Review on Ravencoin by Leighton Webb

Name: Ravencoin
Item: Ravencoin
Rating: 5

October 03, 2020

Ravencoin - Just Do It

I have been using the Ravencoin network and following the development since the project was announced by Bruce Fenton and the idea subsequently given away for free and wallet code was released.
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I have seen the decentralised nature of Ravencoin as the users have seen issues and publicised them responsibly to core developers and proposed improvements.
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I myself, along with other developers, have recommended improvements that were subsequently coded and adopted by the miners and community despite opposition from, the initial author of the idea, Bruce Fenton. He likes Bitcoins security and deviation from Bitcoins code base has risks.
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The improvements I'm referring to are surrounding the network difficulty adjustment. Originally this was a per bitcoins difficulty adjustment and the difficulty changed every 2016 blocks. Ravencoin uses gpu mining as part of it's commitment to remain decentralised by allowing anyone with off the shelf consumer equipment to mine Ravencoin. When large pool hopping gpu miners, including Nicehash, supported ravencoin they had a side effect of speeding up the block generation by solving low difficulty blocks quickly and then moving elsewhere when the difficulty skyrocketed after 2016 blocks. This caused some network instability at the time due to rapidly changing block intervals. Every few seconds (during a fast 2016 block cycle) and a few minutes (during a slow 2016 block cycle). We recommended adding dark gravity wave block difficulty adjustment (known as DGW in the community) to change each blocks difficulty by looking at the previous 180 blocks and once adopted this stabilised the block production to every 1 minute.
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Anyone arguing this community is not open and decentralised in my opinion has a very poor argument to try with me based on my experience with the above.
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Joining the community is highly recommended to checkout what is possible using digital tokens on a completely decentralised network and decentralised file storage and share ideas. 
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Just Do It!
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Pros

PoW Mineable Blockchain
Decentralised ethos in network design and structure.
No ICO funding for development or marketing.
All development and marketing is is community driven.
All digital tokens are publicly auditable from initial issuance to current holding addresses.
Bitcoin-style pseudonymous addresses allow you to choose to reveal your address so others can confirm your holdings.
Different token types allow many variations of information and asset type to be represented on the blockchain.
Digital tokens or assets can be linked to agreement information showing what the token is for. This token link (using IPFS) can immutably linked a digital token to digital files.
Faster confirmations on the blockchain. Almost instantly added to the network of ravencoin wallets mempool. 1 minute blocks means transactions get added in 1 minute increments to all the nodes records. For medium and higher value transactions its recommended to wait between 6 and 60 minutes before accepting confirmation as successful. After 60 minutes of being added to a block the transaction is immutable on the blockchain.
Anyone is free to build on Ravencoin.

Cons

No ICO funding means no budget for development and marketing. All this is done by companies who see the value in the technology and donate resources and the Ravencoin community. Anyone is free to build on and contribute to Ravencoin.
Development is ongoing and code changes bring risks to the network stability and trustworthiness. Most development and changes from BTC code is complete. Most of the roadmap is however completed.