Bitcoin Forum

After 5 long years of hard work, failed attempts and lessons learnt, we present the whitepaper explaining Tempo, our ledger and consensus tech that was published this week.

You can get it at our website https://radix.global

It details how our ledger architecture allows high throughput, rapid settlement and offers a true micro-payment and IoT solution, along with the consensus algorithm which we developed to secure it.

Tempo is a completely different way of thinking, and I would STRONGLY suggest you leave anything you know about blockchain, DAG, and other ledger tech at the door, otherwise you will end up with incorrect conclusions.

This paper is the first of a set that will explain all of the Radix core features such as economics, DEX, payment rails and more.

I'll keep this short and let the paper do the talking.

As always, comments, thoughts and feedback welcome.

Oy, VB! I think your nemesis has arrived  ;)

This is the post I have been waiting on for about 4 years.  ;D

I also agree with smaragda, that the economics WP is the one that I have been chomping at the bit for, for a long time, and have had to rein myself in several times over the years.

Again Fuserleer Congratulations!

It's definitely been a long road, but the results were worth the wait.

You finally now have a solution to end all other projects and their partial attempts at a solution.

The future is now!

I can understand your excitement after finishing 5 years job but I would guess it is a little bit too early to bury blockchain.
If Radix will work in reality as you suppose it should work, it means that blockhain only lasted for 8 years. If yes, I want to see faces in Silicon valley speaking about "the most disruptive technology after invention of the internet"  ;D

Well, its works quite well.. we did a test back in April on a network, and one node on the network (mine) doing the video. Regular PC's, mine doing loads of other stuff while the nodes in the network spam each other. Video is below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw2uy_NAx7w

One node was placed in Denmark, another in the UK. So, beta test, before recent database (and other) optimizations, test network across the internet. No cheating, no preload into ram. Just a straight up test to see the status at that time.

This could get big. Really big.

Let's wait for the mainnet.

Nice to see Emunie / Radix again  :)

Congrats Dan. :)

Great to see the whitepaper out and am currently trying wrap the tech around my head.

This is so exciting. Ive looking forward to this project since i first got into crypto and heard about it.

Hi, Good to see you have a scientist in your team does he have a positive effect in development?

Really exited to see the Whitepaper released! Have been waiting on this day since 2013  ;D

I must admit I have a hard time getting my head around it though. So perhaps my question is already answered in the paper and I just didn't understand it...

So the Universe is split up in X shards. Each shard is a part of the network contain transaction information, right?
Now what happens if a bad actor (Bob) sets up a lot of nodes that store, say, Shard (2) of the network and by that stores all or at least the majority of that shard.
Now Bob sends a a payment to Alice in shard (3). Alice now asks a node serving Shard (2) if that transaction is valid. But as Shard(2) is controlled by Bob, can't he return false information and thus double spend transactions over and over?

Bob will have to send the commitment data (see white paper) along, and by checking the hashes of the merkle tree you can prove the (in)validity of any atom.

It's look pretty, guys.. Do you carry out ICO? or Do u have pre-sale?

Deciding on how people are happy about this the launch of Radix should be the date of blockchain RIP.
Seems really interesting if legit. As I understand technology behind Radix is tested and works with real company.
I'm waiting more details on economics and ICO.

Bob has a few challenges to overcome here:

Challenge 1

Bob can never be sure that he controls a shard or a set of them.  He can't prevent anyone else from maintaining that shard, nor them being asked about Bob's transactions.  

Say Bob constructs an Atom(x) which Alice receives.  If there are any nodes that Bob doesn't control, they will also receive Atom(x), either from one of Bob's nodes, or from Alice's or someone else.  Bob can't prevent these nodes from receiving it, because he has got to broadcast it to Alice somehow.

Bob later presents Atom(x') which conflicts with Atom(x).  Bob can not be sure that nodes that aren't his don't have Atom(x).  If they do, when they receive Atom(x') from Carol, they can inform Carol that it is not legit..with proof of Bob's previous transaction.

Challenge 2

Bob will have to manipulate his commitments in order to fool Carol and anyone that may have Atom(x').  He would have to create Atom(x) to Alice first, somehow let Alice know about it without Atom(x) information leaking to the network.  Later present the Atom(x') to Carol, then submit Atom(x) and the commitment information for him to "prove" Alice was first....double spending x.

Alice might also be part of the ploy.

This is quite the challenge for a number of reasons:

If Bob places Atom(x) into a commitment and makes that commitment known, he is then very likely to be asked to verify that commitment at a future time by a node he doesn't control; Such as when connecting to it, submitting Atoms to it, or when part of a Temporal Proof Provisioning with it.

If Bob doesn't verify any commitments he has submitted when asked, then the node he is connected with will not accept anything from him, nor send anything to him until he does.

If Bob creates two commitments, one which he keeps to himself containing Atom(x) for later use and another without it which he presents to the network.  When he eventually presents the original, it will break his commitment sequence in the network.

Recall from the paper that a commitment references the previous one.

Say Bob creates C(2) which contains Atom(x) and keeps it to himself.  To preserve his commitment sequence, C(2) contains a reference to C(1).

Bob then creates Atom(x') that is sent to Carol.  He can't create C(3), because if he does, he has to reference C(2) which contains Atom(x).  To preserve his commitment sequence and for it to be accepted, C(3) also has to contain a reference to C(1).

Later when Bob presents C(2) to prove the existence of Atom(x) BEFORE Atom(x'), there will then be TWO commitments from Bob that reference C(1).

The only way for that to happen is if Bobs nodes are either faulty, or he has manipulated his commitments.  Nodes do not modify what they have unless there is verifiable proof that they should.  Bob can not have 2 commitments that reference C(1), therefore it can not be proven that Atom(x) was first.

Challenge 3

Because Tempo operates with relative time, not absolute time, nodes stick to a "I'll keep what I've witnessed unless proven otherwise" and even then, their logical clocks still count up.

For example, say Node(A) witnessed an Atom(x') at LogicalClock(5), then it received a conflicting Atom(x) that supposedly happened before.  It doesn't matter what the time stamp on those Atoms are, it will always reference its local ledger first to discover information that it can verify against.  For Atom(x) to be proven to be before, then it must have in it's ledger some information about Atom(x) where the logical clock value is less than 5.  If it is proven that Atom(x) was first, and is accepted by Node(A), its logical clock will still increment and it will keep a record of Atom(x').

This is where commitments come into play and why reliable gossiping is important, as a node never "takes anyones word for it".

For Node(A) to alter its ledger, accept Atom(x) and disregard Atom(x'), it must have a commitment containing Atom(x) in a Temporal Proof that it saw BEFORE Atom(x').  If, when Atom(x) is presented with commitment "proof", the node can not find the commitment hash in its ledger that should have been previously submitted, it assumes that Atom(x) was created in a faulty manner.

Because of the inability to tamper with the commitment sequence, Node(A) will not have such a commitment, otherwise it would discover Bob's scam.

The paper details that Node(A) will also contact a number of its neighbours to perform a more intense order determination.  This will also fail, as none of those nodes will have any commitments in their ledgers either that match the supposed "proof".

Bob could continue to create a sequence of Atoms, TPs and commitments independently, even sniffing legit Atoms from the main-net in order to try and increase the viability of his "proof" and then submit them all in one go.  It is still detectable that Bob was faulty or dishonest as no node will have any commitments from Bob since before Atom(x') and Atom(x) were created.  Which indicates a high likelihood that he was not part of the main-net at that time and should have ceased processing Atoms.  

The fact that he didn't stop, also suggests a fault or dishonesty.

The tech is tested and tested and tested.. we have spent years iterating the tech. It does indeed work and we plan to do a longer term test soon, showcasing reliability and ramping up the amount of TPS to show throughput on a  shard.

There is a real product already using the platform.. https://twitter.com/radixdlt/status/900357606220251136 called surematics. https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/22/yc-demo-day-s17-day-2/

Oh, if somebody missed the main message here: This could be 100k/sec stuff!

It could indeed!

We plan to do public testing that hits that (and beyond) over the next few weeks.

how will distribution take place? ico?

Brilliant! Thanks a lot for your detailed reply.
The main parts I initially missed where that atoms are signed by the owner and as such if one node has a record of the atom, it is verifiable that it is ledig (I some how had a model in mind where the majority of the nodes have to agree that a transaction happened). As well as that the commitments are chained together.
Reading your reply and again the whitepaper helped a lot. Thanks!


Does a node have to keep record of its commitments (or rather the data/atoms used to build them) for ever, or can it start deleting old atom data after a given time/LogicalClock time?

 ico?
afaik:
- No ICO planned, as everybody will be able to get some RDX for some of its crypto once launched.
- Early backers from previous private internal rounds will just have a bonus factor.

distribution?
afaik:
Elastic supply model and fees for the running nodes activities, managed by the decentralized Radix client.

I think it will be developped in future WP regarding client / economy etc.

Kind of anecdote:


https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-explains-flaws-in-icos-and-scaling-issues-in-ethereum (https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-explains-flaws-in-icos-and-scaling-issues-in-ethereum)

What percentage of initial Radix supply will hold developer team?

Answer: The original goal and plan: None.  Not needed.

Perfect plan, if not changed.

Just for clarity's sake, Atoms/Events are only associated to a Temporal Proof provisioning verification. The Atom that is being verified is sent to each of the successive Temporal Proof (TP) nodes to regenerate the TP.  I had to reread these sections of the Whitepaper several times, before all of this sunk in and I got my arms around it all.

okie

When my sources r correct the bonuses for early investors wil be something between 2-4x the $-amount invested some years ago. In light of the recent bitcoin value rise I would say poor early investors ;D

   guys, as I know that the radix distribution will happen without an ico mechanism but when will be the possibility to buy radix?

Well, the roadmap (https://www.radix.global/about) on the official website says 2018 is the time to launch the public network.

But I'm wondering if there's a chance the network will be launched by the end of this year?

Is there an ETA for mainnet launch to buy some RDX?

Not with a white paper it won't.

Where's the code?

I heard it's next to finish. Whatever, talk is talk. I want to see it!

Currently performing large scale testing:  no issues as expected.

50M txn over 48hrs and still roaring ahead.
https://twitter.com/radixdlt/status/916400252701118464 (https://twitter.com/radixdlt/status/916400252701118464)

So they broke through 200 million on their testnet after a few days.

When can the public join the testnet?

Testnet is good but fully functional open DLT is better.
Do you think to run a security test with any established companies to get results or you are sure that is not worth as system is secure and it is impossible to attack and hack it?

I hear they went above 1000tps for a serious timeframe. I want a public testnet.

Yes, this year is definitely about scaling debate. Blockchain is about 10 years old experimental technology and we have blockchain killer apps. Isn't that weird? I hope that one day we will talk not about infinite TPS but about security and robust technology. I think that it is a little to early to bury blockchain in its infancy. Scaling solutions are on their way and we should expect bugs and weak security from the very start but it should evolve to better solutions. I feel that patent bum of DLT's is just upcoming. People can't understand the power of open source. Here lays the real value of blockchains in contrast to patented DLT's.

Interesting. Must have. How to buy? ETA for economic WP?

Perhaps you're thinking about other projects mentality....would be very naive to think there are NO issues lurking in there!  We have a number of auditors pending to code and security review once the final bits of the core are done.

Makes no sense to do that while we're still fine tuning things now the main R&D is done.

Everything else is futile if the technology ultimately can't scale.

We aren't concentrating on just scalability.....its a key part yes, but not where all of our focus is.  Security, efficiency, usability, infrastructure integration etc are all important things ONCE you have the scale nailed.

We ran at a sustained 5k+ a few days ago in a short test...hardly broke a sweat.  More and higher load tests are coming, including a pub test net.

Wow...,  without a sweat?
Very fascinating !!

We can look into their latest testings in realtime:

http://explorer.radix.global

incredible if true  :o

Yes, really amazing. There's going to be over 550m tx done just in 7 days at speed of 1100-1600 tx/s, where Bitcoin did only ~270m transactions for all time of its existence

That's just the start of our scale testing.

Next week we'll be adding more nodes, enabling sharding and shooting for 1 billion in 7 days or less.

From there we'll just keep scaling up the tests with more nodes and higher throughput.

So when can we buy some?

 is there any possibility to add to this project and launch node?

Great news!

As someone on Reddit mentioned Radix is not only about fast transactions, but they're also working on a lot of cool stuff. Check this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMw7hQ6x2f0&feature=youtu.be
All you need to do is to buy an empty debit card and a debit card encoder, program it and use it in an every-day life. Sellers don't even have to install firmware upgrade to their POS. No intermediaries, no excessive fees or whatsoever. Very cool indeed.
 
Radix is building the future.

What's the status of eMunie and the ICO in 2013?

Congratulations on finally finishing part of your project. You have a great concept behind your project but i must say, that is still the first stage. Of the struggle. But judging by how long you've managed to stick on working with the project, i think you'll be fine. So i wish you good luck and hope for the success of this project. I will be keeping an eye on this project.

I still can't find any answer how secure is your software? It is patented and not open source project concentrated mainly on scaling issues. What will be value of Radix if other open source projects could reach the same scaling capabilities?

No other project can handle 4000 tps decentralized (as it is running right now on the testnet)

Yes, I agree but you said now and who knows what will be in the future. I think some projects will go well beyond this level still being "blockchain" and open source.

100k txn/s huge number. Will there be utility tokens? Are you planning public sale or distribution? I haven't heard about your project. But good luck. 5 year it's a long road.

You can't expect a project build on top of a blockchain technology to have 4000 tps. It's achievable only if it has either a low number of full-nodes (which leads to centralization) or off-chain transactions (which leads to insecurity in general). Some developers move to DAG, but it still has some scalability issues.

I may be wrong, but as far as I know, Radix is going to become opensource in a year or so once the project is released to the public.

As I know only first implementations of off-chain transactions could be considered as insecure. It will change over time becoming robust and safe scaling method on blockchain. However, I think that scaling issue is very exaggerated. We should concentrate on security.

This is a very interesting project, I started following today! Pretty excited about it

After scanning the white paper, is this a new way of creating a faster distribution of information?

It would serve the public good to ‘also’ explain this proposed white paper in a non-computer jargon filled language, since people without computer knowledge haven’t a clue what this is about ...

Is the next test "1 billion txs in 7 days" will start this Monday?

It will start the next days.

So, when Radix DLT will start to function publicly and tokens will be available to buy and sell?

Q2/Q3 2018 from what I heard. There is a telegram group you can join, to keep yourself informed: https://t.me/radixDLT

Looking foward to hear more from your projects. Nice work!

I watched the video and was amazed!
From the little I know, a standard POS accepts only EMV-certified chip cards and the firmware won't let just any card open up communication with anything other than the acquiring network.
What you're doing looks like you are bypassing a VERY secure device such as the POS and you're making it function out of its specs.

By doing that you're actually taking money off the banking networks. And banking networks control 100% what's in their POS.
So even if this works today POS firmware would be quickly updated to lock this out.

I'd very much like to hear more tech details on this. It's a killer function as far as widespread adoption is concerned!

Really looking forward to the launch of the main net.  :)

I think if it works without flaws it will make many other coins useless, especially smart contract coins and coins which focus on TPS, here we have over 100k/s  :o

Hi Fuserleer,

I've only just spotted this thread and your whitepaper - congrats on getting something out the door :)

I've only skimmed your whitepaper, but I'm left wondering why the consensus isn't vulnerable to sybil attack? For example. Alice owns a majority of nodes on the network, attempts a double spending transaction by asking the network for two temporal proofs in which she spends the same item on two different shards - the network will provide her with this, because she owns a majority of nodes?

Cheers, Paul. 

Wow! I just came across this new technology. Very interesting!

If they prove it actually works... Could be a blockchain killer  8)

Who knows... Maybe Radix will overtake this cryptospace and become a new standard for decentralized economy  ::)

Hi, I own a discord server for discussing DAG coins. Every DAG is listed and has its own channel.

https://discord.gg/auFsMSD.

Feel free to join us ! See ya.  ;)

hope you guys can be success with radix :)

Just come across this thread.

really interesting, going to follow this one.

If you need any help with testing, running an node or participate in any other way just let me know.

Will there be a public funding or only private series a funding for friends and family? If there won't be a funding I will definitely try to buy it very early.

I would really like to see a Radix Bitcointalk signature campaign.
Does anybody know if the devs have any plans about this?

With respect to bad actors: The idea being that if a node N receives two atoms purporting the same transaction (double spend), then it has to query the network (other nodes) in a systemized fashion to see which atom appeared first. Isn't this an extreme vulnerability as it is quite cheap to set up nodes (over and over again after they have been blacklisted) and send out double spends as if you were sending out postcards? This will slow down transaction times and generally inhibit the network's efficiency. Has the team tested worst case scenarios and what were the results?

The whitepaper states that Radix is a new form of distributed ledger technology; it is not a blockchain, nor a directed acyclic graph. The question is, what is the foundational architecture used by Radix (the mathematical structure to store information, i.e. custom hashed link list for blockchain type DLTs)?

I am following this project for a couple of months now, have just been going through backlog of email recently saw the one sent out regarding nodes.  went to the site, signed up, follwed instructions but couldnt find any information on how to do it. 

So ill just be waiting then :)  thanks much!

Good question, the one we're all waiting to have answered. From my research radix will start with a humungous number of shards, or network subdivisions, and each address will exist in a single shard, and then nodes in each shard will be constantly communicating their state to other shards, so no node will ever have a complete picture of the network, but as addresses exist in only one shard space, double spends can still be detected quickly. I know that doesn't go anywhere near answering your question, but the key (i think) is radix is starting out with a design that scales using shards. The datastructure is something new.

As regards the double spend problem, the network cannot easily invalidate a conflicting transaction when there aren't common nodes that processed it; furthermore it is described a mechanism to address this issue involving periodic 'commitments' made by all nodes from any given shard, however the conflicting transactions are stored locally by the nodes that issued them, thus impacting the immutability property of the ledger.

Concerning the patent, what is your strategy about the fact the the European Union doesn't recognize software patents?

Quick Google search suggests otherwise, so much so that there's a campaign against them amusing as that is. Which is not really surprising considering Radix is or was an EU project at the time of the patent application.

After quickly viewing WhitePaper, would this project be considered in anyway similar to HashGraph? ie regarding timing.. Pooling timestamps and selecting the mean average? Plus, a cluster of nodes gossiping, handling shards?

This talk by radix CEO might help you understand the consensus architecture, much better than anything I could explain on a forum post.


https://youtu.be/t46NIbOsztg

I want to bring into discussion the following paper, "On Stake and Consensus" link here: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

More specifically, chapter 3.4 "No Universal Time":

[...] there is no well-defined clock time in a distributed system. Network latency gives a finite speed of information propagation, which we know from special relativity means different observers cannot agree on the time-ordering of events that occur closely in time [...]

With respect to the time-ordering mechanism that is mentioned in earlier posts to prevent double-spend attacks;

[...] Network latency is not something that can be bounded in an adversarial setting. An attacker may be able to slow systems by arbitrary amounts using denial-of-service measures, and may be able to physically partition the network by other means. In relativistic terms, this means that there is no amount of waiting that will assure somebody that they are no longer spacelike separated from other participants in the network [...]

How this can affect the finality of transactions and how does Radix address network partitioning?

[...] Users who are new to the network or have been offline recently need access to historical data.   But  there  is  no  way  to  verify  after-the-fact  what  order  transactions  occurred  in,  so they cannot be assured that the transactions they are receiving actually occurred before any conflicting ones [...]

This can impact the permissionless property of Radix as an open, public cryptocurrency.

I have a question. Will all Radix nodes on the network have published IP's as opposed to a gossip or onion type protocol?  For the radix payout, will the node hold any sort of private key?

I think open source and open licences are one of the foundation of internet culture, and of cryptocurrency. If someone has a good idea based on Tempo, it would beneficial for the whole community that he can implement it. You could just adapt it to another use case, without even being a direct challenger.

I understand the concern about forks, but see for example IOTA they also tried to fight fire with fire (with their hidden voluntary obfuscated bugged code, meant to avoid forks), and it backlashed against them. What makes a cryptocurrency good is the capacity of coders to constantly improve the product, if I fork Radix tomorrow Radix would still be better than my fork on its next iteration, because I could not deliver the same quality as their team.

Any reason why there is not any activity in here? I mean, Radix is one of the most promising crypto projects out there right now.

Or is there another thread where the real discussions take place?

We gave up on bitcointalk looooong ago as it devolved into more of a pump-n-dump cesspool.

My apologies to those die-hard fans that still continue to hang out here as there are still some gems that can be found and some highly-upstanding and intelligent individuals still lurking around.

Primarily, you can find substantial dialogue and conversations on Radix DLT within our Telegram and Discord channels.

Nearly all of the team members regularly post and are engaged with the over 17k members on Telegram.

I'm one of the Admins and (while it has been challenging on some days) we have kept the channel VERY free of noise and off-topic convos such that the entirety of the thread contains a wealth of knowledge around the project and CTO's insights.  A worth-while read if you have the time.

Telegram:
https://t.me/radixDLT (https://t.me/radixDLT)

Discord:
https://discord.gg/7Q7HSZZ (https://discord.gg/7Q7HSZZ)

An echo chamber, if you will.

Testnet is great yet completely useful open DLT is better.

Do you think to run a security test with any settled organizations to get results or you are certain that isn't worth as framework is secure and it is difficult to assault and hack it?

All in all, when Radix DLT will begin to work freely and tokens will be accessible to purchase and offer?

WHAT WAS THE PRE-ICO PRICE ??

After PARSEC algorithm (invented by MaidSafe team) all crypto projects have no any chance especially a patented one like hashgraph, radix and etc, because it is FREE/OPEN and has no scaling limits at all.

The whitepaper states that Radix is another type of conveyed record innovation; it's anything but a blockchain, nor a coordinated non-cyclic chart. The inquiry is, what is the fundamental engineering utilized by Radix (the numerical structure to store data, i.e. uniquely hashed interface list for blockchain type DLTs)?