Tangle data-structure – The lesser known blockchain alternative
blog.iota.org
blog.iota.org
There was a time in 2017 when all you needed for a successful ICO was a flashy landing page with countdown timers and a 5-page "whitepaper" of gibberish set in Computer Modern. Maybe those days are back, with altcoins riding the hype wave again.
But my interest was initially piqued by IOTA back in 2017. It quickly died when I realized that it didn't prevent double-spends and, critically - at least at the time - it was completely non-functional!
The fact that it was down for 11 days only a few months ago and that it's still somehow worth $3Bn is amusing.
What's really interesting is... From my limited knowledge, Zcash and Monero DO actually work and have use cases being anonymous. Yet they have roughly the same "market cap" as IOTA.
For perhaps the most egregious example of this, look at the "Cardano" project. It does nothing, without any apparent plans to even change that. Even their hello world example doesn't run. And yet it is the #4 ranked cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $44 BILLION dollars.
All of it appears to have stemmed from their founders doing these creepy aspirational youtube live streams. If you're still investing in cryptocurrencies at this point, seriously look at that project and tell me that this space is reasonable. This is the 4th most popular project behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether (an obvious fraud).
https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...
That said, I don't believe that there's an actual demand or need for smart contract platforms, or that it makes sense to build new currencies that are tied into these platforms.
Also, proof-of-stake is not very secure, and Cardano has admitted this by supporting Ergo, which is a new smart contract protocol based on proof-of-work. However, PoW needs a lot of hashing power to be secure, so Bitcoin with secondary smart contract layers such as Rootstock and RGB are actually the best option (if there's a need for them).
> the most active of all blockchain projects
> peer-reviewed research papers
"it does nothing"
> proof-of-stake is not very secure, and Cardano has admitted this by supporting Ergo
so what can it do if the base protocol is not secure?
Proof-of-stake has various problems, depending on who you ask. In this case, as far as I understand it, the issue is related to large positions locked as collateral in DeFi. PoS security assumes that most of the available currency is used for staking, but the security assumption breaks if most of the currency is locked as collateral in DeFi (which can offer better interest rates vs. staking).
I'm no Cardano shill and would never buy at the current prices, but if I believed they had what it takes (which is more than just sound tech) to siphon off much of the Ethereum crowd and bring in more nation-state level projects in the coming years then the valuation isn't that crazy.
Again, I don't have such lofty assumptions and will be waiting for smart contracts before I consider investing, but to say it does nothing is patently false- and if my time horizon were in the multiples of years then I'd probably consider inclusion in the large pool I'd spread my play-money across.
Is it worth $44B right now? Obviously not, but investment is a bet on the future, not current performance- and I've been wrong a lot.
[0] https://iohk.io/en/research/library/
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/from-paper-to-cardano-blockchain-io...
This is identical to every other project that claims these exact same things.
If you have to say you're not a shill, it's probably not working in your favor. You sound defensive. For what it's worth I don't think you're a shill but I think you're naive about cryptocurrency.
And if it's not worth $44 billion today then you're an idiot to buy at that price, because why not wait until the price is right? And if the price is just going to go up then clearly it is worth that today. This isn't even unique to crypto this is just investing 101. Why would you ever overpay for something if your goal is to make money?
Yeah it's probably overpriced and not a smart idea to buy. I'm not saying it isn't.
Cardano has a lot going for it from my time looking at it (3 months now). I'm going to keep paying attention to it.
That said, I hope it succeeds in staying cheap to write transactions unlike the other projects in order for poorer countries to be able to take advantage. And hope it is successful convincing African and Asian governments/institutions in keeping important things like education credentials and property deeds onto its chain given the lack of documentation and authenticity in a lot of these places.
Lots of cryptocurrency speculation going on, but I can ignore that and be interested in where Cardano is going with regards to improving lives in countries where they are essentially neglected.
Why would they use DLT for exchange of (promised) value rather than using banks?
Why would they use DLT for token issuance rather than the monetary policy of the fed?
2) Pick 100 'influencers' and give them each 0.5% of the initial batch of coins
4) Profit
payola is a helluva drug
It is a combination of a Markov chain that stores the transitions between nodes. The problem with this is how can it be consistent at all if it is storing a public distributed ledger (another poster said that it allows for double spends).
sounds like a great way to go from a tangle to a rektangle
Now, there are ways to build graph-like data structures that do prevent double-spends correctly. I believe both Hedera and Nano (formerly called RaiBlocks) have working solutions, for example.
The key is that not just anybody can create a block (or a graph node), as IOTA does. If anybody can create a node at any time, what prevents them from sending out contradicting messages? Instead, working solutions always involve putting some sort of asset at risk (such as currency or energy), so that if the block producer decides to make a contradicting statement, they pay a steep price. This ensures that there is a financial incentive to always work towards consensus.
But in the last year or so the project has made a lot of interesting developments, redesigned the protocol to remove the 'exotic' design decisions, parted ways with some of the controversial founders and developed into a more mature research project. To solve the issue of double spends, they developed a consensus protocol called Fast Probabilistic Consensus, a leaderless voting protocol, that draws on the "voter models" introduced in the 70s by Holley and Liggett and Clifford and Sudbury. The research has been published and peer reviewed, and is implemented in a test-net which is open source and currently running without a central coordinator.
The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10895
and the testnet codebase is here https://github.com/iotaledger/goshimmer
And without going too far down the rabbit hole, it seems in the more recent versions of the decentralized test net, the FPC works alongside a kind of consensus which might be described as "Nakamoto Consensus on the DAG" where writing ledger updates is the same as voting on conflicting transactions, so that the behavior of updating the ledger also communicates node opinions on a given conflict set without additional message overhead.
I can understand why there is a lot of distrust of this project - there were many bad decisions in the past, and bad communication on top. But, in my personal opinion, if you dig a bit deeper into the research they are doing there is some very interesting stuff going on.
I think being friendly to programmers is a pretty good way to actually get things flowing with blockchains. You mess that up from the get go and it's just no fun for anyone