There's been some interest in where I see the long term position of RaiBlocks, does it have a business plan or a way to generate funding. I don't view RaiBlocks as something that should have or needs a business plan; it's more of a technical specification that people can build other real revenue generating businesses on top of.
The goal is to have minimal ongoing expenses so any cost of operation could be rolled in to a normal cost of business like bandwidth or storage investment. Ideally I think RaiBlocks is something that deserves an IETF RFC that's maintained by by the industry but needs almost no change, maintenance, and no investment.
The last week of faucet distribution, despite being an enormous burden to core development and a distraction to issue fixing, has been a great network stress test. All of the representative nodes run on VPS servers with 1 shared CPU core and had no problem processing the load. The network is designed so nodes that experience load are those that are sending or receiving balances in proportion to their individual activity.
An admirable approach. Glad your representative servers are holding up ok, I think you may end up taking the whole burden of this yourself for a while. Do you have any plans to do anything to encourage others to run representative nodes, or at least do their own PoW?
For the PoW, 1 proof is generated on the send and 1 proof is generated on the receive, this is why people will see CPU activity when receiving from the faucet, the faucet itself also generating its own work. Other than that there is no PoW in the network, only when transactions are being added and the work is only applied to those doing the transactions.
Taking the example of RFCs and how they're maintained, how do you see their incentive structure being similar or different than something like this? From my perspective, groups maintain the TCP standard without TCP giving direct in-protocol incentives for its use, people build on top of it which is where their incentives lie.
It was already off today.