This made me lose any confidence in a person's capabilities in evaluating the coin. If anything, Java is way more (or any language with modern memory management) robust choice than C++ where security is concerned.
In any case, I am highly skeptical of the IOTA as well.
This is unfortunate, because the factual reporting he can offer, located towards the bottom of the page, describes a situation wildly contrary to the claims made on IOTA's behalf, and is suggestive of a code base that is unready, fragile, and teetering (at best) on the edge of fraud.
that said - he's right about IOTA. If that type of use is what it takes to make everything work, it has a long way to go.
The worst thing is that I can't find a useful alternative crypto currency that can be used stand alone (ie without converting to BTC) for e-commerce.
Only choices are BTC with its high fees and to some extent BCH.
Even Litecoin which is easy to use doesn't have many uses.
Dash, Monero and Zcash make bold claims but aren't particularly useful at the moment.
However, searching for useful things to do with Ripple as an individual leads to nada. All the use cases are provisional.
All the top 20 google results are for how to buy Ripple itself(in order to speculate).
I've started and stopped mining various currencies since BTC in 2011. Each time I stop because I do not see meaningful progress in usability.
Marketing speak there as all blockchains support global payments.
In full disclosure, I own a little bit of both. I first stumbled upon them after being disappointed with IOTA, and they deliver on a lot of what my initial expectations of IOTA were. I just want to be able to buy coffee with my crypto and not wait an hour for confirmation times!
That said, I know some great software can be produced in Java, ElasticSearch been one on top of my mind.
If Security is the goal, nor CPP nor Java is great. Proven Haskell or Rust might be more of a valid option.
That said, I steer clear of IOTA too. Relevant search terms for me are "IOTA roll your own crypto", "IOTA ternary logic" and "IOTA hash collision". And their whitepaper is indecipherable. Red flags all over the place, IMHO it's a scam.
I'm having a really hard time reconciling that with the fact that it's got a market cap in the billions at this point...
Instead, it's a story of all the ways IOTA simply does not work.
Java vs C++ is irrelevant. Maybe the author is wrong, maybe not. Either way, it's probably a bad idea to take two sentences out of context and claim the author loses all credibility for an offhand opinion.
I'd rather use a language where e.g. a buffer overflow couldn't be turned into a remote exploit that would let you steal coins from every client on the network. Mistakes in cryptocurrency code has the potential to be very costly so you'd think minimising mistakes at all costs would be worth it.
(Lot of "write my dumbass cryptocurrency" requests on Upwork, so I assume this is very common.)
As for technical superiority, maintaining consensus is critically important. If one set of users (miners) requires a high-performance implementation, it makes a lot of sense to use that implementation everywhere.
If you're an experienced developer writing a new cryptocurrency that's radically different from Bitcoin, why would you want to fork from Bitcoin and why would you find Java code harder to make safer than C++ code?
Personally I think C++ is a bad choice. A safer language that is easier to verify is preferable when small bugs have the potential to wipe out a cryptocurrency. Imagine Bitcoin got hit with a bug that allowed wallets to be emptied or took down the network such that a hard fork was required to fix it; it would wipe out confidence if this happened enough times. Maybe I'm missing something beyond the developers being very disciplined but I'm impressed this hasn't happened yet.
Anyone remembers Heartbleed?
The problem with multiple implementations is that if there is a tiny difference in behavior between them, you can only find out after damage has been done to the network via a split/fork.