IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
This project is peak 2017 bullshit. I can imagine the pitch deck: “It’s WeWork but for cannabis startups using IoT on the blockchain promoted by a reality TV star!”
I love watching these guys and their supporters. It's like watching an internet cult in real time.
Honourable mentions to subs like /r/lisk or /r/arkecosystem
The thing is I think he's smart and a programmer with the head in the right place and has made a ton of very good decisions at work. So if you think these projects only attract idiots and fools you're wrong. Smart people can also be fooled.
Cryptocurrency has done a lot of damage to the tech world due mostly to the sheer amount of brainpower it's sucked up that might otherwise have been used for more useful stuff. It's been kind of a tar pit where you have vast resources chasing things that have no actual real world value. It sort of reminds me of that Star Trek TNG episode where they try to kill off the Borg collective by giving them an impossible geometric shape to ponder endlessly.
A lot of these crypto companies frame themselves as liberators from the banks who don't want to give you a share of the pie and so on, targetting vulnerable people who seek opportunity. It's very cynical.
Another space where I have observed this is online education startups. Lots of "you don't need a degree", "the universities are just trying to keep you out", "we're bringing education to the masses" etc. Same sales pitch.
All those universities that donated lecture videos to places like edx and Coursera? Yeah, you can't access most of those lectures anymore. They're either paywalled or deemed not to fit in with their paywall platform of the day and are no longer accessible.
For a brief glorious moment it actually seemed like we'd have a great quantity of quality University material available over the internet for anyone who wanted it. But it's all gone now.
I'm not looking for dogmatic crypto-tribalistic nonsense, simply an answer to why the GP felt necessary to lump EOS into his ad hominem attack. Too often these discussions resemble drunk bar patrons arguing over which cities sports team is better, I hoped HN would be better than that.
Yeah, it's "different", but not in a good way.
EOS has a bunch of big problems, and they're not likely to fix them, as there's no motivation to do so.
We're also making fun of how IOTA stopped their network, but EOS had a similar situation in 2018. Granted they have more than a single fricking node, but that it was even possible should tell you something about the network.
Is there any real reason these exist except for the ultimate motive of making people believe they'll become richer, like 2012-era Bitcoin actually caused, and proceeding to profit off their ignorance?
If not then it makes a lot of sense that a sizeable amount of people would preach nonesense for months. They'd believe there's compensation for them waiting at the end of it all.
And it doesn't even need to end in having cryptocurrency-of-the-month being exposed as a scam or anything. People can just believe it didn't work out this time and continue searching for an IoT-enabled 2012-era Bitcoin that in the future will likely never exist.
I know it's cliche, but money corrupts. This is probably another manifestation of that with what improved technology now allows us to accomplish.
"Tokyo chooses IOTA"
You assume that that city is implementing IOTA, right? If you dig deep enough you will see that what actually happens is that few people from IOTA will participate in something like a seminar with a workshop in Tokyo. It is organized by somebody in the city administration as part of some social program and there are 30 participants and what IOTA is chosen for is to be among those.
Outage of 12 days and counting... Why won’t anyone put us in production..
How do people know who has how many coins?
https://blockstream.info/address/1BgoUL3Mf8vDSDU4jjpFARKBJ6z...
The information comes from a leveldb database you can download from peers after installing this client: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
OK, why'd you use this example as your entire response to "how do people know who has how many coins, for a coin which has reportedly never shipped a working binary"?
Can you answer the original question instead of linking an unrelated bitcoin topic?
They have a MySQL type database that stores IOUs for the people who bought the ICO tokens. They promise to deliver the actual coins once they finish the software, which in many cases has never happened. Others are less egregious than this and have working binaries on a testnet--the future main network is promised to deliver the actual functionality. There are a few coins (Cardano, EOS) worth multiple billions that don't have a mainnet or a working wallet.
They are also running a testnet for their staking capability, which will promote to the main net eventually -- but claiming they're not running a live net and don't have a wallet is absolutely incorrect.
To be clear, this isn't definitive, as he is one of many individuals suspected to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
As an unrelated side note it is worth reading his post from 2009 when we talks about having ALS: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bshZiaLefDejvPKuS/dying-outs... I have a memory of discovering this essay on hn, but I can no longer find the discussion. Maybe I remembered it wrong.
Edit: I found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=867623
Uhh, source??
In the case of ERC style tokens, the token issuing contract holds a hashtable that links public addresses to a token balance as well as an invariant for totalSupply.
In any case, anyone with access to a block explorer or a node can query for an address and see its balance using the provided APIs (in ethereum it would be web3.eth.getBalance('0xdeacafe')
Looking forward to the day where the shitcoins die off and there's only a handful of cryptos on exchanges/people talk about.
I felt this way for quite a few projects and I'll be honest I felt too smart by half by passing, I don't regret my risk adverse nature though.
Some of the most lucrative offers were obvious bullshit, but it didn't matter at all. Crowds were so frenetic about where the next "big project" was they didn't and couldn't comprehend that they were being fleeced.
It wasn't until a buddy of mine talked about his nephew "wanting to invest in X coin because the price was low".
Lot's of hype = lot's of dumb money ∴ Profits can be made on where dumb money flows.
But I agree, most often blockchain outside of a cryptocurrency doesn't make sense. This use case also depends on the security of an existing cryptocurrency.
[0] https://whycryptocurrencies.com/timestamping_service.html
> The solution we propose begins with a timestamp server. A timestamp server works by taking a hash of a block of items to be timestamped and widely publishing the hash, such as in a newspaper or Usenet post [2-5]. The timestamp proves that the data must have existed at the time, obviously, in order to get into the hash. Each timestamp includes the previous timestamp in its hash, forming a chain, with each additional timestamp reinforcing the ones before it.
It’s not really usable though; all the “dns on blockchain” means just “well we can store arbitrary data on the blockchain, some are parseable as DNS records maybe, and then I guess we can parse all the chain to get all the records???”
it was as meaningful in 2011 as it is in 2020
Ethereum lets you do general purpose computing, so there are nameservers that just use a hash table. That's how ENS (.eth) works. But at that point it's not really "DNS as a blockchain"; it's more like ICANN but running on Ethereum miners's computers instead of 8.8.8.8.
For reference: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Core_0.11_(ch_2):_Data_St... https://hackernoon.com/getting-deep-into-ethereum-how-data-i...
DNS needs to resolve an name on the order of nanoseconds across a distributed system. It is designed with this in mind. A blockchain is designed with integrity in mind. Wallets can verify transactions on the order of nanoseconds with SPV--also distributed because a client can get the intermediate block headers from any server. Querying data, like for DNS, has constraints different from verifying integrity, like for a ledger.
Sure, you can use a blockchain for storage, but who do you trust to do the lookups? It can't be on chain because it will be far too slow. You'd end up having to trust some entity like Cloudflare to run a DNS-on-blockchain node that stores the ground truth, going full circle back to regular DNS. What's the equivalent of SPV for DNS-on-blockchain where I can do and verify name resolution with limited resources?
Here is a possible implementation in Ethereum: https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/ethdns-9d56298f...
Blockchain as in the above with a decentralized decision function (proof-of-work, maybe proof-of-stake) is less likely to be useful outside cryptocurrency.
Typically when people talk about "blockchain" they mean the latter.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3244128/how-blockchain...
Could you have an identity where if the above happens you just start over? Yes, as long as it's not "too" expensive. But if you make it too cheap you risk Sybil attacks. So your identity system can't really be used for reputation. What's left? Not much IMO.
Timestamping use cases like 'I created this work of science/art at this time and I can prove it' are good, especially if you broker with an agent that can reliably and securely store keys. Identity is hard IMO.
Reading the W3 spec for Decentralised Identifiers is probably a bit dry, suggest looking into other sources on this matter.
Regardless the answer to your question is yes.
A lot of smart people have been working on this very thing for years.
"I'm waiting for a use case of blockchain outside assets"
Which there are plenty of entities using or applying blockchain tech as a means of tracking the immutable transfer of assets. That's a fairly large market place. Does it need to be more than that?
This shit isn't gonna cure cancer, tell you why you sometimes you have wondering sexual thoughts, or run your life for you.
It may be valuable for some applications.
https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2017-04-27-Lockheed-Martin-C...
https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2014/9/ericsson-a...
https://nortal.com/blog/blockchain-healthcare-estonia/
etc.
Every car has a unique VIN, so imagine all data of the car is written to a blockchain. Maintenance, mileage, accidents, etc. When you buy a car, you check the blockchain and get a complete history, unable to tamper with afterwards.
Of course you have to trust the entities that write the info. But the more trustworthy entities, the harder a malicious entity can withhold or provide false info.
The only real way to keep your keys safe is in a hardware based solution that has been audited by multiple parties. Our credit cards have that level of security, crypto wallets need at least that much.
Actually now that I think about it I wonder what liability the exchange has in this. Obviously the exchange can't send you your coins because it's physically impossible and the value is purely speculative but currently being given value only on the exchange. Would they need to reimburse you for the 'value' of the coins if you can't withdraw? Though if we're playing a game of silly buggers I guess the exchange could put up a sell for 0.000001 cents a coin, execute the trade and immediately freeze further transactions then claim any payout would be at the last traded value (which obviously wouldn't work as there are multiple exchanges). Perhaps they could 'give access' to the exchanges wallet key with instructions that the person trying to withdraw is entitled to take out their share of the coins thus it's the account holder who is 'in control' of the coins.
The amount I lost: 100 USD
You did not lose 100 USD. You lost XXX MIOTA.
If you're a stock trader and you buy $100 in a company that goes backrupt do you lose $100 or XXX stocks?
The responders are wrong about my proficiency with crypto. I've been following the tech and finance side of it since Bitcoin was worth 120 USD. I've written trade bots, some fun smart contracts and even participited in Dogecoin giveaway with some doge I mined.
Nano is another coin with properties similar to Iota that is actually decentralized.
(disclaimer: I hold some Nano)
(But it's not as bad as IOTA of course.)
There is nothing behind it but the lie is so strong and there are so many people peddling it that the market starts to believe its own lie.
It's funny how quickly some capitalists will discard cryptocurrencies as worthless junk while simultaneously preaching the doctrine of "efficient markets" and not realizing the simple fact that "real markets" and "cryptocurrency markets" both exist in the same universe and are acted upon by the same market forces.
Iota remains a speculative cryptocurrency. It does not rely on the technology before it and is not a copy-paste crypto like many that came out of the last boom cycle.
I still think it is quite innovative. That said, it may eventually fail due to its poor implementation. The value of it on the exchanges reflects the fact that it may survive this latest fiasco.
Indeed, it has had their centralized Coordinator with plans to decentralize. Is that a flaw? Maybe, but it's also a scaling issue.
The distributed proof of work is novel as well as the absence of centralized mining and transaction fees.
Truly bizarre bullshit.
Sadly, I don't think that the blind defense of flawed security is that bizarre and is all too common today.
That said, it was corrected and seems solid to date.
There's nothing "solid" about this. It's a scam.
And yes, that's exactly how they described it.
It's a scam? Any link to how they are intentionally stealing money? I'd like to know how you know.
Read for yourself and make up your own mind.
Where you got that from?
"By 2019, members of the IOTA community earned a reputation for routinely harassing women security experts, like Open Privacy founder Sarah Jamie Lewis, who found flaws in IOTA research."
Fair enough that it's implicating the community and not the founders, but is in the same paragraph with the Sonstebo/Narula scandal.
I see that I did infer, but perhaps that was the intent.
Congratulations.