These Are the Most Rewarding Bitcoin Faucets in October ...

Howdy, folks! ?Welcome back to the show that never ends!?
I've decided it's high time I did a Coin-a-Year on Raiblocks. This is a special feature I do to recycle old material revisit past coins I've covered of special note a year or more later. I originally posted my Coin-a-Day feature about Raiblocks on this subreddit March 7th, 2016; it didn't get much attention then, but I have a strange feeling people might be slightly interested to see the difference now.
Below is the original report. I'll strike out what is wrong now, and add [bracketed notes] for updated commentary.
I'm no expert on the current state of Rai by any means. I'd honestly thought the coin was dead later in 2016; just didn't check back into it. And now here we are.
Bias note: I got a significant bit of Rai from the original faucet. I have sold a fraction of that this year but still have a lot of it. I'm biased both by holding it and from selling it.
Hello, y'all! I saw a comment pointing to this coin as being designed for free transactions, which is a core interest to me, so I decided to look into it a little bit and do a write-up. Enjoy!
Summary
Today's coin is Raiblocks (RAIXRB), which are designed to support free transactions and no block rewards. The coins will be initially distributed by a CAPTCHA controlled faucet with an annual halving rate.
[Faucet now closed.]
• Initial creation: October 15th, 2015 [1]
• Coin supply: 4.8 x 10¹² rai current supply in circulation; 3.4 x 10¹⁴ rai maximum supply [2]
[XRB is the new standard base unit which was Mrai before (and still I suppose). Also, supply is distributed. So we now have about 133 million XRB as the outstanding and max supply.]
• All-time high: Not yet traded as far as I know. [3]
[About $37.5 or 0.0028 per CMC max so far, about two days ago]
• Current price: Not yet traded as far as I know. [3]
[Depending on the exchange and moment, somewhere around $30-35 currently or about 0.002-0.0022 BTC]
• Current market cap: Not yet traded as far as I know. [3]
[Somewhere around $4 billion]
• Block rate (average): Unlimited [4]
• Transaction rate: ? [5]
[I'm too lazy to find this right now. Maybe someone will chime in with it in the comments.]
• Transaction limit (currently): None [6]
• Transaction cost: Free [7]
• Rich list: ? [8]
[https://raiblocks.net/page/frontiers.php - Top 100 own ~63%]
• Exchanges: None yet. [3]
[Bitgrail and Mercatox have been the two main. Kucoin just added it and Binance has it in its voting which is ending shortly.]
• Processing method: Proof-of-stake [9]
[Above refers I believe to dispute resolution (double spend). There's also a minor PoW for send/receive.]
• Distribution method: Faucet [10]
• Community: New-born [11]
[Fairly strong and growing. Good memes. Slightly drunk on euphoria currently.]
• Code/development: Active development at https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks
• Leadership: Colin LeMahieu
• Innovation or special feature: Protocol designed without a limited throughput or block rate, as well as not supporting block rewards nor transaction fees.
Description
Raiblocks is, as far as I know, the first cryptocurrency designed from its start to not support any block reward or transaction fee. In addition, it has no block size or rate limit. Further, all coins will be initially distributed through a captcha-controlled faucet on the main site. It's a bold attempt, going against the conventional wisdom of what is possible.
Edit: I should mention a couple things. First, there is a PoW attached to transactions as an anti-spam defense. This PoW can be attached by the recipient rather than the sender as well, which means that large automated sends could be done without the PoW if needed and the recipient could attach that.
Also, the natural question coming from how all the rest of the cryptocurrencies work is "how does it work without an incentive to run a node?" The idea presented in the whitepaper is basically that operating a cryptocurrency has a lot of expenses, and most of them are paid "out-of-band", so why not have funding nodes be that way too? It leaves it open to whatever other incentives there may be, of which the most obvious are first: that there are only full nodes so far, so if one wants to use the coin, then one is going to run a node. More long-term, even after SPV, presumably large holders might choose to operate one regardless. Someday, if merchants accept it, they would presumably run one. And enthusiasts. It sounds very tenuous, and this is why this is such an audacious attempt in my opinion.
After six months running, the number I heard for the blockchain size was about 20 MB, which is insanely small, but the coin has gotten so little attention that I suspect there hasn't been significant load yet. I'm very curious to see how it will perform under load. I think its design actually makes it more efficient when there aren't transactions, because nothing is added to the blockchain (actually termed block lattice here, but using blockchain generically to refer to any cryptocurrency's core data), unlike in the conventional / Bitcoin model where blocks are being generated whether or not there are transactions in them. Of course that doesn't matter much when there are tons of transactions, as on Bitcoin currently, but, for instance, in Nyancoin, we accumulate tons of empty blocks all the time, where Raiblocks would just wait for more transactions. However, again, under load perhaps it could start growing "too quickly" by some metric, or eventually reach the point where it starts losing users because of the requirements of running a full node.
I think it will be very interesting to see how this turns out in practice.
[And it's certainly going to be interesting to see how it goes. So far, it's still working. Which is better than I'd hoped or expected.]
Community
The coin is relatively young but even for a young coin it's not a huge community. But there is clear discussion and interest both on BCT and on their Google Group. It looks like a healthy start to me.
[As per my comment above: Fairly strong and growing. Good memes. Slightly drunk on euphoria currently. Seems well-intentioned generally: looking to try to have some caution mixed in and putting up a bug bounty and that sort of thing. Still has a little bit of some of the common negative characteristics in crypto communities but this may be due to growth from outside communities overwhelming the local culture temporarily more than anything.]
Footnotes
[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1208830.0 - Initial announcement, didn't get much attention apparently. Also, this thread mentions a built-in block-explorer with a rich list. I don't have a working client to access this at the moment but that's pretty cool.
[2] There are 2¹²⁸ total units, and a rai is 10²⁴ total units, so total supply should be about 3.4 x 10^14. https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks/wiki/Distribution-and-Mining Distribution has been going since about November 2015, so I would expect about one-third of the initial 50% to be distributed. The block explorer seems pretty primitive; it just takes a hash. No overall stats. So I'll use that one-third of the initial 50% estimate. So about 5.7 x 10^13. Note by comparison that the faucet gives 10⁸ coins at a time currently.
Actually, this comment puts the amount of rai in circulation as 4,763,023...that can't be right, that many Mrai I think? Yeah, 10³⁰ stated as divider there. So 4.8 x 10¹² rai in current circulation.
[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/raiblocks/PSbX_onjLfU - This topic discusses it a bit. Also comments from meor in this thread
However, I have also paid 100 NYAN for 100 Mrai. This is basically a test transaction, but 1 NYAN for 1 Mrai (10⁶ rai) would imply a marketcap of 4.8 million NYAN, or about 0.34 BTC in current circulation. I had initially thought this was higher before recalculating with the actual amount circulating as per [2]; may also have screwed up the math initially or here.
[4] https://docs.google.com/document/d/13s6BKzRq9oD5Me55JBRzR7BdvjJ44QKqPu2lf-JsAlU/edit - whitepaper ; each transaction could be thought of as its own block if I am grokking this right. It goes through as fast as the network can handle it. There is no fixed interval or period.
[5] I believe https://raiblocks.net/#/block-explorer is the only block explorer so far and it only supports entering a hash, so I don't have a way to determine the transactions in the last 24 hours.
[6] ...