:56.694 --> 00:08:00.080 So we don't know if it gets to Bitcoin-sized transactions 00:08:00.413 --> 00:08:02.482 if the speed or the efficiency of the network 00:08:02.749 --> 00:08:04.145 is going to be compromised. 00:08:04.170 --> 00:08:07.387 Another issue is if in theory an attacker bought up millions 00:08:07.387 --> 00:08:09.522 of NANO they could carry out a voting attack. 00:08:09.809 --> 00:08:13.026 NANO does recognize this as a weakness and a possible issue, 00:08:13.318 --> 00:08:15.053 but they don't see it as a large threat 00:08:15.195 --> 00:08:17.999 because of the fact that an attacker would have to buy up an 00:08:18.025 --> 00:08:20.908 extraordinarily large amount of money to pull that off. 00:08:20.934 --> 00:08:22.135 All in all, if you're interested 00:08:22.135 --> 00:08:24.604 in DAG technology as a hedge for the blockchain, 00:08:24.871 --> 00:08:28.008 and you don't really like IOTA, then NANO might be for you. 00:08:28.161 --> 00:08:31.269 My normal disclaimer applies to this video and all of my other videos. 00:08:31.594 --> 00:08:33.746 Please do not take my opinion as trading advice, 00:08:33.746 --> 00:08:36.616 and please do your own research if you're going to invest in something. 00:08:36.812 --> 00:08:39.251 As always, I appreciate you guys coming to watch my videos. 00:08:39.379 --> 00:08:41.321 If you disagree with me and you want to tell me why, 00:08:41.688 --> 00:08:43.365 feel free to come on my Discord and hang out. 00:08:43.390 --> 00:08:44.691 We're in there pretty frequently. 00:08:45.038 --> 00:08:48.094 And also I've started making podcast versions of these videos. 00:08:48.094 --> 00:08:49.686 Obviously, it's just audio only. 00:08:50.003 --> 00:08:52.593 But I put them on my Patreon account and they are there for contributors. 00:08:52.763 --> 00:08:55.458 So if you are interested, I will link my Patreon in the description. 00:08:55.823 --> 00:08:57.904 And again, thank you for coming and stopping by, 00:08:59.372 --> 00:08:59.877 and I will see you guys soon.