The Fenton Files
This page aims to capture some of the thoughts from Bruce Fenton and some of the core devs about RavenCoin, it's purpose and future. It's not comprehensive, just some of the interesting comments spotted on the community chats.
Discord 1 refers to the original discord which has since been deleted by it's owner. Discord 2 refers to the 2nd discord that was set up by the community. Links on community page.
11 July 2018 - Discord 2
From @Chatturga
Hello, everyone. I bring exciting news about the asset layer! Assuming that everything goes smoothly, the binaries to test the asset layer on testnet will be available for download on July 30th. Additionally, the target date for mainnet release has been tentatively set for October 31st. These dates give the community time to find any issues and for PR's to be processed - with October 31st also being the 1 year anniversary of the first Medium article about Ravencoin.
3 July 2018 - Discord 2
Have I mentioned that this is Game of Thrones?
GAME OF THRONES!
This space is very treacherous and risky - there is a ton of uncertainty.
A coin claiming they will “beat Bitcoin” is not credible — neither is it credible to say Bitcoin has a 100% chance of being both global money and the rails for all tokens with zero exceptions.
There are a few possible outcomes:
1) Bitcoin becomes the only chain, all projects become sidechains on Bitcoin - RVN and ALL other coins/ projects die completely (possible but unlikely / not certain enough to bet on 100%)
2) Bitcoin dies, other coin or coins / projects serve that need (unlikely)
3) Bitcoin becomes important money and important chain for tokens but other projects survive and serve large or niche markets 3a Raven is one of these survivors 3b it isn’t (This is the most likely scenario imho of the 3 — even if I felt an 80% chance of option 1 then it would still be prudent to support other coins in case BTC fails or in case any can develop a niche which serves one area better than BTC)
So if option 3 occurred and raven survived then it could be used in even a “small” niche of the possibly deca trillion dollar token market and end up being very important.
Cross chain atomic swaps and lots of other things will make cooperation between projects make sense — LTC is a good example - the project has never tried to be at odds with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was always going to do tokens — that a HQ co like Blockstream is working on this is exciting and validated the entire idea. Just a month ago all the best “experts” were saying that tokens couldn’t be put on Bitcoin or a fork of Bitcoin — this is specifically why I always used Bitcoin not raven in the periscope video examples on security tokens.
When we did these demos everyone laughed — well now the smartest devs in the space are doing what we’ve been working on for a while as well (Blockstream has worked on this a long time too)
It will be great if both Bitcoin and Raven serve markets in tokens successfully - there are certainly plenty of ways that can work — I also think other projects like ada and eos will have a good chance of surviving and several platforms will thrive for different reasons.
Anyway — being that this is Game of Thrones and in the grand timeline of global money and blockchains - we are early in season 1 ... it’s a good time to be supportive of all projects and focus on building great tech rather than “beating” someone. Also — most importantly — Blockstream is NOT a competitor of Raven - Blockstream is a company with investors and some top devs and products etc. - Ravencoin is an idea and some code / software which generates a scare digital asset.
So back to the Blockstream announcement
...If this is Game of Thrones here we are over at Raven Tower okay — and Adam Back is like the Maester from Fort Block — he just moved in and says he wants to fight white walkers with the weapon he’s been working on —
Okay I could go on :joy:...
But seriously, Blockstream is not an enemy to this project - that’s absurd - they are awesome people and high quality cypherpunks and some of the smartest people in the industry.
The “competitor” isn’t Blockstream it’s Bitcoin (for tokens!) — obviously Bitcoin is the strongest chain and it’s very unlikely raven would replace it — that was never the goal, point or idea (at least from my personal POV or imho)- the better competitor is ETH who actually has serious weaknesses.
Goal as I’ve always personally seen it is to work on this specific use case on a PROTOCOL level to see if it develops advantages overall — it has had some since day one —
Just build good stuff and keep focusing
If you want to attack someone ETH is a better target but even those folks are pretty cool — better to hope the rising tide lifts all boats!!
Yeah no one should care so much what I say — centralized authorities are bad
I love this coin and project and community — this is why I’ve given what I think is a fair share of free work to the project — but my activity shouldn’t be so relevant (and neither should anyone else’s)
I don’t see it as competition and even if so it would be silly to claim this chain is stronger than Bitcoin - imho far smarter way to look at things is the way LTC and to a lesser extent cardano does: we are all in the same ecosystem
I’ve supported raven as best I can and will continue to — I’ve done about 15 speeches and a hundred tweets and 12 interviews and I’ve received death threats and nearly daily criticisms and accusations of being a scammer / pumper because of being such a vocal supporter — I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money on support of raven — I’ve taken time from my family to fly to meet devs and I’ve spent hundreds of hours on everything from writing and research to design to chatting in forums or answering questions.
I receive zero pay and zero special coins or bonus for any work or commentary I do on Raven — Every hour I spend on Raven is uncompensated and I have to skip other paying work to do -
If people think it’s not enough or can do better then by all means hopefully they can step up and be spokespeople also — I offered to help others do so a while ago & will make more ppt etc when I can
Asset layer test net should be out in July
Blockstream moving into this is great news for the overall ecosystem
It’s a $40 trillion market
Personally I see it as very different
Raven is open source If you want to compete with a company you can Or use the code and software how you choose
2nd July 2018 - Discord 2
I have over 150,000 social media followers and announced Raven to over 2000 conference attendees at crypto conferences including Miami BTC and Texas Bitcoin Conference It was posted by many others aside from me and retweeted and reposted by many others
We had 4500 miners within a week and the network grew so fast that solo mining and cpu rigs were obsolete within two weeks
To claim that no one was on the network and that some secret miner dominated the mining is preposterous and easily provably false
In the very earliest days the network was widely distributed — the three largest miners (Overstock / Medici and three parties I don’t know who they are) each never reached more than 10-15% of hash power —- and that was only for a short few weeks or so in the earlier days
Since then the math can easily show that for anyone to have significant network power they would have to spend a significant amount on GPU rigs — the math & metrics behind this are trivial for anyone with a basic understanding of mining and crypto
It is simply impossible to have had a special advantage on the launch - all anyone could have possibly done is what early miners did:: take a big risk on early equipment-/
No one had any advantage whatsoever and there was absolutely no premine or set aside or insta mine at all
This is what is great about this tech - a blockchain is provable I guess at the ravencoin annual meeting we can ask early miners to raise hands
Blockstream is a company — raven is a protocol
We are not competing with Blockstream
