Why I find IOTA alarming
medium.com
medium.com
- Uses custom "ternary" crypto which has been shown to have vulnerabilities in the past.
- Has software that doesn't include the basic function of generating wallet addresses, instead having some users rely on shady 3rd party websites and getting their coins stolen.
- Does away with much of what made other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work in the first place in order to remove transaction limitations.
- Except that the changes required to make this work, at least in theory, are for the most part not actually implemented yet and there appears to be a lot of doubts that it can work at all. See for instance this comment on the article: https://medium.com/@comefrombeyond/thank-you-269640e794e7 ("in the future", "temporarily", "will be using",...). Also note that many replies in this comment actually deflect the original criticism without actually addressing it. I don't even understand what that person means by "You describe the internet", and how that has anything to do with the argument of TFA.
So basically you have a highly experimental technology (even by cryptocurrency standards) which is very much unproven (even by cryptocurrency standards) and yet apparently it has a market cap of $6 billions: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/iota/
So what's the other side of the story? Can a IOTA enthusiast explain what's missing from this picture?
What makes IOTA quantum-secure?
IOTA uses hash-based signatures (https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/07/18/hashsig.html) instead of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Not only is hash-based signatures a lot faster than ECC, but it also greatly simplifies the overall protocol (signing and verification). What actually makes IOTA quantum-secure is the fact that we use Winternitz signatures. IOTA's ternary hash function is called Curl.)[1]
Curl is designed by Genetic Algorithm. I wonder how they could test this? Did they 'do the math'?
[1] https://learn.iota.org/faq/what-makes-iota-quantum-secure
That smells fishy to me. Whether his statement is true or not he cannot be trusted. And the fact that they are using unproven in-house cryptography again supports my view of IOTA as a science project rather that something serious and dependable.
Seemed a bit fishy to me too.
Math project is more likely.
Winternitz... ok
Ternary hash function ... designed by genetic algorith ... WUT?
Why would you design your own hash function?
IOTA does not use traditional asymmetrical (public-key) cryptography algorithms which depend on not being able to efficiently computing discrete logarithms or factoring numbers (which are believed to be easy on a quantum computer).
Instead, its signatures are based on the Winternitz signature scheme (slightly modified for ternary) which only depend on the impossibility of reversing hash functions (Kerl in case of IOTA which is a ternary version of Keccak), which is believed not to be that as easy on a quantum computer as factoring a number (although any reversing of a (hash) function can be done more easily on a quantum computer than a traditional computer).
Disadvantage of Winternitz scheme is that signatures are one-time (every signature reveals parts of your key); therefore users have to be careful not to reuse addresses that have been spent.
Source: https://iota.stackexchange.com/questions/203/how-does-iota-m...
I also found something about 'the length of the computation of the hash function' somewhere as making it more quantum resistant but can no longer find the reference.
2. If people are unable to generate a simple seed (password) on their own. How can they even begin to understand cryptocurrency or even new tech based on IoT? Still, yes it should be in the wallet and it will be added, but only for investors, I guess?!
3. Please read the following from their AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7goul4/iota_founders_... and https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7tltz2/live_interview...
Is their market cap justified? Is the entire crypto market cap justified? The whole idea is to invest in tech that can change the future. Who knows which party will be the winner. It's a dare to believe in something magical, like IOTA. Or put your luck into something more real like Bitcoin, for example. Alas, it's good to have doubts, but this blogpost is alarming and not IOTA.
PS: A small portion of my crypto investments are in IOTA, but never press your luck on a single coin.
I don't know man, the MIT Digital Currency Initiative found a pretty bad one last August:
https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...
> the IOTA developers had written their own hash function, Curl, and it produced collisions (when different inputs hash to the same output). Once we developed our attack, we could find collisions using commodity hardware within just a few minutes, and forge signatures on IOTA payments. We informed the IOTA developers, they patched their system, and we wrote a vulnerability report
Smells like a BS excuse to me, and if true, perhaps an even bigger red flag as it strikes me as a very unethical move that is antithetical to open source ideology.
IOTAs developer CFB has used this kind of copy protection for hen he developed NXT and his entire history is littered with arguing for putting a copy protection in place. His argument for putting that in place is any legitimate developer would review the code for vulnerabilities and kinks b fore implementation and only those trying to plagiarize the work would literally copy paste the code. That seems a rational argument to me and I am not entirely sure if the copy protection in IOTA’s case is deliberate or not but they say it is and his historical work seems to be in line with that
The MIT-DCI are not credible..
So what were you trying to say?
What I did find in that first link of yours [1] is this gem though:
> The IOTA hash function, Curl-P, was designed to allow for practical collisions. The IOTA protocol’s security depends solely upon the one-wayness of the function, not its collision resistance. The rationale behind the design of Curl-P is a much more complicated question which we explain in detail.
This statement is alarming on so many levels.
[1] https://blog.iota.org/official-iota-foundation-response-to-t...
// edit: oops, I see now that it's a multipart post, so I'll have a look there.
// edit: yeah okay, nothing of substance in the other parts either.
I'm having a very hard time believing that explanation, but even if I do, it's still something that shows bad judgement in my opinion.
“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,”
Bruce Schneier, renowned security technologist,
about IOTA when we shared our attack.
We discovered a vulnerability in IOTA after reviewing
their code on GitHub in July. We disclosed what we found
to the IOTA team on July 14th, and have been in contact
with them since then as we discovered new issues and
exploits. IOTA issued a patch that addresses the
vulnerabilities we found on August 7th. IOTA no longer has
the vulnerabilities we found, they have been fixed. To
learn more about the details of our attack, you can view
the full disclosure and review our attack examples.
https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl
2. If every other cryptocurrency software team can impliment seed generation in their wallet software, why does IOTA refuse to?
3. Please read this comment from the CEO of IOTA, David Sønstebø on why he doesn't care if you lose money using IOTA: https://reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7gwl38/hello_gu...
2) The android wallet has seed generation. So it's not a question of "refusal", more a question of priotities. Seedgen had not been a priority of the team. We can argue if its good or bad but at the end of the day, it is what it is. Creating a seed is not hard and if you can't put in the effort, well nobody is forcing you to jump into cutting edge experimental technology in search of lambo when!!!
3) Please click "parent" on that comment in order to realize that, yes, this is not a reply to the original post of the thread but to another person unlike it was made out to be and context does matter. Who knew?
2. Every other cryptocurrency has implemented the seed generator as it's the most basic and fundamental feature necessary for this type of software. It's so trivial to implement, it really begs the question of why the IOTA team didn't just include it in all their software releases.
3. The comment CEO David Sønstebø was directly replying to was just commenting on how confusing the software is compared to other cryptocurrency wallets:
I know it sounds simple newb mistake, but even me I
probably would have made that mistake and having been
using crypto for a while.
So to sum it up don't use same receive address in IOTA.
I'll try to burn that in the back of my brain.
"Price to pay for quantum security :) " - David Sønstebø, IOTA CEOI fully expect a wave of stolen IOTA to come from people who typed a 'random' code.
Also look at it yourself, don't listen to others. Everyone is trying to do price manipulation on anything remotely related to crypto.
I thought the white paper and code were really interesting and thought-provoking fwiw, regardless of the viability of the project itself.
>1. There have no vulnerabilities in the past. Please read: https://blog.iota.org/official-iota-foundation-response-to-t....
Let's have a look then. It's in 4 parts, the first two are not about the purported vulnerability but rather complaining that the people behind the discovery didn't disclose it properly and might have a hidden agenda. Fair enough I guess, but it's odd to start with that, it would make a much better point if it came after a strong rebuttal regarding the technical aspects of the vulnerability.
Then we get to the meat of the issue in the middle of page 3:
>2. IOTA Protocol Security and Tangle Reliability
So they start by addressing the "IOTA's coordinator is a single point of failure". Their reply is that... It's true but they never pretended that it was otherwise and that it's temporary:
>IOTA node operators, understanding the importance of the Coordinator’s role in securing the network while it is still young, voluntarily suspended operations during this time.
>The purpose of the Coordinator in the infancy stage of the IOTA network has been transparently communicated throughout the history of IOTA. As the team has explained at length, the Coordinator is a temporary measure to help bootstrap the network and protect it during its infancy. Once there are enough full nodes and transactions to secure and sustain the IOTA network, the Coordinator will be permanently removed from the network. The specific reasons for this are complicated; there is a more detailed explanation on page 19 of the white paper: “...this indicates the need for additional security measures, such as checkpoints, during the early days of a tangle-based system.”
So there's a solution in whitepaper form. As far as the current state of IOTA, they have not debunked any of DCI's claims. But that's still not really the main issue, the one about the broken hash function. They sure do take their time to get there.
Next they talk about whether or not IOTA devs can mess with IOTA accounts. Honestly I don't understand the issue well enough to pass a judgement but if I understand correctly they sort of forked IOTA "ethereum-style" in order to protect the users:
>Ultimately, in order to implement the preventative measures mentioned above, a special snapshot was scheduled wherein all funds vulnerable to theft were tagged with a key reuse marker.
They also say that "Importantly, these protective measures were only possible with the direct and active support of the IOTA community". Except that since they control the coordinator, what would happen if the community hadn't agreed? Can they go their own way without coordinator? Would they have to elect a new one?
Let's skip ahead and get to the vulnerability with the hash function, the last point of the last page in this document. This line stuck out to me:
>The answer is that the Coordinator was specifically designed, in addition to other purposes, to prevent precisely such an attack.
Ah, the coordinator again. Beyond that I don't understand the issue deeply enough to judge whether or not the vulnerability is as bad as DCI said so I can't decide who's right. I do find the justification behind the weakness rather... strange though:
>In summary, Curl-P was indeed deployed in the open-source IOTA protocol code as a copy-protection mechanism to prevent bad actors cloning the protocol and using it for nefarious purposes. Once the practical collisions were uncovered, its purpose as a copy-protection mechanism was of course rendered obsolete (it only works for as long as it remains unknown) and IOTA reverted to the industry standard KECCAK-384 cryptographic function.
So... there's nothing wrong with the function, it's just some kind of protection against people cloning the protocol (why is that a problem?) but even though everything is absolutely fine they decided to replace it anyway? It seems like such a weird decision, and also a bad precedent (you shouldn't have hidden functionality in your open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency). It reminds me of Intel's "Spectre and Meltdown are the CPU operating exactly as designed" PR stunt.
1. Parts 1 and 2 were all fluff. Part 3 responds to the actual technical claims, and several paragraphs of fluff later, confirms the MIT claim that funds were transferred out of user accounts to an account controlled by the IOTA Foundation without user consent. (They had consent from some other network participants / the "community", and supposedly they had very good reasons for it.) I gave up by part 4, sorry.
Where I come from—which happens to be MIT, in fact—security protocols have a threat model, either stated or unstated, and a confused threat model is a legitimate criticism. One of the common unstated parts of the threat model of cryptocurrencies is that, unlike with a government-issued currency, the organization behind the currency should not be implicitly trusted and certainly should not be able to take your money for your own good. Is this part of the IOTA threat model? What exactly is required technically for this sort of transfer?
You can use a credit card without ever having to calculate your own Luhn checksum. You can send money to a bank account without having to untangle the rat's nest that is ACH.
It makes the IOTA team's priorities look skewed when they don't have basic wallet functionality, but they have time to implement ternary math and new cryptographic primitives that aren't useful with existing hardware.
While IOTA boosters probably have a story they believe that justifies the hype in their mind, just because it’s worth $6 billion in this market doesn’t mean they necessarily have a good one.
For what it’s worth, of all the crypto people I follow that I consider smart or savvy, none of them are IOTA bulls.
Also, the IOTA founder comes off as extremely immature on twitter each time someone trashes it. Even if all the criticism is FUD, his reaction alone is enough to keep me away.
Twitter seems sadly popular among this crowd. Sadly because it lends itself to flamewars.
1. Token Economy is a weekly crypto newsletter run by two crypto VCs (https://tokeneconomy.co/). I think it is extremely good at separating the signal from the noise. Highly recommend.
2. Twitter is unfortunately indeed the easiest place to follow what's going on. Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, recently published a list of the people he follows in the space (https://twitter.com/naval/lists/crypto/members). It has a large overlap with my own list, but neither he nor I endorse everyone's views that are on it. But it probably includes most of the active developers, VCs and thought leaders in the space.
In general I give up after I get the first "you don't know what you're talking about" without any kind of actual argument behind it. Note that you find several of these in the comments of TFA:
>i find it deeply alarming everybody and their graindma has to write bad stuff about iota without beeing informed themselves enough.
>I learned a lot today, but not from this article. The comment section has some good information.
>you’re way too late for the fud party.
>Wow…another clear case of awesome journalism. Another case of the misinformed trying to mislead people with another mudslinging article.
>Just a question: does it ever occur to you to pick up the phone and may get in touch with someone who actually knows the topic at hand before writing this kind of garbage…say the IOTA…
Truly enlightening.
I love this comment too: https://medium.com/@dfalkman/i-think-this-article-sums-the-p...
>The bottom line is that IOTA is embarking on something new. Like a lot of things in crypto, it is theoretical and academic and working towards becoming practical. It is very early.
Then:
>We all rise together, so we should more encouraging of one another’s endeavors in crypto and blockchain. IMO these concerns would have been best voiced in the IOTA slack channel instead of on the interwebs for all to FUD about.
In other words: it's experimental academic endeavor but don't criticize it publicly because it hinders my ability to pump it.
There’s your tip-off for a scam: don’t ask questions, and be encouraging to each other, because it’s us against a skeptical world. Cults, penny stocks, Amway, and now crypto currency scams apparently: I’ve observed similar patterns in all. Not that we shouldn’t support each other in our mutual endeavors, but if that’s the only thing with any substance that you hear and money is on the line, run away.
Tip-off #2: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Enlighten me.” <crickets>
Learned that one from a biodiesel nut, a suburban boy with clean fingernails trying to convince this ex-mechanic who grew up on a farm that growing food crops for fuel is energy net positive, and otherwise a good idea. Not that his heavy financial investment in a local biodiesel company would color his opinion at all.
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance), growing sugarcane for ethanol is 8x net energy positive.
Your nut isn't much of a nut.
OTOH, snarky or not, you bring up an interesting thought: there are probably millions of people that know (as in practical knowledge) how soybeans are grown, hence enabling millions to call “bullshit”. Had said nutter said “algae”, I would have to have taken his word until I could research further.
It's amazing how many scams are in the cryptocurrency space. To some extent even I personally even view Ripple and all the other completely pre-mined or tokenized cryptocurrencies (i.e. 100% centralized systems) as a scam. There's no guarantee manipulation of the underlying technology isn't happening. Essentially, removing the advantage of cryptocurrencies.
To explain further, PoS blockrewards are settled as lotteries to stakeholders with each staked coin being granted a lottery ticket. Due to the all or nothing nature of newly printed coins from blockrewards, the wealthiest users will not just accumulate more newly printed coins on average but the statistical odds of them accumulating more of the future supply increases with time whereas poor users are entirely disqualified from thresholds required for "staking" and earning newly minted coins.
Would it be possible to stop using crypto as a shorthand for cryptocurrency? It's already a term of art for the much older field of cryptography and things get confusing, especially as all the crypto(graphy) people I follow consider altcoins in general to be hype.
Not to mention it makes no sense, kryptós means "hidden" or "secret", which cryptocurrencies are not, the crypto- prefix comes solely from the underlying usage of cryptographic tools.
I tend to think you're right that it's time to just sigh, shake our collective head, roll our collective eyes, and give up fighting this battle, but the future I just described seems at least somewhat plausible to me.
About that, I think it won't be a flash in the pan. I think it's here to stay and people won't stop talking about cryptocurrencies.
Too late, the language has changed whether you like it or not.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/946630708805566464
I know a fair bit about crypto. I would implement (and have implemented) higher order constructions like encrypted and authenticated protocols according to design patterns and principles put forward by competent cryptographers. I would never ever even attempt to design a cipher or a cryptographically strong hash unless I were just playing around, and would never label my work as anything other than such. Even trying to innovate on constructions (like how to combine a MAC with a cipher) would make me very nervous and I'd seek the advice of a pro.
Multiply that nervousness by ten if the system is a cryptocurrency, which has a big "hack me" sign on it with a massive cash bounty.
Actual deep cryptography such as cipher design is an area where truly extreme and very esoteric expertise is required to even get started, and where the consequences of a failure are pretty dire. Even people who can design ciphers are conservatives when they implement real secure systems, only using those ciphers that have been through years of academic cryptanalysis. This area is very different from other areas of computer science and math.
I hear this every time cryptography is brought up. I think I get that it's hard, but people make it sound like it's the hardest thing ever. Where does this extreme complexity stem from? And what's the field of knowledge required? (Mathematics I imagine)
Furthermore, given the number of subtle failure modes, a new scheme (even one designed by an expert) is likely to be insecure until shown to be secure by time and peer review (i.e., after it has been extensively attacked). Experts know this; amateurs assume that because they can't see a flaw, their new scheme is secure enough to deploy.
Tricky maths and just-as-tricky implementation. And a broken implementation can obviously make the best maths worthless.
I believe that it stems from the fact that it's easy to get wrong, and hard to know you got it wrong. Furthermore, other than a few special cases like one-time pads, there's no known way to prove that a cipher is secure, only that it's insecure. A cipher designer, therefore, must by necessity be an expert on all the known ways to break a cipher, so as to avoid all the known traps, and defend against the yet-to-be-discovered ones.
Cryptographers are modern day real world occultists and wizards. It really is an esoteric area of computational and mathematical lore that requires many years of diligent study before one can even attempt to do anything that isn't a toy.
The gods (intelligence agencies, organized crime) laugh at those who attempt to roll crypto without knowing what they're doing.
Note again that I'm talking about core primitive (cipher, hash, etc.) design. I do think that mere mortals can implement crypto, though doing so competently still requires a lot of study and respect for the difficulty of the domain. I don't repeat the "never implement crypto" mantra. Instead I prefer the modified version: "do not attempt to implement crypto unless you know how to break crypto." If you don't understand how crypto is often broken and can't name and explain a few recent examples, you should not be implementing crypto.
It’s not literally the hardest thing ever, but it’s probably in that category of difficulty with a few other domains. There are several reasons why this is the case.
First, to understand cryptography well enough to safely design a novel cryptosystem requires significant knowledge of information theory, complexity theory and approximately all of undergraduate mathematics. If you’re only developing symmetric encryption cryptosystems or primitives like hash functions, you can probably stop there. If you’re developing a novel public-key cryptosystem, you will be adding on graduate-level study in number theory and algebra; in particular for advanced topics in elliptic curves, coding theory and vector spaces (lattices). Throw in game thory while you’re at it to model cryptosystems and their security proofs. You don’t need everything from every course, and it doesn’t have to happen in a strictly academic setting, but you still need to acquire that knowledge if you want to design novel systems.
Second, while a lot of “hard” fields require knowledge of very advanced topics in math, cryptography is somewhat unique in that the incentive to identify a mistake in your design is extraordinary. Designing an imperfect alternative to bcrypt or scrypt results in absolute catastrophe for real-world user privacy and monetary assets if a serious vulnerability is found after it’s widely adopted. Simply put: this is an arms race, and most software does not need to be designed to be fault-tolerant in an actively hostile environment. This elevates the design difficulty to what you could call the “military setting.”
Finally, and corollary my second point, cryptography is very difficult to implement. It’s fairly easy to choose the wrong parameter when you’re implementing a cryptographic primitive from a specification, or to accidentally destroy the security of the cryptosystem in an attempt to make it a bit faster (e.g. lattice reduction). And other than that you need to defend against a battery of side channel attacks, which introduces another level of complexity.
I personally understand a lot of academic cryptography (but the more you learn the less you actually know...), and I’d say that, categorically speaking, cryptography is comparable to rocket science. I’m not claiming it’s absolutely as hard, but it shares many of the broad strokes. It’s not brain meltingly difficult in any single dimension (I find cryptography papers far easier to read than some blog posts by Terence Tao, for example), but the conceptual addition of a “safety” requirement makes everything more complex. It elevates the requisite mathematical knowledge and engineering rigor needed to design and implement a good cryptosystem.
* Computer science, specifically complexity theory and circuits
* Galois field theory (AKA finite field theory)
* Group theory
* Number theory
* Specialities include elliptic curves and modular forms, lattices (in the ordered/on-the-plane way, not the algebraic structures)
In general, cryptographic design and analysis is all about a guess that we have in mathematics: We think that one-way functions exist. We think that we have certain specific tools, such as the discrete logarithm problem and Feistel networks, which can be carried from one domain to another reusably, and as a result the bleeding edge of research is currently concerned with finding new domains, as quantum computers will rapidly be obsoleting our current ones.
This isn't the hardest thing ever, but you're going to have to spend a few years getting your maths up to snuff. I've personally spent over a decade and while I've done a lot of things, I've still yet to contribute usefully to the cryptographic community; I haven't accrued enough knowledge to do more than analyze basic protocols and read some classic cryptanalysis papers.
Hope this helps; everything should be Googlable or on Wikipedia.
And it's not hard because of the mathematical theory behind it. It's because there are so many subtleties in cryptography that in order to call yourself a "cryptographer", you not only need to have understood all the mathematical theory but also have thought about and understand all the subtle edge cases. And once you do get to that point, you become super careful about making certain claims.
Unlike engineering problems where a small error can be fixed somehow through monkey patching, a subtle loophole brings down the usefulness of the entire cryptographic algorithm. So no matter how powerful your next big cryptography algorithm is, if someone finds a very very small loop hole, it's fucked, and the entire algorithm is unusable.
This is so important that the WebCrypto API even named their main API endpoint as "crypto.subtle" (instead of just using the "crypto" prefix) to warn people.
So TLDR: it's not because people don't trust the expertise of a non-cryptographer, but because people trust that an actual "professional cryptographer" is humble enough to not make claims unless they can prove it.
My impression with IOTA is that it makes a lot of mind-bending claims which no one can easily prove or disprove. And also they don't use the proven-by-time cryptographic algorithm. This makes it impossible for anyone to make a trustworthy peer review. (It doesn't help that the founder acts like an asshole so nobody wants to waste their time doing a peer review on it anyway)
Given that DCI appears to have outsmarted the IOTA developers here, it's not a crazy attitude.
They are trying to push the ternary to see if adoption can take off. All it needs is a few thousand logic gates on any traditional chip.if it doesn’t get adopted,they said they can always go back to binary.
They're claiming this, for what operation? And similar question for the 10% usage claim.
I suspect storage will be the same when you get done packing into machine words and storing those, yes? Unless they're not using all the bits in a word...
Any independent references for ternary efficiencies for any operation?
8x efficiency _of_what_compared_to_what_?For all these applications IOTA is not feasible. It is not feasible because the ternary logic needs to be emulated on a processor that itself has not even enough beef to do cryptographic functions by itself. If they have cryptographic support like the e.g. the SE series from STM with a Cortex M0 as used in the Ledger Nano S, then this is optimized for standard cryptographic algorithms and not for some newly invented stuff.
Also if we talk about IOT sensor networking with LPWAN (LoRa, SigFox, ...) than bandwith is a real issue. That means collecting transactions from others and doing PoW on that before sending of your own transaction is completely unrealistic. The remote sensor just wants to transmit its data. But that would mean the LPWAN Gateway needs to be a full node doing the PoW. But LPWAN works, that everybody can listen to transaction request and so we are back to the collisions problem.
One of the reasons I wouldn't trust IOTA any farther than I could personally throw the entire development team is that writing a strong cryptocurrency requires a deep understanding of mathematics, and theirs is the sort of shallow I'd expect from a high schooler. They appear to be operating under the misapprehension that numbers come with their base built into them, as if they are operating in a mathematics regime where "10 != 0xa != 012(octal) != 1010(binary)", and anyone that confused about mathematics is not someone you want designing your CSS stylesheets ("no, that's rgb(255, 255, 255), you really want #fff. Or maybe #ffffff."), let alone your cryptocurrency.
It is possible to sit down and work it all out on paper, and you can work out how many trits using logarithms you can pack into a given number of bits, etc etc., but all the terms will cancel and the math will tell you that you just end up with binary again. You can end up with quite the table explaining how to add "binary-encoded base-3" numbers together if you insist on holding on to the idea that base-3 numbers somehow exist separately from base-2 numbers, but in the end it'll all just cancel out. You can get some idea of what it would look like, and how silly it would be, if we trained people to add numbers together by first converting them into binary, adding them in binary, and then converting back to decimal, since that would be the same thing, just with different bases, but does capture how inconvenient it is to do math that way when your bases can't be translated via lookup table (i.e., hexadecimal <-> binary can be done mechanically on a string basis for the number, unlike 2 <-> 3 or 2 <-> 10 (thanks to the factor of 5 in the 10)). And then imagine that as we are teaching people that maneuver that we are telling them that the binary-encoded representation is the real number, and the base-10 encoding is a fake number that can't be trusted or used the same way.
Totally forgot about it, and never put two and two together(three and three? :P) to link it to IOTA. Now that they are quite wealthy, I wonder if it will become a reality. I'm highly skeptical, but I really don't know enough to form a real opinion. Definitely one of those things that make you go 'huh?' though.
Considering this, it doesn’t really make sense that the Iota founders made a decision to not only introduce a novel cryptocurrency system (the tangle), but to also try to push ternary adoption. That’s a monolithic amount of work from a research and business perspective, and it strains credulity that they could engage in this with a full understanding of what they’re doing. Their work is completely divorced from the rest of the academic community, which has many well-respected researchers with a vetted track record already.
Innovation usually happens in incremental steps forward, building from the (recent) work of others. Much more rarely, it manifests as a large leap forward without significant cumulative work. But it approximately never happens that a new state of the art combines several large and orthogonal leaps forward. It’s not impossible, but my outlook is strongly pesimisstic.
When you combine this with the frankly odd (and potentially unethical) behavior the founders are showing - rolling their own cryptography out of ignorance or to attempt to sabotage other open source projects - it becomes extremely hard to take the work seriously.
So you, how want to discuss the details when people are just convinced without having knowledge themselves?
[1] https://www.inowrx.de/iota-stolen-iota-stop-pending-unconfir...
So it works a bit like replace-by-fee on bitcoin? There is no mining on IOTA so what is the possible time frame? do you have more detailed technical information how this works? Thanks
It is so you do not need to know the private key. So that you can forge fraudulent transactions without knowing the private key.
2) The IOTA Foundation and the community expressly warned not to trust unaffiliated sites. Saying they relied on them is just shady. Would we hang TBL for inventing email because people had their money stolen by nigerian scammers? No, because shifting blame on the man would be even more stupid than wiring thousands of dollars to someone you don't know. Seedgeneration is, in this current non-feature-complete implementation simply not a priority. Creating a seed is not hard and if you can't muck one up, nobody is forcing anyone to try and feed their greed trying to "enter at the ground floor, lambo lol!!!" using IOTA. I would wait for a wallet implementation that comes with a generator.
3) IOTA is very very young by far not feature complete. Hanging it out to dry because it isn't yet isn't exactly fair. Everything had to start somewhere. Though, with all that in mind, it still works rather well in my experience and it scales. It solves a lot of problems inherent with blockchain and it has a future market goal it wants to service. The rest is speculation. As always, I guess.
IOTA rebutted MIT here: https://blog.iota.org/official-iota-foundation-response-to-t...
They start by implying that the MIT Media Lab isn't really MIT (what the fuck) as an ad-hominem way to dodge their criticism. Later they whine "But Zcash rolled their own crypto, why can't we?!" which shows they really don't even understand the context of what they're doing.
I launched my wallet and saw a zero balance and zero transactions. I looked around and heard from some friends that I need to convert my funds or something, because there was a "snapshot" yesterday.
I clicked the "re-attach" button and waited for a few minutes. It failed, so I did it again and again and again. After half an hour and five times or so, it succeeded and I could see my balance.
I tried to send funds, the wallet said "sending" for around ten minutes, and then it finally said "success". I waited for the funds to confirm (there were three transactions, two of which were zero for some reasons), but 70 minutes later it still hadn't.
A friend told me I should "re-attach" the transaction and "promote" it. Apparently, "promoting" sends five transactions that reference yours, to confirm it. I imagine the transactions are zero-fund transactions that just spam the network to self-confirm your own one. Who confirms the confirmers?
This is absolutely insane and I can't believe this thing ever got traction. It feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks. It doesn't even work right! Did any of the people who bought these coins try to ever use them for anything?
> This is absolutely insane and I can't believe this thing ever got traction.
It got traction because people--including yourself--bought into it without thinking much.
> It feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks. It doesn't even work right! Did any of the people who bought these coins try to ever use them for anything?
Yeah, like yourself. You never actually tried to use the coins for anything until this point when you are now finally trying to "cash out".
An alternate (and correct) interpretation is that I bought IOTA as I thought I may end up using it in my IoT projects. I didn't (probably because nobody working for IOTA actually cares about IoT), and now I want to sell them for a more useful currency.
Not everyone wants coins for speculation, but you're forgiven for thinking otherwise.
So yeah, just because someone owns coins doesn't mean they are/were mindless speculators.
Yet another possibility (which is how... a friend of mine... uses coins) is buying weed from the dark web. That's a big use case right now.
To be honest, I don't think anybody's personal user experience has been much of a concern to the IOTA project up until now. The new wallets might change that, so you might want to hold on to your coins until then.
They promise to solve all of the issues that you mention: - Automatic node selection rather than the limited amount of nodes currently listed in the wallet software. - Automatic re-attaching and promoting transactions. - Address re-use detection.
Automatic and distributed snapshotting of the network is also on the roadmap, this would address your zero balance issue.
But like I said, if you have run out of patience and you have your eyes on other projects that do deliver what you are looking for, then by all means...
Combine that with the hand-waving of the vulnerabilities by the community, and it's not a good sign. However, I'm not really interested in speculating about the price (I've never bought more than $100ish worth of any cryptocurrency), it's just that I don't see IOTA being a useful currency for me to play with.
Imagine what it feels like when you have tens of thousands of dollars invested in something where the flamewars might actually have a real effect on whether you ten-double your investment or not
I think it’s gonna get much uglier than this down the road
Thank you. This article was useful for me, it showed what details of IOTA haven’t been highlighted yet. Below I list incorrect things from the article, if you find time it would be great if you paid more attention to them and shared your thoughts:
“IOTA has no limit on transactions and therefore, it has no limit on bandwidth requirements or disk space.” — In the future the majority of the nodes will be swarm nodes forming clusters and using Swarm Intelligence. A swarm can process more transactions than a single full node.
“This means, if you run a full IOTA node, anyone on the IOTA network can write data to your hard drive with just a small, extremely low cost proof-of-work.” — IOTA was created for the Internet-of-Things with network-bound PoW in mind, the current state of things is temporary.
“Over time, the IOTA transaction set size can grow unbounded, leaving only storage farms with the resources required to host the data.” — This is incorrect even for Bitcoin because of pruning techniques.
“My past experience working at companies that develop hardware products tells me this does not make sense in any other way but a marketing bullet.” — While this thing is likely correct I decided to list it here. IOTA team has experience working at companies developing hardware products too. Even more, I bet your smartphone contains a chip developed by one of our advisors.
“IOTA claims their Ternary-based Proof-of-Work function will work with IOT because it uses minimal power, but I contend that any power usage more significant than signing a transaction is too much because there is another alternative approach.” — As I already said, IOTA will be using network-bound PoW, which will be consuming less energy than required for a transaction signing.
“Contacting a central server run by the company that built the IOT device, announcing the need to submit a transaction at which point the centralized server will submit the transaction on the device’s behalf.” — You described the Internet, not the IoT. Please, refer to “Connectivity” section of https://iot.ieee.org/newsletter/march-2017/three-major-chall..., it explains why you are very wrong.
“In the case of IOTA the client software design intends to kick nodes off the network that do not participate enough, so being even just a passive listener is not an option.” — And again you talk about the Internet, not about the IoT. Googling for reasons of not using IP(v4/v6) should show you the mistake.
I don’t mention insignificant mistakes in your reasoning, all those seem to be caused by the lack of information about IOTA. This is an issue that the IOTA team is working on.
Getting a decentralized swarm to implement transaction processing is highly non-trivial, especially when (as the OP highlights) incentives are delicate and the entire system must be extremely secure.
And you can't enforce tip selection.
OP talks about what IOTA _is_. The response is: "You are wrong because we _hope that IOTA will be different in the future_". How does this response make any sense at all?