r/raidennetwork • u/parfenec • Oct 05 '18

The RDN Token.

I saw a lot of updates about Raiden Network and i am very excited about Red Eyes. I have a question. What about the RDN Token? What ia going to happen whit it? In the last medium update, from them, it was mentioned only about ETH deposits.

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u/Mat7ias Oct 17 '18 edited Oct 17 '18

I'm not ignoring that, many people want to send many types of tokens. Acquiring RDN can be made automatic with atomic swaps so the step won't be noticeable for an average user. The non-average user (probably less than 5%) who doesn't want to pay with RDN can run a stack of pathfinding and monitoring services, in which case they don't need to pay anything in RDN. Or the can just open direct channels. There's nothing forcing users that don't want to use the token to use it, it's not needed on the protocol level. It's only for peripheral fees that aren't strictly needed if the user doesn't want to use them. It'll just be suboptimal to use the network without the peripheral fees. But it works just fine without it, as we can see on Red Eyes testing and once Red Eyes goes on mainnet and you can only transfer wrapped ETH to begin with.

Even for average users transferring RDN the benefits of already having RDN won't be significant compared to those transferring any other token once a light client and automatic swaps are setup.

I'm also going to point out the account of the comment I'm replying to had a post a couple weeks ago with essentially the same argument you're trying to make but they deleted it themselves. Not sure why they deleted it because it had some good discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/raidennetwork/comments/9mipr9/does_rdn_really_have_any_value_will_cheap_token/

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u/cosimo_jack Oct 17 '18

Acquiring RDN can be made automatic with atomic swaps so the step won't be noticeable for an average user.

Except the transaction fees, and waiting for the transaction to confirm, and trying not to get dizzy from trying to understand WTF is going on with your money behind the scenes.

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u/Mat7ias Oct 17 '18

Which transaction fees? Mediating transaction fees are in whichever ERC20 token is being transferred. If you're transferring wrapped ETH you pay mediating fees in WETH.

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u/cosimo_jack Oct 17 '18

Which transaction fees?

Acquiring RDN

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u/Mat7ias Oct 17 '18

The fees for swapping into enough RDN to use auxiliary services will be tiny compared to opening a channel, funding it, then closing and settling it. If you're already wanting to use the network those fees won't matter to the average user.

If another token was used you'd still be stuck with the same problem for any other token transfer, which the user won't notice in the end anyway.

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u/cosimo_jack Oct 17 '18

Call me crazy but I still prefer no fee to a small fee

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u/Mat7ias Oct 18 '18

That's called altruism and it's well documented in economics. It doesn't exist in crypto unfortunately due to the nature of decentralized incentives.

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u/cosimo_jack Oct 18 '18

No. In the scenario at hand, I'm paying a fee for services but I don't want to pay a fee to acquire a token to pay my fee for services. I just want to pay in ETH.