Can Raiblocks be the future of how we transact?
Over the past week, we have seen Raiblocks being pumped quite a bit. While it might be a case of pump and dump by some influential investor or some people trying to get rich in a short period of time, it certainly has pushed it to the number 17th spot. This makes other potential investors wonder, "Can it be the future of transactions?" or whether or not to invest. So, let's have a look.
A recent tweet posted in the official twitter account of Raiblocks suggests that it has a really high transaction speed.
Love this visualization of $XRB transactions per second compared to some of the other top currencies pic.twitter.com/95Wo3RkjIc
Zack Shapiro (@ZackShapiro) December 26, 2017
It shows that the Raiblocks network can process 7000+ transactions per second. To add to it, The Raiblocks whitepaper even mentions that the speed is in fact I/O bound, meaning that, it is the speed of the storage device that's limiting it to that. This sounds pretty cool, right? Let's take a deeper look at the underlying mechanism. Raiblocks uses UDP packets for transmission of transactions. The problem here is that there's no way to know if a UDP packet has reached its destination. In other words, UDP packets are prone to packet loss. If a user creates a send transaction, it might not even reach its destination. This means that the intended receiver will not create a receive transaction. It might happen that neither the sender gets to know if the intended receiver has actually received it, nor, the intended receiver gets to know if the sender has sent a transaction, even upon mutiple broadcasts. This gets even worse as the network starts getting congested. The more congested the network, the more the chances of packet loss, and, the more the rebroadcasts, which would congest the network even more. That is, the network might implode and become unusable. Although the whitepaper says that the rate is limited by PoW, it still places a doubt in my mind that the network, upon mass adoption, will almost always operate at the lowest possible speeds. What's worse, is that, we don't even know what the worst possible speed is, because right now, very few people are using it.
Another issue with it is that UDP packets are not sequenced. This means that suppose you were to send a sequence of transactions to a receiver in a particular order, in case, where the previous transaction determines how much the next amount must be, then, it's totally not possible to do so, unless each of the transactions is added to the blockchain before sending the next one. This is generally not a problem, when humans transact with each other, but, syncronous transmission is important when you're transmitting a message or a file that cannot be scrambled. Even if you do receive it in an asyncronous fashion, there has to be a method to arrange it back to the initial order. If Raiblocks aspires to be a network, it must allow for dissecting the files and messages in TCP packets. If each transmission has to be a transaction, then, I suppose UDP packets are simply not going to help it replace the current infrastructure.
So, back to the question. Can it be the future of how we transact? This can only be decided once the network is on full load. Can it replace the internet? Well that doesn't look quite likely in it's current state.