So IOTA hit about a $6.00 high today https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/iota/usd
and down to $3.70 and looks like it is picking up again.
Market can stay irrational for a long time
IOTA Surges Past Ripple
121–130 of 171 posts
Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, it's the training wheels until enough nodes are added to the tangle. What are they supposed to do instead?
The point is that its questionable whether it will work in practice, or ever reach the level of adoption needed to be autonomous. Treating IOTA now as a potential payment system to rival bitcoin is hugely risky.
I agree that it's risky but a lot of people here are making it sound like the plague. There is inherent risk in all cryptos. IOTA being a totally new concept to crypto currency makes it a little more risky but that doesn't mean that it should be abandoned or destroyed. The vision and benefits of it are great! $0 transactions and no miners sucking up electricity! I just don't get the hate.
Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple
#123IOTA is built by a bunch of technical founders who know enough about blockchain to confuse a lot of non-experts into thinking they are really smart and credible. But you will see very consistently in the cryptocurrency space that the experts refuse to endorse iota, and frequently say strongly negative things about it. They are very effective at selling snake oil, but that's all their blockchain is. The tangle that th…
Many people in the crypto space are peddling their own agendas.
I've read the tangle paper. It seems as the node transaction weights grow, the double spend problem is solved (transaction nodes gain weight as others confirm). Arguably you could have bad actors confirming transactions but that is why the coordinator exists until there are enough transactions happening where a coordinated double-spend attack is not feasible.
Looking at tfha's post history, you can see he does not support POS as secure either and refers to the opinions of the bitcoin team. These are two red flags for me.
There are others that do not act in your best interest taking center stage in the crypto world.
There are many very well respected computer scientists in the iota foundation and I'm sure they are well aware of any issues the coin will have along the way.
Edit: Don't trust me either. Do your own research.
Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple
#124I feel like sharing a curious e-mail encounter I had with IOTA founder David Sønstebø.
After writing a blog post about the limitations of the Bitcoin blockchain, which got some attention on HN[1], I received an e-mail by someone named David (I didn't know who he was at the time), asking me:
> Hey Rune,
> I read your interesting article analysis of Bitcoin limitations. I was wondering if you have had any time to check out IOTA (www.iota.org) and the p2p Flash Network within it (https://blog.iota.org/instant-feeless-flash-channels-88572d9...)?
> [..]
Assuming this was just some random person asking for my opinion on IOTA, I replied with a critique, pointing out two weaknesses I was familiar with:
> The only thing I know about IOTA is that it’s centralized, through the so-called Coordinator. This makes it uninteresting to me. As I understand, the IOTA team argues that this is just a preliminary precaution, which will change as the size of the network grows, but I’m skeptical of this claim. In any case, until it actually becomes decentralized, I don’t think I will have enough interest in it to learn how it works. So I think I will wait for this to happen before taking the time to learn about the system. Also, I know that the IOTA team designed their own hash function, which turned out to be vulnerable to collision attacks, which sounds rather amateurish to me.
He promptly replied to this critique -- which I thought I was offering someone seeking advice on the soundness of IOTA -- informing me that
> As the founder of IOTA I can answer these questions: [...]
Proceeding with a rebuttal[2] of the weaknesses I had pointed out, even though he was the one who had asked me, despite the fact that he didn't need any information about IOTA at all in the first place (given that he created it).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427662
[2] > 1) The Coordinator is quasi-centralized, you as a programmer can easily opt out of it if you want, it is not enforced upon you as a user, it's simply a "best practice" at the moment. Tangle is made to scale, so the argument is indeed that the Coordinator is only now in place to prevent against the 34% attack that all DLTs suffer from until the network has scaled. I don't see anything controversial about this, it is the only way to reach a truly decentralized scalable ledger. It is no different from Satoshi firing up his first miners to get the Bitcoin network to work in the first place. The Coordinator will very shortly also be distributed to consist of numerous nodes, at which point it will be a lot more decentralized. These are all well-known steps towards the long-term goal. IOTA never claimed to be production ready, nor do we do any handwavy nonsense like Ethereum and Bitcoin core mantras "we'll solve it with some computer science breakthroughs in the future", IOTA's roadmap is very simple and straightforward.
> 2) The hash function story has been so misrepresented and blown out of proportion it is comical. I'll spare you the pointless drama and conflict of interest from the guys carrying out the hit piece and only focus on what is important, in short: We spoke with the Keccak team back in 2014 about creating a trinary sponge based hash function for the inevitable arrival of trinary processors (we have designed our own as well) as ANNs, photonics, spintronics etc. all favor trinary over binary, hence we need a trinary hash function that is lightweight for IoT which utilize such chips. 'Curl' was born. The best way to thoroughly vet a hash function (which is vital) is to put it out there with a big incentive to crack it. This is what we did. Even if someone had broken the hash function entirely (no one ever did) there was no threat to the network due to the precautionary steps in place, and the fact that we had Keccak as back up as safety precaution #10. Right now we are working with several world-leading cryptographers, including your fellow countrymen of http://cybercrypt.dk/company/ on further developing and optimizing Curl. This is far from amateurish, it is simply leading the way through genuine invention. Lightweight hash function development is a very active field of research.
> 3) We also invented full Proof of Stake, the first decentralized exchange, the first decentralized voting protocol, decentralized marketplace in 2013, pioneered using blockchain for ID, Supply Chain and IoT in 2014-2015. So while we're known to push boundaries, we have so far always been vindicated later on. IOTA being the first ledger to disrupt blockchain itself is a testament to this, but is naturally very hard to swallow for a lot of blockchain maximalists. However, when it comes to actual researchers the reception tends to be very positive, and as for companies we work with everyone from Cisco to Maersk to Bosch to Microsoft to IBM to Statoil, so outside of the niche cryptosphere the interest is mounting daily, due to the fact that they have concluded that they can't use blockchain due to its inherent scaling and fee limitations. I mention this so you realize that we didn't just hack some random shit together like most people do in this space.
> 4) [...]
Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple
#125IOTA is built by a bunch of technical founders who know enough about blockchain to confuse a lot of non-experts into thinking they are really smart and credible. But you will see very consistently in the cryptocurrency space that the experts refuse to endorse iota, and frequently say strongly negative things about it. They are very effective at selling snake oil, but that's all their blockchain is. The tangle that th…
Many people in the crypto space are peddling their own agendas. I've read the tangle paper. It seems as the node transaction weights grow, the double spend problem is solved (transaction nodes gain weight as others confirm). Arguably you could have bad actors confirming transactions but that is why the coordinator exists until there are enough transactions happening where a coordinated double-spend attack is not feas…
Sure, if you wait for a sufficiently large weight on top of your transaction, then you solve the double spend problem. But you need at the bare minimum that every transaction that happened at roughly the same time as yours to be included as an indirect child of your tips. If you do not understand that sentence, please try to, as it is the very reason that IOTA doesn't scale (and isn't fundamentally different from usual blockchains in any sense other than a somewhat contrived construction).
Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple
#126So 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 titl…
Ironically the original "data wants to be free" quote was also said in a similar context.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tangle is live right now with real transactions going on. If it's so insecure, why don't you go take as many IOTA as you please?
IOTA currently uses a masternode called the coordinator that verifies all transactions. The coordinator is a necessary feature until there's enough transactions to secure the tangle without out (millions per second?)
Precisely. Food for thought: IOTA nowadays is not only fully centralized currency (in any meaningful technical sense), but it also has a much higher market cap than Bitcoin had a few months ago. So, is the market really valuing decentralization as much as we think?
Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple
#128IOTA is built by a bunch of technical founders who know enough about blockchain to confuse a lot of non-experts into thinking they are really smart and credible. But you will see very consistently in the cryptocurrency space that the experts refuse to endorse iota, and frequently say strongly negative things about it. They are very effective at selling snake oil, but that's all their blockchain is. The tangle that th…
Many people in the crypto space are peddling their own agendas. I've read the tangle paper. It seems as the node transaction weights grow, the double spend problem is solved (transaction nodes gain weight as others confirm). Arguably you could have bad actors confirming transactions but that is why the coordinator exists until there are enough transactions happening where a coordinated double-spend attack is not feas…
> It seems as the node transaction weights grow, the double spend problem is solved (transaction nodes gain weight as others confirm). Arguably you could have bad actors confirming transactions but that is why the coordinator exists until there are enough transactions happening where a coordinated double-spend attack is not feasible.
What is the fundamental assumption that makes the paper assert that this problem will be solved in the future?
Is the assumption that hashing power will be spread more evenly among nodes? And, if so, what is the basis for assuming this? It's certainly not what we see with Bitcoin.
Is the case that the IOTA security model breaks down if hashing power is unevenly distributed?
Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people in the crypto space are peddling their own agendas. I've read the tangle paper. It seems as the node transaction weights grow, the double spend problem is solved (transaction nodes gain weight as others confirm). Arguably you could have bad actors confirming transactions but that is why the coordinator exists until there are enough transactions happening where a coordinated double-spend attack is not feas…
Sure, if you wait for a sufficiently large weight on top of your transaction, then you solve the double spend problem. But you need at the bare minimum that every transaction that happened at roughly the same time as yours to be included as an indirect child of your tips. If you do not understand that sentence, please try to, as it is the very reason that IOTA doesn't scale (and isn't fundamentally different from usu…
I appreciate the succintness of your comment. I believe there is an elaboration here:
https://github.com/noneymous/iota-consensus-presentation
If I understand the issue you've pointed out correctly, this is why the coordinator currently exists. Once there are constantly running zero value transactions all around us (self driving cars, smart sensors, etc), then that becomes trivial.
IE the number of indirect children of your tip increases at a rate of roughly 2^n (less due to random tip selection). This leads to confirmation in an exponential fashion.
Re: IOTA Surges Past Ripple
#130So 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 titl…
Everything in that blog post is very much what the rest of the industry is agreeing with. Sources backing this up is even cited in the damn blog post man.
What industry? You mean the one that is less than 5yrs old?
IOTA itself, with all its 'smarts' made a stupid mistake designing their own cryptographic hash function! This might seem like I'm hanging on a single point, but I guarantee, any sane security person on this site will tell you to stay far away from this coin if they see this.
https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...