How to Make the Ravencoin Network More Secure and Decentralized 𓅃

Decentralization is the primary goal of crypto as a whole and is Ravencoin’s main focus. This is accomplished through mining by Proof of Work (PoW) and Ravencoin nodes. Mining makes RVN more decentralized through thousands of ‘workers’ solving blocks and nodes confirming these blocks on the network, allowing for a seamless transaction of digital currency. Centralization is an entity controlling your currency and not the people. This can be dangerous and again, has been crypto’s focus to gauge away from this. As such, Bitcoin was created, which Ravencoin is a fork of Bitcoin with L1 supported assets. Decentralization also makes a blockchain more secure and more ‘advertisable’ and desirable.

How Pools can Make Ravencoin More or Less Secure

Pools are the make it or break it for a 51% attack in PoW coins. A 51% attack is when a pool will obtain 51% of hashrate on the blockchain and will have the consensus to interrupt the recording of new blocks and the completion of mined blocks. It is very important to distribute hashrate across pools for this reason. The pool with the most hashrate does not mean a higher payout in RVN. Many pools have different rules with fees, minimum payouts and much more! Currently:

• 2miners has 26.9% of the network’s hashrate.
• HiveOn has 20.4% of the network’s hashrate
• Flypool has 13.9% of the network’s hashrate

If you are mining to any of these currently top 3 pools, especially 2miners and if you want Ravencoin to succeed you should be switching to another pool. When choosing a pool, you can refer to the image I listed above or go here for a full list and details. If you are in HiveOS and do not know how to change your pool, here are the steps:

• Open HiveOS, go to Flight Sheets
• Select Add Flight Sheet, for coin put RVN
• For Wallet, select Add Wallet if you do not have an RVN wallet imported yet. Fill out those details, then select that same Wallet name
• For Pool, select a pool that you want to mine to. For the goal of decentralization, it would not be a pool listed in the image above’s top three. In this case, I'll be using RavenPool.Ninja.
• After selecting the Pool, you will select the closest location or amount of GPU’s you have to you in the popup window.
• For Miner, you may select any miner really. I use T-Rex but other popular miners are Gminer and NBMiner.

How Running a Node is an Easy Way to Support Decentralization

Firstly, I have posted a Medium article about How to Run a Ravencoin Node on many platforms if you are currently not running an RVN node. Running a full-node is fun and important to the security and decentralization of the blockchain. You do not need to be tech savvy to run a full-node. Particularly to Ravencoin, a full-node validates transactions and blocks, keeps a full copy of the blockchain and distributes it.

Currently as of October 12th, there are 689 nodes full-nodes on the network. This is not to be confused with regular RVN nodes. We are only able to see “full-nodes” because they allow incoming connections where they can be pinged and counted. The amount of regular RVN nodes is uncountable and possibly a very large number. Currently:

• Bitcoin has over 10,000 nodes
• Litecoin has 1084 nodes
• Ravencoin has 689 nodes

I want to encourage you again to run a Ravencoin node as we are not that far behind Litecoin’s node count and that would be a huge accomplishment for the network!

How Your Wallet May be Contributing to The Decentralization or Not

Quite frankly, having an exchange like Coinbase holding the majority of a coin’s supply makes the coin/project more centralized. This may have no effect on a 51% attack but definitely has its place in the discussion of decentralization. Effectively, an exchange like Coinbase can become a bank in some form holding the supply majority of a coin. For this reason and for the security of your coins, it is best to hold your crypto in a non-custodial wallet where you own your keys/seed phrase.

If you do not have a seed phrase (12-word phrase) to your wallet/exchange, then you do not own the coins, they are not yours. We have seen this as a problem in the past with Celsius going under (not associated in any form or fashion with RVN) and in the contract, consumers did not own their coins that they bought. This is a crazy concept and shows why decentralization is important and why having your own keys/seed phrase is important!
It is best practice to keep your Ravencoin in a non-custodial wallet for holding and to send to an exchange/custodial wallet when you want to sell.

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