Let's have a deeper understanding of its architecture.
Introduction
Railblocks like Iota is a new kind of chain without miners, fees and even fast transactions.
As we all know Bitcoin has a very long chain called Blockchain, RaiBlocks allows you to have your own blockchain of transactions (called block lattice), one public address may exist per account, to make the transactions faster.
The block size is limited to 128 bits per transaction and aimed to increase it to 128 65,527 bytes for IPv6.(UDP packet size).
Like IOTA which transactions get attached to the “tangle”, which is a directed-acyclic-graph (DAG) data structure, XRB is a however a bit different. In Iota when a transaction has enough weight, the transaction will exhibit a “confirmed” status, this confirmation could be as quick as seconds when there is a sufficient flow of transactions across the network, in Raiblocks there is a different confirmation system based on “representatives”. In general, all that is needed is your cryptographic signature on your “send” and “receive” blocks. When the node syncs, it runs through the ledger to ensure that the signatures are authentic.
Each node produces a block that will be sent via UDP packets to the second node, in Bitcoin a transaction is sent to the unconfirmed pool then will be pulled into a block the miners created.
There is differents kind of blocks, a sender block, a receiver block and a change block appearing when a fork occurs, unlike Bitcoin when all the amount is sent and returned to the owner without the amount sent. For example, transferring funds from one account to another requires two
transactions: a send deducting the amount from the sender’s balance and a receive adding the amount to the receiving account’s balance.
Since every chain is run by a personal node (program running on your pc) the blockchains are inherently asynchronous. The ledger is a global account where each account has its own transaction chain but only an account owner can modify its chain via its signature. Don't worry, users don't have to be online to receive funds. The current full ledger size is on the order of 3 GB for the last two years transactions compare to Iota that is 5-10GB. You can also connect with the node and keep the last block containing your current amount of money without having to save it all.
It's saving time and the fees are free because there are no miners to confirmed the transaction, but because it's a POS system it's less robust.
It's working with a POS system to check in case of a double spending creating a fork which is the right transaction to approve (like Bitcoin), and a PoW in RaiBlocks is simply used as an anti-spam tool, similar to Hashcash, and can be computed on the order of seconds.
Recently we saw the DDOS attack on Bitcoin making the transactions time longer and the fees reaching the sky to DDOS this system we only have to buy 33% of the market cap.
Centralization
**The network **has no central authorities managing transactions on the network so it can be decentralized. The only issue is a potential attack vector, whereby a malicious entity may buy up millions of dollars worth of XRB and carry out a voting attack, in order to make such an attack the attacker would need 50% of the coins supplied.
Their actual max supply is about 133,248,290 MXRB, where 1 MXRB represents 10³⁰ (or 1 nonillion) raw RaiBlock units. The max supply can be denoted as roughly 133e36, or 133 undecillion raw RaiBlocks.Meaning with 39 digits.
For instance the max supply of IOTA is 2,779,530,283,277,761 IOTAs (or roughly 2.8 quadrillion IOTAs). it is a small number compare to it, now think about Bitcoin (21 million)
Privacy
The node/ wallet use a modified ED25519 algorithm to makes brute-force attacks against stolen private keys far slower.
They are using Blake2b encryption for the hashing data - FYI Blake2b is stronger than a single SHA-256 and Bitcoin use SHA-256(SHA-256). Since the hashing algorithm is only
used to prevent network spam, the algorithm choice is less important when compared to mining-based cryptocurrencies.
Team
Railblock Creator Colin Lemahieu - Software tools engineer at Qualcomm
Mica Busch - Infrasture engineer at Blue Cross and Blue Shield
PartnerShip
Found any
I found an article saying that RailsBlock was like Iota, you can check here but in my eyes the system is not ready yet.
