IOTA Surges Past Ripple

Did...did they intentionally name it curl, so that when you search for "Is curl secure?" you will find articles saying that curl - the widely used library - is secure, in the hope that people will confuse the two?

I know that you shouldn't assume malice when it can be explained with incompetence, but combined with some of the other points here, I can't help but feel that this was intentional.

As an example, one of their core claims is that it's possible to do offline transactions on a tangle (=DAG) that is isolated from the main tangle and that can be merged later. What I didn't understand is how they resolve the double spending problem with this: If two devices create valid transactions on two independent subtangles and the system tries to reconcile these tangles into the main tangle afterwards, how do they determine which transaction is valid?

Also, I could never get my head around the idea of a decentralized IoT data marketplace. I mean, it really sounds catchy but when you start thinking about possible applications it's actually quite hard to come up with something that seems both interesting and doable.

Finally, no one seems to think about the privacy implications of having IoT data (which often is person-related or person-relatable and therefore under the protection of the GDRP) on a decentralized system where you basically lose control over the data the moment you upload it. From a data protection perspective this is an absolute nightmare.

As far as I understand, one main difference between IOTA and classic blockchains is that there are no explicit mining nodes in the system who confirm all the transactions. Instead, if you issue a new transaction, you have to confirm (sign) 2 prior transactions first and do a little round of Proof-of-Work. These 2 prior transactions are called "tips" and are selected by a random walk. I'm not sure who exactly selects the tips (can you select the same ones over and over?) and if the correct tip selection is somehow enforced.

There was a controversy about the homebrew "Curl-P" hash function (P supposedly means Prototype according to the author Come-From-Beyond, previously involved with NXT). After a bumpy responsible disclosure process, MIT researchers Neha Narula et al published these findings: https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iot... and an accompanying Medium post. IOTA Foundation dismissed the vulnerability as non-practical, but switched part of their crypto to Keccak instead: https://blog.iota.org/curl-disclosure-beyond-the-headline-18...

So in the IOTA codebase, there is now "curl" (not to be confused with the HTTP library), which is based on the proprietary crypto, and "kerl", which is based on Keccak. Curl is still used for the PoW while I think kerl is now used for other signing.

Here is a C implementation that is interesting to browse: https://github.com/iotaledger/ccurl/tree/master/src/lib

A bit of an odd aspect of IOTA is the legacy of a ternary number system that is used in the crypto functions. That's why you have to convert your payloads to and from a base-27 encoding scheme ("trytes", alphabet [9A-Z]), which felt strange for me when I wrote some proof-of-concept code trying to use the IOTA libraries. Instead of switching to more established encoding schemes, the IOTA team defends this choice by pointing to future mystery hardware accelerators ("Jinn" etc.) that are supposed to use this ternary system for more memory-efficient calculation. A purported long-haul strategy that is sometimes mentioned is the distribution of such custom processors by IOTA in the future targeting embedded hardware. As an FPGA/Hardware developer myself, I'm extremely skeptical about all of this voodoo and do not understand why so many people seem not to mind it, especially the industry partners like Microsoft and Fujitsu. It would certainly help if the IOTA foundation would disclose more details about these mystery machines.

In summary I find the general approach of IOTA interesting and worthwhile, but there are some strange aspects in the software (not to mention all that coordinator business and the full-system-snapshots that lose all message data once in a while) that I wish would be thoroughly addressed by employing more KISS principle and less NIH.

This is the one main thing that keeps me very, very skeptical regarding IOTA (and the coordinator thing, although that may be resolved someday when traffic increases so they can remove it - at least that's what they say).

It looks a bit like they had this JINN processor developed which appears to be ternary in nature, but it went nowhere, and then they pivoted that into IOTA and stubbornly kept the ternary stuff because that might revive this JINN thing again later on, if IOTA catches on. At least that's how it looks to me from the outside. It's a bit hard to get reliable information about this JINN thing, as the company that apparently developed it, Jinn Labs, is nowhere to be seen publicly, with the excuse of being in "stealth mode". As far as I can see, this entire thing could just as well be vaporware as it could be revolutionary tech developed under strict NDAs.

I'll definitely stay very, very skeptical for now, as it's so hard to get reliable information about IOTA aside from the bling-bling on the surface. I also tried to look at the code of their reference implementation on GitHub a bit recently, since it's mostly Java and I'm mostly a Java dev for a living right now I was interested, but the code quality I can see there is pretty bad overall (like there are almost no comments, most comments you find are actually code that was commented out, formatting seems incoherent, huge amount of bloat code even by Java standards among which it's hard to actually find any real logic), so that excursion also did achieve nothing with regard of alleviating my skepticism.

The only downside it's not currently decentralized, and requires a "conductor" to run securely, which will be removed in the future, apparently. The other criticisms are at the first implementation (rolling own crypto), which is an error that impacts confidence in the team but not the currency / concept.