IOTA Surges Past Ripple • Hacker News Board

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#61

Post by jp_rider » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:45 PM UTC

knocte wrote: 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…

It appears their own crypto was already vulnerable. A friend pointed me to this article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/09/07/mit-and-bu...

He was also concerned that there's no security proof in the whitepaper. To me, it seems like you could feasibly launch an attack with less than a majority of the computing resources.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#62

Post by lawn » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:47 PM UTC

csomar wrote: 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.…

Their "solution" to the double spend problem (which is the real problem Bitcoin solves) is to have a centrally controlled entity, the coordinator, declaring which transactions are considered confirmed.

When pressed the lead dev retorts with insults instead of answers [1] and tries to redirect to their subreddit where these questions conveniently disappear.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7hgi2g/iota_warning/dq...

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#63

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:49 PM UTC

DalasNoin wrote: post #58

After a security vulnerability in a self-made hash function of iota was discovered, they claimed that it had been included to stop people from copying iota. While I dont believe them, it does show something about the personality and professionality of the people behind iota. https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543...

[deleted]

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#64

Post by bhaak » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:50 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #21

gst wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

From what I gathered from the links below, they were intended to stop mining if an unintentional hard fork would have happened. Or maybe also to force miners to upgrade? Did the Frontier release not yet have the ice age mechanism?

The wiki page suggests that there was an option to ignore the canary contracts. So you could mine nevertheless without recompiling the source.

There's no such option with IOTA as the coordinator is closed source.

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Bad-Chain-Canary

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/22/frontier-is-coming-what...

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#65

Post by nadam » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:51 PM UTC

tfha wrote: post #54

nadam wrote: post #53

IOTA fans say that IOA is scalable and capable of microtransactions. They often say that it gets faster and faster as there are more transactions, which seem to be an incredible bullshit to me. I started to read the whitepaper, but I just don't understand how it is scalable. The whitepaper goes into details about how the transaction DAG is maintained, but absolutely basic things seem to be missing: Are nodes all full…

EOS has made security compromises though. If you aren't validating every transaction on the network yourself you have no way to be certain that the money you are being paid is legitimate

Token holders vote for 21 block producers. Pretty much all of these block producers have to be controlled by the same malicious party so that an invalid transaction could go through unnoticed. (In fact I think even more than 21 nodes will track the network, as runner-ups are rewarded also to some extent) Malicious block producers, when noticed, are voted out of the system by token holders probably for ever. Unlike in case of most other currencies, block producers will be actual respectable 'real world' people (but the physical location of their servers will be unknown)

In fact one can say that in case of POW if an entity can get cheaper electricity than others, it can happen the mining is unprofitable for everyone except this entity, so the system can become centralized simply by fierce competition to mine efficiently. I am not saying that I know for sure which will be the more secure method in the future: I have diversified my investments into DPOS and POW based currencies (BTC, DASH, EOS)

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#66

Post by albertgoeswoof » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

jp_rider wrote: post #61

knocte wrote: 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…

It appears their own crypto was already vulnerable. A friend pointed me to this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/09/07/mit-and-bu... He was also concerned that there's no security proof in the whitepaper. To me, it seems like you could feasibly launch an attack with less than a majority of the computing resources.

So, how come no one has done that?

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#67

Post by dimillian » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 2:08 PM UTC

I don't really care about all the fluff & stuff behind all those alt, I just bought it very low at very high quantity, and sold it when it was higher. I love cryptos, whatever the use for it. It's free money. While it last.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#68

Post by wyldfire » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 2:14 PM UTC

Bruce Schneier had this to say about IOTA:

> In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system secure is low

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#69

Post by BLanen » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 2:19 PM UTC

Skeptical of IOTA.

Build on promises that have no proof: Coordinator can be disabled, scaling.

Also, it pretends to be open-source but you can't build it yourself because they won't release their real code out of fear of 'copying'...

I like the lack of PoW though, a foundation issuing funds at regular times could fulfill this function without wasting a world of energy.

DISCLAIMER: rode a 50% gain wave and sold.

Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple

#70

Post by Buttes » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 2:29 PM UTC

hobofan wrote: post #11

gst wrote: 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…

It gets better... their "improved" version of "curl"? Kerl.

You can't make this shit up.