I've spent some time surveying the state of DAG implementations. As always in the crypto world, it's an ecletic mix of insanely impressive research, ill guided engineering, mediocre copycats and outright scam ranging from trivial to extremely sophisticated. So let's dig in!
1.
Meh: IOTA, famous, but disturbing amount of technical debt.
2.
Interesting, but not a real DAG: RaiBlocks/Nano, while related, is not a DAG chain in strict sense - does not propagate "I've seen and acknowledged that branch" state normal DAGs are supposed to do. That said, Nano is very impressive in engineering sense, but suffers from a lot of formal debt: The voted-in federated nodes doing conflict tiebreaks do not have livenesss guarantees whatsoever. There is no recorded history, and loss of quorum means loss of access to consistent state of both past and current.
3.
Interesting: ByteBall is formally quite unassuming DAG. It too depends on "sworn in" federated tiebreakers like Nano, the quorum is not as bad as compared to Nano, as past votes cast by witnesses is recorded history.
4.
Blah: Aidos = IOTA cargo cult. Non functional. The existing code is very preliminary, and seems to be just Go port of IOTA from Java, trinary nonsense and all. Might be useful to get Golang port of IOTA, though?
5.
?? Dagcoin - which one in particular?
6.
Academically competent DAGLabs - Startup employing some of the researchers responsible for the cutting edge
GHOST, SPECTRE and PHANTOM theoretical work. No published code yet, but if they do, it's going to be legit unless the VCs botch it.
7.
Blah: Oyster = Some sort of horrible IOTA and EVM cargo cult. Seems to be straight IOTA instance with some marketing fluff on top.Move along.
8.
ICO scam Paragoncoin.
9.
Border ICO scam, but not a DAG The techs at HCash might be onto something, but HCash PR team really does shuts it down with the bullshit fest. HCash is just Decred (Bitcoin-NG). The thing they added is lua-scripted smart contracts, but as an external module (works similiar to counterparty and such). Still brobably a good idea rather than trying to mutilate decred directly.
10.
Pretty legit RChain. The only downside is complexity introduced through the unorthodox choice of process calculus for contracts.
11.
ICO scam IOT-Chain. It's interesting the lengths they've gone to show off fake code. Top of the class China fake.
Others:
12.
ICO scam TravelFlex. ICO ended in december, no single line of (original) code delivered since then.
13.
ZCash clones Fill-in-any-other-clone of ZCash today is unlikely to become DAG anytime soon.
14.
Not many people realize That
Ethereum is a Block-DAG, in it's most primitive form (GHOST).
15.
Seems legit, but review pending Universa. They don't elaborate on nature of the consensus whatsoever. Cursory looks at it suggest some sort of interactive voting. Still reading to figure out more.
updates on this post will be on:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ccpolice/comments/80em51/state_of_dag_hype_2018/
