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IOTA: A tangled mess

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Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#61

Post by knocte »

tromp wrote: post #58
knocte wrote: post #39

While I agree with the majority of the criticisms of this post (I also posted a criticism here[1]), one has to recognise that it's perfectly possible that a cryptocurrency requires no-address-reuse. This may not be a bug but a limitation which is a consequence of its design. I know other cryptocurrency that suffers this problem: Mimblewimble. But I sincerely hope the wallet developers of mimblewimble are smarter enou…

Mimblewimble doesn't have addresses [1] [1] https://github.com/ignopeverell/grin/blob/master/doc/grin4bi...

Well, see? mimblewimble developers hid this characteristic in a "no addresses" fashion, because they are smarter than IOTA devs. When they say "transactions have to be built interactively, with 2 (or more) wallets exchanging data with one another" this is what I meant when I mentioned QR codes for every amount reception/sending.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#62

Post by jayjay13 »

the recent network issues are really annoying but if you run your own full node tx are confirmed in max 20min. something that should be kept in mind IOTA is in early beta and was always promoted as that. when people start to pump it and without reading an announcement right, why should that be iotas fault? and about the usability of iota, when have you started with cryptos? go back to 2011 and look for a good usable wallet (hint: you won't find anything). iri is a reference implementation a C and Rust Version is in developement.

IOTA is clearly about to proof that their protocol works, here some brain food: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05385.pdf

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#63

Post by seanwilson »

acoye wrote: post #57
planetjones wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. He may well have valid points but, as someone who has written mission critical software systems in Java, this destroys the credibility of the article for me.

He may be biased, but you may be too. Are you a Java developer (or android)? That said, I know some great software can be produced in Java, ElasticSearch been one on top of my mind. If Security is the goal, nor CPP nor Java is great. Proven Haskell or Rust might be more of a valid option.

I wonder if something like OCaml would be a good choice. It's a safe language with good performance plus it gives you an easier route to formally verify the important parts of it. Cross platform is going to be trickier though.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#64

Post by sillysaurus3 »

tasubotadas wrote: post #15

>The IOTA source code is written in JAVA instead of C++ like most professional cryptocurrencies are. That did not instill me with confidence. This made me lose any confidence in a person's capabilities in evaluating the coin. If anything, Java is way more (or any language with modern memory management) robust choice than C++ where security is concerned. In any case, I am highly skeptical of the IOTA as well.

I read your comment before reading the article. I expected the article to be a technical overview of IOTA.

Instead, it's a story of all the ways IOTA simply does not work.

Java vs C++ is irrelevant. Maybe the author is wrong, maybe not. Either way, it's probably a bad idea to take two sentences out of context and claim the author loses all credibility for an offhand opinion.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#65

Post by cryptodogemoon »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #41
cryptodogemoon wrote: post #40

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.

It's forever part of Bitcoins orgin story that it begin as hyperinflationary and has since slowed the minting of more BTC.

The irony is the mythos of bitcoin being "deflationary" is not historically accurate and the supply is inflating every 10 minutes.

What Bitcoiners conveniently omit from explanation in Satoshis protocol is the initial "dump" of the supply to the first few users who ran the software. This is a malicious design decision intended to control the supply early.

Any user who joins the network must than attempt to psychologically exploit new users by selling their asset previously generated for less effort/work/watts as the protocol increases in difficulty to any new user.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#66

Post by jayjay13 »

akerro wrote: 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…

As far as I know there are no bugs in the wallet it's just not completly self explaining. tbh from my view there are just the wrong people in the whole space... 95% of the people are here to get rich quick and not for the developement and it's excatly these people who have problems with Key reuses and so on.. the people have to do their research in such a young space..

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#67

Post by pimeys »

fiatjaf wrote: post #38

These days it's absolutely impossible to get any serious conversation about any of these cryptocurrencies. Maybe you can do something with Bitcoin and Ethereum, but for any of the others all the foruns and chats are just flooded with crazy people.

Tell me about it. I need to follow the tech and communities as part of my job, and sometimes it's seriously hard to have any discussions e.g. in IOTA's Slack channels.

On the contrary, Monero uses IRC for their communication and maybe because of that I've seen more adult discussions in their community. Of course lots of money being on the table, things can get pretty sour everywhere.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#68

Post by asddddd »

seanwilson wrote: post #53
kleiba wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with your "way more robust" argument per se , but I also didn't buy that point in the original article. It's unclear to me why the choice of programming language -- unless it was a very obscure and rarely used one, or one that's specifically used in one (unrelated) domain -- should be of any significance.

> It's unclear to me why the choice of programming language -- unless it was a very obscure and rarely used one, or one that's specifically used in one (unrelated) domain -- should be of any significance. I'd rather use a language where e.g. a buffer overflow couldn't be turned into a remote exploit that would let you steal coins from every client on the network. Mistakes in cryptocurrency code has the potential to b…

Most likely it's that the majority of experienced crypto devs (aka people who have been around since it was "fork bitcoin and change PoW algo + logo") will be familiar with C++, so a Java implementation is an odd choice that strongly hints that it was written by a lowest-cost contractor - or at least someone unfamiliar with cryptos. Since there is an awful lot of trust in devs to provide future support/improvement, both are bad.

(Lot of "write my dumbass cryptocurrency" requests on Upwork, so I assume this is very common.)

As for technical superiority, maintaining consensus is critically important. If one set of users (miners) requires a high-performance implementation, it makes a lot of sense to use that implementation everywhere.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#69

Post by afpx »

cromwellian wrote: post #22

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 deflationary aspect is the number one reason I’ve never bought into a crypto currency. I have serious ethical and moral issues that prevent me.

In addition to hoarding, deflationary currencies (like gold) cause people to spend lots of money and effort trying to get other people to buy into them too. For me, it’s a very sad thing to watch unfold. It’s like when the ‘buy gold’ commercials started appearing on Fox News, and I saw my grandparents buying gold.

If someone has to spend lots of time and money advertising how useful something is, it’s probably more useful to them than me.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#70

Post by Frogolocalypse »

cryptodogemoon wrote: post #65
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's forever part of Bitcoins orgin story that it begin as hyperinflationary and has since slowed the minting of more BTC. The irony is the mythos of bitcoin being "deflationary" is not historically accurate and the supply is inflating every 10 minutes. What Bitcoiners conveniently omit from explanation in Satoshis protocol is the initial "dump" of the supply to the first few users who ran the software. This is a mal…

> deflationary

? It is deflationary because it is known what the total number will be, and coins will be permanently lost over time.

> Any user who joins the network

They do this out of free choice do they not? No one is coerced into acquiring bitcoin. There isn't even a coordinating body, like a company, that controls the issuance or exchange of tokens. I would encourage any person that invests in anything to understand what they are investing in before they commit their funds to it. Bitcoin is extremely unforgiving if you don't manage your security well.

None of this has anything to do with your incorrect usage of words though. You can't just invent new definitions of words because you don't like something, and you think it would be nice to assign that word to it. You don't like it. Fair enough. Don't invest in it.

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