Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IOTA: A tangled mess

codesuppository.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 253 posts

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#141

Post by nadam »

IOTA is the only big cryptocurrency that seems extremely fishy to me. The trick is that even a fairly technical person (like me) cannot easily refute it based on the whitepaper, because the whitepaper is intentionally indecipherable, and does not have enough information to evaluate the project anyway. The average person sees such a whitepaper, and is amazed by the complicated scientific formulas. A good engineer/scientist on the other hand gets uneasy about it I think. I don't understand how a huge network of full nodes, nodes which are small indusrtrial devices can scalably reach consensus in a fast way. Even storing the full state is impossible, not to speak about history. It is independnet on whether we use the DAG or blockchain. That is why scalability plans on other networks go into the direction of sharding, or have a smaller number of powerful nodes, or use layer 2, etc...

Crypto communities fight each other (BTC vs. BCASH, DASH vs. Monero, Ethereum vs. EOS) but these are all serious projects. The whole community should speak up about IOTA instead.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#142

Post by akerro »

jackstraw14 wrote: post #119
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…

> It still doesn't work on Linux What are you talking about? I haven't used the wallet on anything but Linux, and I've had no problems.

https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/631

https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/577

https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/511

https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/416

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#143

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

nadam wrote: post #141

IOTA is the only big cryptocurrency that seems extremely fishy to me. The trick is that even a fairly technical person (like me) cannot easily refute it based on the whitepaper, because the whitepaper is intentionally indecipherable, and does not have enough information to evaluate the project anyway. The average person sees such a whitepaper, and is amazed by the complicated scientific formulas. A good engineer/scie…

We try but there is an army of IOTA shills that drown us out.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#144

Post by simonbyrne »

tfha wrote: post #111
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…

I've never really accepted this argument. If your money is inflating, that's incentive to spend because you know it's losing value. That's a terrible reason to spend money. If your money is deflating, you are still going to spend it because there are things that you want to accomplish. Whether it's eating food, sustaining a hobby, or making a difference in the world, people will continue to spend a deflationary curre…

I think the point is more to do with savings: in a non-deflationary environment, you have the incentive to invest your savings in potentially productive use. In a deflationary environment the incentive is simply to hide your money under your mattress, which doesn't help anyone.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#145

Post by alttab »

planetjones wrote: post #18
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.

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.

On top of that, all of his technical issues with IOTA turned out, by his own admission, to be using the network wrong. Not understanding that buying 1,000s worth of an obscure cryptocurrency is going to come with a heafty dose of RTFM is a fool's errand. Instead of realizing this, the denial in him turns this into "victim blaming."

that said - he's right about IOTA. If that type of use is what it takes to make everything work, it has a long way to go.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#146

Post by BLanen »

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…

Because it's literally impossible for people to rationally 'invest' in a inflationary currency. Therefore there is no incentive to make one popular.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#147

Post by rileyphone »

sdwisely wrote: post #24
hmexx wrote: post #20

What about the other DAG technologies like the one used by ByteBall? I’m not crypto-intelligent enough to analyze them but could DAG be a credible replacement for the blockchain? Iota is just a very well marketed option in that space. Their execution seems shoddy.

disclaimer: I own some of these so I'm not without some bias. Thus far I've been pretty impressed with Raiblocks (XRB). Near instant (1-5 seconds depending on the wallet in my tests so far) and fee-less. I'm pretty keen to check out the other DAG projects after this one.

The whitepaper (https://raiblocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper__English.pd...) is actually very readable, I really like it. Too bad it's almost impossible to buy right now.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#148

Post by CydeWeys »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #64
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.

I had the same reaction as well, though. Sometimes one foolish thing that someone says really can make you suspect everything else they're saying.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#149

Post by chrisco255 »

seanwilson wrote: post #63
acoye wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what Texas is supposed to use but it's wrapped up in lawsuits at the moment.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#150

Post by chrisco255 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #149
seanwilson wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what Texas is supposed to use but it's wrapped up in lawsuits at the moment.

Tezos, not Texas, auto correct...
Post reply on HN