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IOTA: A tangled mess

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Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't promote commerce and trade The problem is that our existing financial system probably had an intention of using inflation to encourage commerce and trade, but over the past 40 years, that focus shifted from using debt for the funding of productive enterprises to debt being used for the bidding up of fixed assets like houses, but also stocks. The only thing that mattered to this bidding process was capita…

Fun fact: Bitcoin is designed as a hyperinflationary currency that begins to slow down inflation as more users join and time passes. Why? To control the supply early and exploit later speculators.

> hyperinflationary

I don't think you understand what this word means.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#42
post #12

Heh, this article barely even touches on the full insanity of IOTA. https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io... has a decent rundown on some of it. It's centralized on a central coordinator because it fundamentally can't work in a decentralized manner. It used a homebrew hash function that was vulnerable to trivial attacks. It uses ternary math just-because of some extremely doubtful efficiency cl…

> Using a memory-safe language like Java makes it exponentially harder for developers to accidentally write remote-code execution vulnerabilities, and makes it harder for malicious developers to hide remote-code execution vulnerabilities.

Weeell...In currencies like Bitcoin it's crucial that everyone have the most efficient implementation. Otherwise nobody will bother mining, if they can't do it efficiently.

I guess IOTA doesn't depend on the proof of work in the same way. But then again, IOTA seems hopelessly broken?

As I was reading the article and the "promises" of IOTA, I was thinking, "Okay so they must not be using Satoshi's solution to the consensus problem". It's not surprising to hear they don't have a solution. Sure this means the software might not have to be efficient. But that's cold comfort if it doesn't, you know, work.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#43
From the white paper:

“As a transaction receives additional approvals, it is accepted by the system with a higher level of confidence. In other words, it will be difficult to make the system accept a double-spending transaction. It is important to observe that we do not impose any rules for choosing which transactions a node will approve. Instead, we argue that if a large number of nodes follow some “reference” rule, then for any fixed node it is better to stick to a rule of the same kind4. This seems to be a reasonable assumption, especially in the context of IoT, where nodes are specialized chips with pre-installed firmware.”

Is this for real?

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: Bitcoin is designed as a hyperinflationary currency that begins to slow down inflation as more users join and time passes. Why? To control the supply early and exploit later speculators.

> hyperinflationary I don't think you understand what this word means.

[deleted]

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: Bitcoin is designed as a hyperinflationary currency that begins to slow down inflation as more users join and time passes. Why? To control the supply early and exploit later speculators.

> hyperinflationary I don't think you understand what this word means.

I think cryptodogemoon is talking about monetary inflation, not price inflation.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#46
post #25

Why do people persist in the idea that a deliberately deflationary currency is a good idea. It might be a good investment, but as a currency, it doesn't promote commerce and trade, it just promotes hoarding. Much of crypto-currency holders today either seem to be people seeking to get in at the top of the ponzi pyramid and sell before collapse, or people who need to avoid some legal issue, be it capital controls, dru…

The problem is not just deflation but uncontrolled issuance. Ie miners produce too much or too little coins to keep them stable.

Is this for IOTA? As far as bitcoin is concerned the coin issuance is built into the protocol and there is no case of too much or too less.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#47
Maybe the best strategy for designing a cryptocurrency today is actually to make it really stupid? It's kind of like the scam logic, where you only want to get good marks in the door from the start.

If your cryptocurrency is really stupid, then only the true believers buy in, and then they all hodl. You don't want anyone too influential, and you definitely don't want people to say "okay I was tricked, I fodl".

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#48
I think that there are still problems with the algorithm. The tangle was in a bad shape a few days ago and I considered selling my IOTA but I decided to hold because based on my understanding of how the tangle works, these problems are fixable.

Until I find something fundamentally wrong with the idea of the tangle, I'm going to hold.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#49
post #12

Heh, this article barely even touches on the full insanity of IOTA. https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io... has a decent rundown on some of it. It's centralized on a central coordinator because it fundamentally can't work in a decentralized manner. It used a homebrew hash function that was vulnerable to trivial attacks. It uses ternary math just-because of some extremely doubtful efficiency cl…

> Using a memory-safe language like Java makes it exponentially harder for developers to accidentally write remote-code execution vulnerabilities, and makes it harder for malicious developers to hide remote-code execution vulnerabilities. Weeell...In currencies like Bitcoin it's crucial that everyone have the most efficient implementation. Otherwise nobody will bother mining, if they can't do it efficiently. I guess…

>Weeell...In currencies like Bitcoin it's crucial that everyone have the most efficient implementation. Otherwise nobody will bother mining, if they can't do it efficiently.

Parts that have very critical performance, especially proof-of-work code, can be in native code. (And if it's modularized well-enough, that code could be sandboxed to contain the damage of any vulnerability, so any remote-code-execution exploit can only corrupt the mining process with nonsense without being able to get to private key data.) Or a safe-and-performant language like Rust could be used.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#50
post #2

IOTA wallet is full of really bad bugs, just look how bad it is on first pages, the more pages you skip, the worse it is. It still doesn't work on Linux, for many users wallet crashes or shows green screen and nothing more. Doesn't work through Wine either. https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues Issues on github have no responses from developers since early November and there were no commits since than, what's s…

I have never seen a GitHub issues page quite like that.

Pages and pages of issues ranging from; "Somebody stole thousands of dollars from me" to "My money is stuck and I can't get it out".

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