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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

IOTA isn't even resistant to differential cryptanalysis.

Care to add sources?

A flaw was found in the hash function they rolled themselves which doesn't build confidence there aren't more vulnerabilities to be found:

https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/09/07/mit-and-bu...

To make things even worse than rolling their own hash function, they're claiming the flaw was intentional! This makes them hostile and untrustworthy to the open source community if this is true and further erodes confidence they know what they're doing if this is their attempt at PR spin:

https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1...

> Next, and in my mind most damningly, Sergey Ivancheglo, Iota’s cofounder, claims that the flaws in the Curl hash function were in fact deliberate; that they were inserted as ‘copy protection’, to prevent copycat projects, and to allow the Iota team to compromise those projects if they sprang up.

These points have all been talked over extensively and are not a concern: https://medium.com/@comefrombeyond/cfbs-comments-on-https-ww...

That blog response is completely unconvincing and makes me trust them even less. They have no proof of the extraordinary claim that the flawed hash function was intended (which is bad whether this is true or false) and their network going down for three days is a huge red flag that the protocol cannot be used in a decentralised way. He talks a good game but if you have any technical background you can see he isn't addressing what's being asked and is avoiding valid criticism via hand waving and character attacks.

I disagree with you entirely.

The creator requested an open, live debate to put these claims to rest. They haven't accepted and probably won't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com