IOTA Surges Past Ripple
blocksyn.com
blocksyn.com
But you will see very consistently in the cryptocurrency space that the experts refuse to endorse iota, and frequently say strongly negative things about it.
They are very effective at selling snake oil, but that's all their blockchain is. The tangle that they have designed is neither scalable nor secure. Every node still needs to verify every transaction, and because there is no mining it's trivial to double spend if you have a few machines that focus on cranking out as many transactions as possible.
If you understand enough about blockchains to find security flaws in an insecure system, all you need to do to believe me is learn more about iota. Their flaws are not subtle, there are many of them, and they are substantial.
If you are not expert enough to analyze the security properties of various blockchains, look for reviews of iota by other experts. You will not find any positive ones by people with significant standing. Not from the ethereum camp, not from the bitcoin camp, not from the academic camp.
This is not because of some iota vs. the world conspiracy. It's because iota is genuinely a terrible cryptocurrency.
Another HN user swayed me away from Monero - which I owned a large part of as he told me about scaling issues.
But my question is to your advice about: look to other experts. As someone coming outside the crypto-universe it is kind of hard to distill who the real experts are - so any advice on how to distill/find credible sources of information in this space?
For crypto currencies is not necessarily people with deep technical insight nor is it established economists.
This is exactly the sort of anti-advice that brings suckers into a pyramid scheme.
> For crypto currencies is not necessarily people with deep technical insight nor is it established economists.
Sure, stir up hatred and jealousy of "experts" and "the establishment" to bring in more suckers, right?
GTFO shill.
If people either a) didn’t show interest in something they don’t understand, or b) acquired the necessary level of knowledge to judge — by themselves — the validity of some concept, misinformation would be unable to survive.
Many of Bitcoin's scaling innovations could be applied to Monero as well.
This type of sentence is often intellectually dangerous. It's the basic pattern for a false equivalence -- brushing the differences under the rug.
You are essentially saying that risk1 === risk2, without any justification.
The default position when comparing thing1 to thing2, in any complex domain, is that they are not exactly the same, and we should be very cautious when trying to generalize from one to the other.
I've read the tangle paper. It seems as the node transaction weights grow, the double spend problem is solved (transaction nodes gain weight as others confirm). Arguably you could have bad actors confirming transactions but that is why the coordinator exists until there are enough transactions happening where a coordinated double-spend attack is not feasible.
Looking at tfha's post history, you can see he does not support POS as secure either and refers to the opinions of the bitcoin team. These are two red flags for me.
There are others that do not act in your best interest taking center stage in the crypto world.
There are many very well respected computer scientists in the iota foundation and I'm sure they are well aware of any issues the coin will have along the way.
Edit: Don't trust me either. Do your own research.
If I understand the issue you've pointed out correctly, this is why the coordinator currently exists. Once there are constantly running zero value transactions all around us (self driving cars, smart sensors, etc), then that becomes trivial.
IE the number of indirect children of your tip increases at a rate of roughly 2^n (less due to random tip selection). This leads to confirmation in an exponential fashion.
What is the fundamental assumption that makes the paper assert that this problem will be solved in the future?
Is the assumption that hashing power will be spread more evenly among nodes? And, if so, what is the basis for assuming this? It's certainly not what we see with Bitcoin.
Is the case that the IOTA security model breaks down if hashing power is unevenly distributed?
A single consumer machine can generate hundreds, if not thousands of transactions per second. A fleet of specialized machines costing less than 7 figures total can do millions, if not hundreds of millions, of transactions per second.
IOTA has a terrible security ratio.
The blog post is long and features many well-made graphs, including pictures of "Data Silos" with a pictogram of a lock on it, slogans like "Data is the new Oil" in a subsection "Crudely put, data is the new crude", the famous DIKW Pyramid (Wisdom, Knowledge, Information, Data) and, my favourite, the title of a subsection "Data wants to be free, but not for free.".
All the alarms on my bullshit meter are ringing after reading this.
[1] https://blog.iota.org/iota-data-marketplace-cb6be463ac7f
IOTA itself, with all its 'smarts' made a stupid mistake designing their own cryptographic hash function! This might seem like I'm hanging on a single point, but I guarantee, any sane security person on this site will tell you to stay far away from this coin if they see this.
https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...
Recently, with the Foundation being established (therefore giving them access to sufficient funds), they hired CYBERCRYPT to vet and improve upon their prototype.
There's a process for everything. Cryptographic functions are supposed to undergo atleast half a decade of peer testing before they can be used with any reasonable sense of security. Creating them isn't stupid. Creating them and using them in your application without proper security testing is.
If 'ternary' logic based hash didn't exist, then sure, create one. But don't tout it as being anywhere close to ready when it is important to the overall security of the system.
The project justifies their decision to do so about 'spearheading technology for a new paradigm', which further solidifies the fact they value short-term risky benefits over long term research which is what science is supposed to be.
Curl-P is based on a well-studied sponge construction, so it’s not an especially risky move to deploy it in their system after it passed all initial security requirements.
Curl-P also has the advantage of being extremely simple. This makes it easier to vet as the analysis can be done more thoroughly, as it’s not obscured through complex internal mechanisms.
It does require new tools to study (as it’s ternary) so there is bound to be some delay to extremely thorough production readiness. However, saying it is not close to being ready is false (unless we must put an arbitrary year requirement on it as you seem to be keen on).
No there isn't, but it is about letting more researchers take a crack at it. With well-known competitions, you can expect cryptographers to take a look at it.
The thing is, I've heard of lots of new hashes in the past couple years but only heard about curl when the vulnerability was found. I'm not saying I was on the lookout for new hashes but didn't find any, but how do you except people to check it out when no one really knows about it? Even decades of time is worthless when you have no one looking at it.
>There are standard tests (like avalanche) all of which Curl-P passed.
That's basic homework, not the real test, which is analysis done by people. Give me some tets, a couple months and I can come up with a hash function which passes those too.
>Curl-P is based on a well-studied sponge construction, so it’s not an especially risky move
Sure, sponge construction, while new has been studied due to Keccak. But you should've used keccak, instead of creating a new one(As they're doing now)
> Curl-P also has the advantage of being extremely simple. This makes it easier to vet as the analysis can be done more thoroughly, as it’s not obscured through complex internal mechanisms.
You know what, I'm not a cryptographer, so I'll quote what a real cryptographer - Bruce Schneier has to say about that.
“In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system secure is low,”
What do you have to say to this?
>However, saying it is not close to being ready is false (unless we must put an arbitrary year requirement on it as you seem to be keen on).
Arbitrary year requirement seems frivolous, because you don't see the cryptographers who work hard quietly till they have an attack ready. It is to give time for them.
Take a look at previous competitions, where attacks surface many years after first publication.
Cryptographers have been looking at it. Initially the team reached out directly to a number of cryptographers, and they have an internal team as well. As a side note, it seems like a weird argument that since you haven't heard of it, no one really knows about it (especially given that you aren't a cryptographer). Additionally, as I said above, it's now being vetted by CYBERCRYPT: https://cybercrypt.dk/company/
Also, the article you cited is incorrect in it's assessment that a vulnerability was found. They assumed the ability to generate collisions was a vulnerability instead of a design choice. The security of Iota's current signature scheme relies on one-wayness of the hash function, which was not broken by the MIT team. In addition, the collisions would not result in compromised funds as they state, since forging a signature would require malicious software be downloaded by a user.
> Sure, sponge construction, while new has been studied due to Keccak. But you should've used keccak, instead of creating a new one(As they're doing now)
Keccak is not lightweight and therefore not a viable end solution. The network works much better with Curl-P. I will agree that it probably would've been better to just use Keccak initially till their hash function was vetted by a group like CYBERCRYPT if only to avoid the backlash from implementing a custom function. Hindsight is 20/20 though, and I imagine they were probably just keen on testing the tangle (which is much more unknown tech) in a state closer to it's end implementation.
You know what, I'm not a cryptographer, so I'll quote what a real cryptographer - Bruce Schneier has to say about that. “In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system secure is low,” What do you have to say to this?
This is not a valid argument. It is an appeal to authority. Besides, Bruce is commenting based on the original incorrect analysis by MIT.
> Arbitrary year requirement seems frivolous, because you don't see the cryptographers who work hard quietly till they have an attack ready. It is to give time for them. Take a look at previous competitions, where attacks surface many years after first publication.
This is true. But it is also true for all hash functions including current well vetted ones. Better mathematical models are produced all the time. This kind of researched coupled with AI will likely make a lot of current hash functions vulnerable. What is the fix then? Most likely in the short term it will be quickly swapping to alternative hash functions, which the Iota team did quite easily (since they were prepared for the scenario). This seems like much better prep for the future to me than assuming Keccak or another hash function is forever golden.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
The Tangle is an idea that has no theoretical solution yet.
What I did understood is the following: A user that makes a transaction, picks two txs (from the unspent pool) and send his transaction. Then another user picks it with another one and send his. And so on and so forth. But who gets to decide which tree to follow?
This is exactly what mining is for: It is election based on mining capacity (or hash rate burn rate). The one who burns more hash rate gets elected to publish the next blockchain.
Not that mining can't get centralized, it is. But there is a difference: Mining is democratic. The nodes elect based on it. That's not the same with the coordinator in IOTA. It is run by the creator of the cryptocurrency.
Edit: Thinking about it now, is it ever possible to achieve this without "burning" something? (I mean equal consensus election without a non-free criteria). Doesn't this somehow conflict with the physic law of conservation of energy.
Now let me get to the important part: It's a premine. It has a nice façade and polished website. That's all you need to know.
This is going to end in tears for lots of people fomoing right now. (or later if this still ramps up)
Not talking about IOTA specifically but DAG oriented blockchains, there is a good foundation in the SPECTRE paper which was done by recognized researchers in the field. In the following document we made a summary of emerging new research in blockchain technologies: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J8hehbnZWzcIUMQcxMiGbjz8...
The same thing happens with IOTA, except the mining happens on the node sending the transaction (and confirming two others). Competing transactions can happen, and are propagated through the network, but eventually a consensus is reached. I’m only familiar with IOTA in passing, but the biggest flaw I see is of a malicious actor flooding the network with transactions to themselves. I believe the theory is that once the network is big enough this will economically not be feasible, but until then they have the master node. Whether or not this will end up working out, I’m not sure.
Happy to be corrected for any of this. I’m not super familiar with IOTA, this is just my understanding of it.
That's not the same with IOTA. Who gets to decide which fork is better? Based on what? Number of txs? That wouldn't work and I think it is obvious why.
With IOTA, it operates in a similar fashion. The winning chain is the one with the most successful hashes discovered. Just like bitcoin, except instead of a winning chain happening after ~2 hashes, it happens after hundreds(?) of hashes.
I feel like we're going in circles. In both Bitcoin and Iota, we never reach an absolute certainty. In Bitcoin we reach a point where its infeasible for transactions to ever be overwritten. For high value transactions this is generally around 5 or 6 confirmations. I don't know the exact number people use with Iota, but I remember hearing it was some percentage of confirmations within the tangle.
> What if there is low activity, few transactions; and then comes a big guy who was burning hash to generate txs and take over the chain?
That's the big flaw I pointed out in my original comment, that I suspect may exist.
That's not correct. You are only uncertain in bitcoin when there are two equal (hash wise) blocks. This happens very rarely. That's not the case in IOTA since it does happen all the time and I'm guessing somebody could calculate txs to make it happen on purpose.
Not true. Orphaned blocks happen all the time. https://blockchain.info/orphaned-blocks
> You are only uncertain in bitcoin when there are two equal (hash wise) blocks.
Not true. Its possible to see the longest chain and not know about another chain that is of equal length. Nodes won't propagate chains that are of equal length to their current chain, so this is actually probably a somewhat common scenario. There has also been a number of orphaned blocks of length 2, 3, and 4. That means its totally possible (not likely, but not outside the realm of possibilities) for a node to be working on a chain and have never seen the correct previous block. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the...
This is all exactly why many nodes don't accept transactions until there are 6 confirmations -- statistically, we shouldn't ever get to an orphan chain of length 6 even though its technically possible (outside of bugs).
FWIW, I'm not arguing that IOTA is any more or less secure than Bitcoin.
When pressed the lead dev retorts with insults instead of answers [1] and tries to redirect to their subreddit where these questions conveniently disappear.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7hgi2g/iota_warning/dq...
* They have this thing called the "coordinator" which is a master-node run by them, which is a single point of failure. The codebase that this node runs is proprietary software. They claim there will be no need for this masternode in the long run but they never say any ETA about when to remove it (which hints that removing it may always expose the security flaws of their network). This means it's Proof of Authority instead of Proof of Work, therefore, not decentralized.
* It's 100% premined, which smells as scammy as Ripple. It's not a coin, it's an entity handing you gift vouchers with their name on it.
* I've heard they rolled their own crypto. Yes, let that sink. Haven't verified this myself though.
* There's no way for new nodes joining the network to recover the full history of the transactions (a IOTA speaker told me there are some public FTP servers or something where you can get a copy...). So yeah, it's an "append and forget" blockchain, lol.
Be prepared for a big (&deserved) crash.
Other than that, yeah it's weird. Although I'm not sure why there's so many announcements of businesses like Microsoft, Fujitsu doing partnerships with IOTA. Sounds very weird and overpumped.
Ethereum never depended on a centralized master node.
These simply stated whether a chain was good or bad, and they were controlled by the makers of ethereum. I don't know if they were ever used to mark a chain as bad, but they certainly represented centralized control.
I do see your point that most of the time, ethereum functioned using the decentralized protocol, but there was a centralized fallback.
The wiki page suggests that there was an option to ignore the canary contracts. So you could mine nevertheless without recompiling the source.
There's no such option with IOTA as the coordinator is closed source.
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Bad-Chain-Canary
https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/22/frontier-is-coming-what...
https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543...
They decided it's a good idea to use ternary logic instead of binary logic so they had to write their own cryptographic primitives based on ternary. Here's a good analysis about the security issues: https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...
Did...did they intentionally name it curl, so that when you search for "Is curl secure?" you will find articles saying that curl - the widely used library - is secure, in the hope that people will confuse the two?
I know that you shouldn't assume malice when it can be explained with incompetence, but combined with some of the other points here, I can't help but feel that this was intentional.
Sergey Ivancheglo (@Come-from-Beyond) claims the collisions were intentional and for the purposes of IOTA the hash merely had to be a one way function:
https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543...
He addresses his base-3 number system design decision as well (by appealing to authority no less :)
> name it curl
In above he references Curl-P and the final letter (see his last gist) also explicitly asks that the MIT security blogger use the full name which she declined.
You can't make this shit up.
https://blog.iota.org/iota-foundation-hires-cybercrypt-615d2...
Also, since we are being pedantic, SHA-3/Keccak is an NIST standard, which is a federal agency of the United States.
Your curl function is not even listed as one of the major lightweight crypto primitive on Lux' zoo: https://www.cryptolux.org/index.php/Lightweight_Hash_Functio...
Your post is full of shit.
This is the one main thing that keeps me very, very skeptical regarding IOTA (and the coordinator thing, although that may be resolved someday when traffic increases so they can remove it - at least that's what they say).
It looks a bit like they had this JINN processor developed which appears to be ternary in nature, but it went nowhere, and then they pivoted that into IOTA and stubbornly kept the ternary stuff because that might revive this JINN thing again later on, if IOTA catches on. At least that's how it looks to me from the outside. It's a bit hard to get reliable information about this JINN thing, as the company that apparently developed it, Jinn Labs, is nowhere to be seen publicly, with the excuse of being in "stealth mode". As far as I can see, this entire thing could just as well be vaporware as it could be revolutionary tech developed under strict NDAs.
I'll definitely stay very, very skeptical for now, as it's so hard to get reliable information about IOTA aside from the bling-bling on the surface. I also tried to look at the code of their reference implementation on GitHub a bit recently, since it's mostly Java and I'm mostly a Java dev for a living right now I was interested, but the code quality I can see there is pretty bad overall (like there are almost no comments, most comments you find are actually code that was commented out, formatting seems incoherent, huge amount of bloat code even by Java standards among which it's hard to actually find any real logic), so that excursion also did achieve nothing with regard of alleviating my skepticism.
It's 100% premined, which smells as scammy as Ripple.
Additionally, In contrast to conventional ICOs, IOTA had 0% of their ICO reserved for founders. Not a single iota. The founders had to purchase their technology back during the ICO.
Furthermore, there was no allocation for foundation or ecosystem funds. They asked the community to donate for this foundation to exist. They reached 5% of total supply and that is what the foundation runs on. (~140Ti)
I've heard they rolled their own crypto.
it's an "append and forget" blockchain, lol.So the founders were forced to buy IOTA from themselves if they wanted some?
... which isn't actually so bad when you think about it, as long as those BTC all went to their foundation.
Iota has bigger problems, like pretending to be more efficient by using a DAG, when in reality everybody still needs to see the whole tangle to verify transactions.
As opposed to say, tezos which has 232mil to develop their self-governing token. Additionally, "the founders get 8.5% of the fiat proceeds in cash in addition to 10% of the tokens"\
Iota has bigger problems,Which is still dirt cheap and they got first dibs so nothing major there.
You may not agree with premining for other reasons, but please don’t call something a scam just because someone is trying to be a capitalist.
In the context of deceiving users and leading them to believe there is a more even distribution than there is in reality – premining could be a scam. The examples you gave, however, don’t fit the bill.
Not a scam, but there is a problem with premining. Consider the first 1 million Satoshi's bitcoins, which, albeit unintentional, still qualifies as pre-mining IMO - we don't know who owns them and whether they are spendable, their value is mind-boggling and if any one of them is spent, it can cause a panic.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/09/07/mit-and-bu...
He was also concerned that there's no security proof in the whitepaper. To me, it seems like you could feasibly launch an attack with less than a majority of the computing resources.
If messages cannot be forged, then a consensus could make positive progress with even 99% of participants being dishonest.
Not 33% of participants, 33% of the hash power, could just be one participant with a pile of GPUs or ASICS or "JINN" chips lol. That's the claim made by the IOTA author, anyway.
Right now it wouldn't surprise me if someone could amass 90+% of IOTA hash power anyway.
>If messages cannot be forged
Tbh this is not even a given with IOTA.
Of course PoW provides some protection against sybil attacks, but the reality is that with enough hashpower the network can be overtaken. (Hence why HashGraph is a closed network.)
Second, I didn't say it was necessary to order transactions, I said that is what it is used for, which is correct. You are replying to a point that I didn't make.
https://blog.iota.org/iota-foundation-hires-cybercrypt-615d2...
Anyone putting their money in IOTA is an absolute idiot.
I bought in when it was trading well under $1. I'm holding long term so I don't much care about today's price, but it _is_ nice to be up >700% so far.
I don't consider myself an absolute idiot on this one.
No scam. There was an announced, publicly available crowd sale available to anyone paying attention & interested in 2015. Sorry you missed it.
IOTA does not proclaim to be finished, it is still in beta. Hence the need for the coordinator. The coordinator will be turned off once there are enough transactions to secure the network.
I already said this in my comment, no need to reiterate it. You didn't repeat, though, that there's no ETA or rough threshold of when it would be safe to turn it off.
* I don't see the correlation between pre-mined and scammy. Please elaborate. In my view it eliminates greed/TX costs because there is no mining.
* Has been discussed ad nauseam months ago, but here it is again https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-updates-d12145e381eb
* ?
As an example, one of their core claims is that it's possible to do offline transactions on a tangle (=DAG) that is isolated from the main tangle and that can be merged later. What I didn't understand is how they resolve the double spending problem with this: If two devices create valid transactions on two independent subtangles and the system tries to reconcile these tangles into the main tangle afterwards, how do they determine which transaction is valid?
Also, I could never get my head around the idea of a decentralized IoT data marketplace. I mean, it really sounds catchy but when you start thinking about possible applications it's actually quite hard to come up with something that seems both interesting and doable.
Finally, no one seems to think about the privacy implications of having IoT data (which often is person-related or person-relatable and therefore under the protection of the GDRP) on a decentralized system where you basically lose control over the data the moment you upload it. From a data protection perspective this is an absolute nightmare.
If two devices create valid transactions on two independent subtangles and the system tries to reconcile these tangles into the main tangle afterwards, how do they determine which transaction is valid?
when you start thinking about possible applications it's actually quite hard to come up with something that seems both interesting and doable.
no one seems to think about the privacy implications of having IoT data
Which is not an acceptable answer, at least from the perspective of an offline node accepting payment. People will exploit it by paying an offline vendor, taking the goods then rushing online to create a doublespend which reverts the transaction.
So offline vendors will never accept it as payment, and the entire feature is useless.
You can't do it with credit cards, people will generate fake numbers.
You can't do it with bitcoin, someone can double spend with a higher fee.
https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543...
Finally, they wanted to pay me in IOTA, which was the point I walked away.
I'm sure there's more going on there, but I wouldn't want to know. I'm not touching this cc with a 10 foot pole.
> In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system secure is low
The only downside it's not currently decentralized, and requires a "conductor" to run securely, which will be removed in the future, apparently. The other criticisms are at the first implementation (rolling own crypto), which is an error that impacts confidence in the team but not the currency / concept.
Why? Because everyone serious who has taken time to look at the paper has realized it's not a valuable project, and makes plenty of claims it can't back up.
In fact one can say that in case of POW if an entity can get cheaper electricity than others, it can happen the mining is unprofitable for everyone except this entity, so the system can become centralized simply by fierce competition to mine efficiently. I am not saying that I know for sure which will be the more secure method in the future: I have diversified my investments into DPOS and POW based currencies (BTC, DASH, EOS)
I recently wrote a paper on eliminating double-spending without relying on global consensus. If there are any cryptographers or security researchers in the audience, I would be interested in hearing your analysis / critique.
https://intercoin.org/technical.pdf
Most of it has pretty straightforward elements so the security properties can be more or less proven, but still I want to hear what the major caveats are.
So far I just heard that it's similar to IOTA and there MAY be some attack, but I would love to hear more specific ideas if they jump out at anyone.
As far as I understand, one main difference between IOTA and classic blockchains is that there are no explicit mining nodes in the system who confirm all the transactions. Instead, if you issue a new transaction, you have to confirm (sign) 2 prior transactions first and do a little round of Proof-of-Work. These 2 prior transactions are called "tips" and are selected by a random walk. I'm not sure who exactly selects the tips (can you select the same ones over and over?) and if the correct tip selection is somehow enforced.
There was a controversy about the homebrew "Curl-P" hash function (P supposedly means Prototype according to the author Come-From-Beyond, previously involved with NXT). After a bumpy responsible disclosure process, MIT researchers Neha Narula et al published these findings: https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iot... and an accompanying Medium post. IOTA Foundation dismissed the vulnerability as non-practical, but switched part of their crypto to Keccak instead: https://blog.iota.org/curl-disclosure-beyond-the-headline-18...
So in the IOTA codebase, there is now "curl" (not to be confused with the HTTP library), which is based on the proprietary crypto, and "kerl", which is based on Keccak. Curl is still used for the PoW while I think kerl is now used for other signing.
Here is a C implementation that is interesting to browse: https://github.com/iotaledger/ccurl/tree/master/src/lib
A bit of an odd aspect of IOTA is the legacy of a ternary number system that is used in the crypto functions. That's why you have to convert your payloads to and from a base-27 encoding scheme ("trytes", alphabet [9A-Z]), which felt strange for me when I wrote some proof-of-concept code trying to use the IOTA libraries. Instead of switching to more established encoding schemes, the IOTA team defends this choice by pointing to future mystery hardware accelerators ("Jinn" etc.) that are supposed to use this ternary system for more memory-efficient calculation. A purported long-haul strategy that is sometimes mentioned is the distribution of such custom processors by IOTA in the future targeting embedded hardware. As an FPGA/Hardware developer myself, I'm extremely skeptical about all of this voodoo and do not understand why so many people seem not to mind it, especially the industry partners like Microsoft and Fujitsu. It would certainly help if the IOTA foundation would disclose more details about these mystery machines.
In summary I find the general approach of IOTA interesting and worthwhile, but there are some strange aspects in the software (not to mention all that coordinator business and the full-system-snapshots that lose all message data once in a while) that I wish would be thoroughly addressed by employing more KISS principle and less NIH.
Build on promises that have no proof: Coordinator can be disabled, scaling.
Also, it pretends to be open-source but you can't build it yourself because they won't release their real code out of fear of 'copying'...
I like the lack of PoW though, a foundation issuing funds at regular times could fulfill this function without wasting a world of energy.
DISCLAIMER: rode a 50% gain wave and sold.
After writing a blog post about the limitations of the Bitcoin blockchain, which got some attention on HN[1], I received an e-mail by someone named David (I didn't know who he was at the time), asking me:
> Hey Rune,
> I read your interesting article analysis of Bitcoin limitations. I was wondering if you have had any time to check out IOTA (www.iota.org) and the p2p Flash Network within it (https://blog.iota.org/instant-feeless-flash-channels-88572d9...)?
> [..]
Assuming this was just some random person asking for my opinion on IOTA, I replied with a critique, pointing out two weaknesses I was familiar with:
> The only thing I know about IOTA is that it’s centralized, through the so-called Coordinator. This makes it uninteresting to me. As I understand, the IOTA team argues that this is just a preliminary precaution, which will change as the size of the network grows, but I’m skeptical of this claim. In any case, until it actually becomes decentralized, I don’t think I will have enough interest in it to learn how it works. So I think I will wait for this to happen before taking the time to learn about the system. Also, I know that the IOTA team designed their own hash function, which turned out to be vulnerable to collision attacks, which sounds rather amateurish to me.
He promptly replied to this critique -- which I thought I was offering someone seeking advice on the soundness of IOTA -- informing me that
> As the founder of IOTA I can answer these questions: [...]
Proceeding with a rebuttal[2] of the weaknesses I had pointed out, even though he was the one who had asked me, despite the fact that he didn't need any information about IOTA at all in the first place (given that he created it).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427662
[2] > 1) The Coordinator is quasi-centralized, you as a programmer can easily opt out of it if you want, it is not enforced upon you as a user, it's simply a "best practice" at the moment. Tangle is made to scale, so the argument is indeed that the Coordinator is only now in place to prevent against the 34% attack that all DLTs suffer from until the network has scaled. I don't see anything controversial about this, it is the only way to reach a truly decentralized scalable ledger. It is no different from Satoshi firing up his first miners to get the Bitcoin network to work in the first place. The Coordinator will very shortly also be distributed to consist of numerous nodes, at which point it will be a lot more decentralized. These are all well-known steps towards the long-term goal. IOTA never claimed to be production ready, nor do we do any handwavy nonsense like Ethereum and Bitcoin core mantras "we'll solve it with some computer science breakthroughs in the future", IOTA's roadmap is very simple and straightforward.
> 2) The hash function story has been so misrepresented and blown out of proportion it is comical. I'll spare you the pointless drama and conflict of interest from the guys carrying out the hit piece and only focus on what is important, in short: We spoke with the Keccak team back in 2014 about creating a trinary sponge based hash function for the inevitable arrival of trinary processors (we have designed our own as well) as ANNs, photonics, spintronics etc. all favor trinary over binary, hence we need a trinary hash function that is lightweight for IoT which utilize such chips. 'Curl' was born. The best way to thoroughly vet a hash function (which is vital) is to put it out there with a big incentive to crack it. This is what we did. Even if someone had broken the hash function entirely (no one ever did) there was no threat to the network due to the precautionary steps in place, and the fact that we had Keccak as back up as safety precaution #10. Right now we are working with several world-leading cryptographers, including your fellow countrymen of http://cybercrypt.dk/company/ on further developing and optimizing Curl. This is far from amateurish, it is simply leading the way through genuine invention. Lightweight hash function development is a very active field of research.
> 3) We also invented full Proof of Stake, the first decentralized exchange, the first decentralized voting protocol, decentralized marketplace in 2013, pioneered using blockchain for ID, Supply Chain and IoT in 2014-2015. So while we're known to push boundaries, we have so far always been vindicated later on. IOTA being the first ledger to disrupt blockchain itself is a testament to this, but is naturally very hard to swallow for a lot of blockchain maximalists. However, when it comes to actual researchers the reception tends to be very positive, and as for companies we work with everyone from Cisco to Maersk to Bosch to Microsoft to IBM to Statoil, so outside of the niche cryptosphere the interest is mounting daily, due to the fact that they have concluded that they can't use blockchain due to its inherent scaling and fee limitations. I mention this so you realize that we didn't just hack some random shit together like most people do in this space.
> 4) [...]
Maybe IOTA is great. But I can't bring myself to look further into it because of the site + github
and down to $3.70 and looks like it is picking up again.
Market can stay irrational for a long time
> https://www.coindesk.com/3-dead-cats-moon-bitcoin-market-dyn...
Also those "dead cats" where just random fluctiations.
would we be able to tell?
Thats the kind of post we should be seeing on hackernews