Live data from Hacker News

IOTA Surges Past Ripple

blocksyn.com

41–50 of 171 posts

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#41
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% premined, which smells as scammy as Ripple. It needed to be as there are no miners in the IOTA network. Additionally, In contrast to conventional ICOs, IOTA had 0% of their ICO reserved for founders. Not a single iota. The founders had to purchase their technology back during the ICO. Furthermore, there was no allocation for foundation or ecosystem funds. They asked the community to donate for this foundati…

> The founders had to purchase their technology back during the ICO. Which is still dirt cheap and they got first dibs so nothing major there.

So its functionally the same as an ICO with a 40% premine? Of which 20% of the tokens go directly to the founders because they figured out how to write a paper.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#42
post #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.…

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

Not talking about IOTA specifically but DAG oriented blockchains, there is a good foundation in the SPECTRE paper which was done by recognized researchers in the field. In the following document we made a summary of emerging new research in blockchain technologies: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J8hehbnZWzcIUMQcxMiGbjz8...

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#43
post #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.…

To be fair, there are times in bitcoin when two hashes are found consecutively. In this case, who decides which one is the correct hash? The answer is that the network enters a contentious state and the miners compete over the correct hash until a new one is found ad infinitum. The chances of there multiple competing chains becomes virtually zero as time goes on.

The same thing happens with IOTA, except the mining happens on the node sending the transaction (and confirming two others). Competing transactions can happen, and are propagated through the network, but eventually a consensus is reached. I’m only familiar with IOTA in passing, but the biggest flaw I see is of a malicious actor flooding the network with transactions to themselves. I believe the theory is that once the network is big enough this will economically not be feasible, but until then they have the master node. Whether or not this will end up working out, I’m not sure.

Happy to be corrected for any of this. I’m not super familiar with IOTA, this is just my understanding of it.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#44
post #43
post #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.…

To be fair, there are times in bitcoin when two hashes are found consecutively. In this case, who decides which one is the correct hash? The answer is that the network enters a contentious state and the miners compete over the correct hash until a new one is found ad infinitum. The chances of there multiple competing chains becomes virtually zero as time goes on. The same thing happens with IOTA, except the mining ha…

The contentious state in bitcoin is a network fork. Fork A and Fork B. Both have equal chances. It is the next winning miner that decides which fork will be elected. So the responsibility is just pushed to the next guy.

That's not the same with IOTA. Who gets to decide which fork is better? Based on what? Number of txs? That wouldn't work and I think it is obvious why.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#45
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…

The other hash function they use is called Kerl a homonym of Curl.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#46
post #22
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who said anything about offline nodes accepting payments? I wouldn’t expect transactions to even be remotely possible offline.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#47
post #24

Are there any transactions on their blockchain?

None, as it doesn't have one. It uses a different DTL architecture called a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), known as The Tangle.

A blockchain is a DAG. Just one with no branches. Like, if in using Git you never branched but only used `master` for everything: that's a blockchain.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#48
post #44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, there are times in bitcoin when two hashes are found consecutively. In this case, who decides which one is the correct hash? The answer is that the network enters a contentious state and the miners compete over the correct hash until a new one is found ad infinitum. The chances of there multiple competing chains becomes virtually zero as time goes on. The same thing happens with IOTA, except the mining ha…

The contentious state in bitcoin is a network fork. Fork A and Fork B. Both have equal chances. It is the next winning miner that decides which fork will be elected. So the responsibility is just pushed to the next guy. That's not the same with IOTA. Who gets to decide which fork is better? Based on what? Number of txs? That wouldn't work and I think it is obvious why.

The network fork is exactly what I described.

With IOTA, it operates in a similar fashion. The winning chain is the one with the most successful hashes discovered. Just like bitcoin, except instead of a winning chain happening after ~2 hashes, it happens after hundreds(?) of hashes.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#49
post #7
post #5

IOTA is kind of a joke IMHO: * They have this thing called the "coordinator" which is a master-node run by them, which is a single point of failure. The codebase that this node runs is proprietary software. They claim there will be no need for this masternode in the long run but they never say any ETA about when to remove it (which hints that removing it may always expose the security flaws of their network). This me…

I've heard that they didn't just roll their own crypto, but that it was in fact unsurprisingly found to be broken and the devs then claimed that this was intentional to stop anyone setting up a clone without the central closed-source coordinator.

It's the second time I hear that today. I don't deny it's true, but can't we put some sources on this? I think it is a little childish to just be spreading rumors.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#50
post #24

Are there any transactions on their blockchain?

None, as it doesn't have one. It uses a different DTL architecture called a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), known as The Tangle.

OK, but are there any transactions on that? What’s the daily volume?
Post reply on HN