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IOTA Surges Past Ripple

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21–30 of 171 posts

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum had a master node too. Other than that, yeah it's weird. Although I'm not sure why there's so many announcements of businesses like Microsoft, Fujitsu doing partnerships with IOTA. Sounds very weird and overpumped.

> Ethereum had a master node too. Ethereum never depended on a centralized master node.

There were the canary contracts, which while they were active (they've been deactivated in mid 2016).

These simply stated whether a chain was good or bad, and they were controlled by the makers of ethereum. I don't know if they were ever used to mark a chain as bad, but they certainly represented centralized control.

I do see your point that most of the time, ethereum functioned using the decentralized protocol, but there was a centralized fallback.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#22
post #16

I read through the IOTA whitepaper a while ago, and while I find the general idea of a DAG-based approach interesting I wasn't able to understand their trust concept or even basic implementation details of their consensus algorithms (which are not detailed in the paper). 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 an…

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? The subtangle with the highest weight. when you start thinking about possible applications it's actually quite hard to come up with something that seems both interesting and doable. I can think of a number of niche exa…

> The subtangle with the highest weight.

Which is not an acceptable answer, at least from the perspective of an offline node accepting payment. People will exploit it by paying an offline vendor, taking the goods then rushing online to create a doublespend which reverts the transaction.

So offline vendors will never accept it as payment, and the entire feature is useless.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#23
Putting aside all their misadventures with crypto and other bugs (it's crypto after all), they don't have a functioning currency or network.

The Tangle is an idea that has no theoretical solution yet.

What I did understood is the following: A user that makes a transaction, picks two txs (from the unspent pool) and send his transaction. Then another user picks it with another one and send his. And so on and so forth. But who gets to decide which tree to follow?

This is exactly what mining is for: It is election based on mining capacity (or hash rate burn rate). The one who burns more hash rate gets elected to publish the next blockchain.

Not that mining can't get centralized, it is. But there is a difference: Mining is democratic. The nodes elect based on it. That's not the same with the coordinator in IOTA. It is run by the creator of the cryptocurrency.

Edit: Thinking about it now, is it ever possible to achieve this without "burning" something? (I mean equal consensus election without a non-free criteria). Doesn't this somehow conflict with the physic law of conservation of energy.

Now let me get to the important part: It's a premine. It has a nice façade and polished website. That's all you need to know.

This is going to end in tears for lots of people fomoing right now. (or later if this still ramps up)

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#25
So this [1] is where they announced their "partnership" (which, to me, remains obscure in nature) with Microsoft.

The blog post is long and features many well-made graphs, including pictures of "Data Silos" with a pictogram of a lock on it, slogans like "Data is the new Oil" in a subsection "Crudely put, data is the new crude", the famous DIKW Pyramid (Wisdom, Knowledge, Information, Data) and, my favourite, the title of a subsection "Data wants to be free, but not for free.".

All the alarms on my bullshit meter are ringing after reading this.

[1] https://blog.iota.org/iota-data-marketplace-cb6be463ac7f

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#27

I've reviewed the IOTA paper and some docs on it. It seems too good to be true, if it works it's much better (faster, free) than block chain cryptocurrencies with no downsides. I am surprised that no one else has come up with this approach so far, why is that? 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 crit…

They will switch to a decentralized coordinator this or next month

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#28

I've reviewed the IOTA paper and some docs on it. It seems too good to be true, if it works it's much better (faster, free) than block chain cryptocurrencies with no downsides. I am surprised that no one else has come up with this approach so far, why is that? 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 crit…

They will switch to a decentralized coordinator this or next month

Why not now? (genuine question)

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#29
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard they rolled their own crypto. Yes, let that sink. Haven't verified this myself though. They decided it's a good idea to use ternary logic instead of binary logic so they had to write their own cryptographic primitives based on ternary. Here's a good analysis about the security issues: https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...

> the IOTA developers had written their own hash function, _Curl_ 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…

I think the insecurity of their function was a mistake. I doubt they would deliberately code something that threw collisions and have a cover up plan that is basically name it curl and hope people get it mixed up with the real curl.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#30
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard they rolled their own crypto. Yes, let that sink. Haven't verified this myself though. They decided it's a good idea to use ternary logic instead of binary logic so they had to write their own cryptographic primitives based on ternary. Here's a good analysis about the security issues: https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...

> the IOTA developers had written their own hash function, _Curl_ 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…

To be very honest, when I first heard about IOTA, there was an article that had the phrase "the inventor of curl", I incorrectly assumed for a while that Daniel Stenberg was involved in the project.
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