NANO: How does Nano work?

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Nano is a low-latency payment platform that requires minimal resources; making Nano ideal for peer-to-peer transactions.

Nano is a new way of thinking about money, take some time and educate yourself on the benefits and uses for this network.

Instant transactions Nano transactions happen immediately, so it’s a currency you can use every day for purchases large or small.

  

Zero fees Pay for the purchase, not the privilege – zero fees on whatever you buy, from bus ticket to business class flight.

Infinitely scalable Nano can process over 1000x more transactions per second than Bitcoin, so you’ll never get stuck in a queue.

Each account has their own blockchain 
With Nano, each account has their own blockchain as part of a larger directed acyclic graph. Each individual user provides the computational power for the verification of their own transactions, meaning entire network is not required to update the overall ledger together in massive blocks.

Wallets pre-cache the anti-spam Proof of Work 
Wallets pre-cache the anti-spam Proof of Work for the next transaction once a transaction is sent, making transactions instantaneous, as both sides have the proof of work ready to go.

Running a node costs next to nothing 
Because the protocol is incredibly lightweight and running a node costs next to nothing, Nano’s transactions are processed with no fees. One transaction fits within a single UDP packet, and transactions are handled independently, eliminating any block size issue.

What is Nano? 

– Nano is a trustless, low-latency cryptocurrency that utilizes a novel block-lattice architecture, where each account has its own blockchain and achieves consensus via delegated Proof of Stake voting. 
– Offers feeless, instantaneous transactions, as well as unlimited scalability, making Nano ideal for peer-to-peer transactions. 
– The network requires minimal resources, no high-power mining hardware, and can process high transaction throughput. 
– To date, the Nano network has processed over four million transactions with an unpruned ledger size of only 1.7GB. 
  
How does Nano work? 
– Unlike conventional blockchains used in many other cryptocurrencies, Nano uses a block-lattice structure. Each account has its own blockchain (account-chain), equivalent to the account’s transaction/balance history. 
Each account-chain can only be updated by the account’s owner; this allows each account-chain to be updated immediately and asynchronously to the rest of the block-lattice, resulting in quick transactions. 
Since blocks can only be added by each account-chain’s owner, transferring funds from one account to another requires two transactions: a send transaction deducting the amount from the sender’s balance and a receive transaction adding the amount to the receiving account’s balance. 
– Refer to sections three and four of the whitepaper for a more thorough look at how Nano’ works.

What are the advantages of Nano? 
Zero Fees
Because the protocol is incredibly lightweight and running a node costs next to nothing, Nano transactions are processed with no fees. One transaction fits within a single UDP packet, and transactions are handled independently, eliminating any block size issue.

Instantaneous Transaction Speed 
Wallets pre-cache the anti-spam Proof of Work for the next transaction once a transaction is sent, making transactions instantaneous, as both sides have the proof of work ready to go. For ongoing transactions there may be delays, but this is intentional to prevent transaction spam.

Scalability 
Transaction lookups scale with the logarithm of the data set size logNO with a tree-like structure or O1 if they are based on a hash table. To get an idea of how this scales, if it was a simple binary tree with 1,000 entries it would take 10 lookups. With 1,000,000 entries it takes 20 and 1 billion would take 30. Pruned nodes only need to keep the latest block of each account-chain, even further reducing lookup time and system resources.

Can I mine Nano? 
Nano is not mined and has reached its maximum supply of 133,248,290 NANO. Funds were initially distributed via a captcha-based faucet distribution system that ended in October 2017.

Websites claiming to mine NANO are actually mining other cryptocurrencies, such as Monero, to trade for NANO on an exchange, and then paying out miners in NANO, leveraging Nano’ feeless transactions.

Where is Nano traded? 
Nano is currently traded on several exchanges under the ticker symbol $NANO

CoinMarketCap Markets for NANO 
The development team is actively working to add Nano to additional exchanges, with the goal of Nano ultimately trading on every major exchange. Unfortunately, the Nano team ​is not permitted to discuss ​potential listings on additional exchanges until Nano is officially listed. The Nano team will announce each new exchange listing as soon as they are available.

Where can I find the Nano wallet? 
Nano currently supports both a desktop and online wallet, with plans to release a mobile wallet and light wallet in the near future.
– The desktop wallet can be downloaded from the Nano website
– Instructions on setting up the desktop wallet can be found on YouTube.
– An open source, online wallet is located at www.nanowallet.io
– An integrated wallet within Telegram app is available here https://t.me/RaiWalletBot

What are Nano’ Units? 
Currently the NANO ticker represents 1 million nano (Mnano), which is 10^30 raw, the smallest unit of Nano (equivalent to a satoshi in bitcoin)

Nano’ smallest unit is 1 raw, while 1 Gnano is the largest. 1 nano is 10^24 raw.

NANO is the ticker used on exchanges/software to trade Mnano.

1 NANO does not equal 1 nano. 1 NANO currently equals 1Mnano.

How does Nano achieve consensus? 
– The voting process is balance-weighted. Every account selects a wallet address of a representative node. This is just a node that is configured to stay online and be ready to vote. When an account selects their representative, the vote weight of that account is increased by the balance of the source account.

– Votes are weighted by account balances. Those who have more funds in the system are inherently incentivized to keep the system honest; a dishonest system would make their investment worthless.

– Additional transactions don’t contribute to securing the network; transactions settle individually within a few seconds regardless of other network activity. Because of this there’s no reason to incentivize generating activity.

– A list of current representatives, sorted by voting power, can be found here. Any wallet, regardless of balance, can be a representative. A good representative is always online to vote.

Is Nano vulnerable to attacks? 
Nano, like all decentralized cryptocurrencies, may be attacked by malicious parties for attempted financial gain or system demise.

In section five of the whitepaper, we outline multiple attack scenarios, the consequences of such an attack, and Nano’ protocol for deal ing with each attack.

What are some of the long-term goals for Nano? 
– To see the protocol itself set up as an internet standard that’s infrequently touched and managed by a diverse group of people from different geopolitical areas and more specifically it’s not controlled by me or any small group of people. Any such group should not add configurable network parameters to avoid political issues like the block size debate.

– Add IPv6 multicast to transaction broadcasting: announcing a transaction to everyone in the world who wants it.

– Have existing payment-providers accept NANO much like they accept fiat currency today.

– To give the large group of people who do not have access to banks the assurance that payments they accept are secure at the point of exchange.

How does Nano compare to other cryptocurrencies? 
vs. Bitcoin 
Bitcoin organizes transactions into blocks with an average processing time of 10 minutes per block. For a transaction to go through, it must be included in a block, and that block must be mined. To be safe, transactions are usually not considered complete until a few additional blocks are added to the blockchain.

Because of this, Bitcoin transactions typically process on the order of hours. With Nano, each individual transaction is a block, and each block is able to be processed instantly by the network. The limit to the speed of the transactions is primarily network-bound; transactions are processed as fast as they can be propagated throughout the Nano network.

Bitcoin’s security is derived from hundreds of terawatts of computing power computing power computing hashes. In order to perform malicious actions, such as a double spend, on the Bitcoin blockchain, an attacker would have to accrue at least half of the network’s computation power, which is both financially and practically infeasible. Nano secure’s it’s ledger via delegated proof of stake (dPoS). In order to perform malicious actions on the

Nano block-lattice, an attacker would have to posses >50% of the online voting power. Such an attack would spoil their large financial investment, and as such not an attractive option. The dPoS of Nano consumes minimal energy, allowing full-nodes to run on inexpensive, low-power hardware.

vs. IOTA 
IOTA’s consensus is decided by Proof of Work (PoW) stacking of consecutive transactions, while Nano’ is achieved by voting on conflicting transactions. PoW stacking requires maximizing the continuous network hash rate which is an expense that is inherently paid in electricity by users of the network. Because Nano doesn’t rely on high network PoW to maintain security, the operating cost of Nano nodes and Nano users are much lower.

While IOTA’s Tangle and Nano’ block-lattice are both DAG data-structures, offering instantaneous and feeless transactions, the way they operate are significantly different.

With IOTA, two “tip” transaction must first be discovered via a probabilistic algorithm, such as a Monte Carlo Random Walk; a good tip is a recent transaction and expands the tangle in a “forward” moving direction. The idea is that if everyone uses similar tip selection algorithms, recent valid transactions will be approved by newer, valid transactions. Once a transaction is sufficiently deep in the Tangle, it is considered confirmed.

Nano’ block-lattice is an organized structure that doesn’t require “tip” discovery. The last block on each account-chain is easily found/cached, and account transactions can only be appended, like a conventional blockchain.

For typical transactions, this transaction is instantaneous and doesn’t require any additional blocks for a transaction to be considered confirmed. IOTA’s vision is machine-to-machine communication, commerce, data storage and to become the premier protocol of IoT devices. Nano’ focus is on reliable, quick peer-to-peer payments and rapid exchange transfers for arbitrage.

vs. Ethereum 
Ethereum is an alternative or separate technology from Nano. The entire concept of programs executing on top of the Ethereum Virtual Machine is something Nano doesn’t attempt to replicate. The part we focus on is an efficient transfer of value i.e. purely a currency, so while Ethereum requires miners and electricity input which is paid for by devaluing the currency, Nano has no fees and no devaluing while operating.

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