⋰·⋰ Feeless

What is Feeless?

Feeless is a Nano cryptocurrency node, wallet, tools, and Rust crate. This is not the official project for Nano, only an implementation written in Rust. The official Nano node implementation lives here.

🚸 This is a work in progress. The API will probably change without notice until v0.2. 🚸

I decided to start this project as a personal adventure of understanding Nano. I give no promises about my future motivation to complete this project 🤐.

Working Features

Feature	Progress	Notes
Rust crate	80%	See the documentation for usage and examples. Please suggest if a feature is missing.
CLI tool	60%	Seeds, phrases, public, private, addresses, parse a wireshark network capture¹.
Wallet	0%	No wallet code yet, but should be quick to implement.
Node	20%	Can connect and communicate. No voting, storage, chain validation, etc.

^{1. feeless pcap [file.pcapng] can dump a capture file and dissect the packets. There are additional arguments you
can see with --help. To do this as successfully as possible, capture with Wireshark, set the filter to nano
, File -> Export Specified Packets, make sure Displayed is selected.}

What is Nano?

Nano is digital money that significantly improves on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The main features of Nano are:

No transaction fees.
Extremely fast to send money—less than 1 second for 100% confirmation.
^{Bitcoin takes 10 minutes on average for ~80%¹ confirmation.
Nano is more asynchronous than Bitcoin—individual transactions are voted on separately from the rest of the network.}
Highly decentralized.

^{Using the Nakamoto coefficient measurement, it is more decentralized than Bitcoin^{2 3}.}
No inflation.
Green—Massively less energy use than Bitcoin.

For more information on what Nano is, see the Nano documentation: https://docs.nano.org/what-is-nano/overview/

Nano is also known as: Nano cryptocurrency, Nano coin, RaiBlocks.

^{1. The Bitcoin white paper, under section 11 "Calculations" explains there's a ~80% chance for an attacker with 10% mining power to overtake the longest chain. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
2. Measuring Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum using Multiple Metrics and Granularities https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10699.pdf
3. List of representative nodes showing a Nakamoto coefficient of 8 at the time of writing (2021-02) https://nanocharts.info/}

Installation

Currently the only way to do this is to install Rust, then run cargo install feeless. This will create a file in your rust's bin directory, or to specify a location run cargo install feeless --root [install-dir].

Goals

General

Correctness before performance.

Rust crate

A complete library that a Rust developer can use to handle wallets, keys, blocks, signing, proof of work, etc.

Tools

A command line tool for particular actions, e.g. generating seeds, conversions between keys, addresses, etc.
A command line client for the official Nano RPC server.

Nano node

A functional Nano node with business logic from the official C++ implementation.
Correct rebroadcasting rules
Representative voting
Bootstrapping
It has to perform well enough to help the network. I don't want Nano to slow down if people start using this! 🤦‍♀️

Non-goals

Only support protocol v18+ (Maybe only v19+ depending on timing)
No UDP support
No user interface

Task list

A medium term task list:

Credits and references

Thanks to the hard work from the Nano Foundation.
https://github.com/nanocurrency/nano-node
- The actual Nano implementation as a source of truth.
https://forum.nano.org/, https://old.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/, Nano Discord: https://chat.nano.org/
- A very friendly community helping out others and myself.
https://docs.nano.org/
- General useful information.
https://nanoo.tools/
- Helped me understand technical details on state blocks and hashing, and also with validating conversions between things.
https://github.com/nanocurrency/protocol/blob/master/reference
- Node protocol specification.
https://iancoleman.io/bip39/
- Helped me test out my BIP 39/BIP 44 implementations.

Other implementations

nano-rs (Rust) https://github.com/termhn/nano-rs
Railroad (Rust) https://github.com/PlasmaPower/railroad
nano-python (Python) https://github.com/orhanhenrik/nano-python-node
gonano (Go) https://github.com/alexbakker/gonano
Go Nano (Go) https://github.com/frankh/nano
Node.js Nano Node (JavaScript) https://github.com/numtel/node-nano-node
nanocurrency-node (TypeScript) https://github.com/pRizz/nanocurrency-node
Prailude (Lua, C) https://github.com/slact/prailude
RaiSharp (C#) https://github.com/vardthomas/Aggrex.RaiSharp

License

Licensed under either of these at your option:

Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

jxub/feeless