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IOTA: A tangled mess

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161–170 of 253 posts

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#161
post #146

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.

Isn't Ethereum inflationary and popular ?

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#162
post #32

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…

Making them deflationary is more of a political statement than anything else I think. The crypto-currency crowd has this libertarian streak and of course those people believe that inflation is the devil, used by governments and banks to rob productive businessmen of their hard earned money.

and it's not?

Inflation harms fixed wage earners and pensioners far worse than "businessmen"

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#163
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>95% of the people are here to get rich quick and not for the developement You're saying that application and developers came completely unprepared for the market?

No, the market was unprepared for an application that is still in alpha.

Still in alpha but accepts real-money deposits in the tens of thousands. I think the market was unprepared for anyone being that brazen.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#164

> RULE 3: ALWAYS wait for a transaction to be confirmed before sending anything else. > Rule #3 is just another admission of a broken network. Really not much else to say. It sounds like an admission of vulnerability to double-spending.

Not really. This isn't an actual vulnerability of the network to double spending, it's just a wallet (or wallets) issuing multiple transactions for the same coin (he may actually just mean the same address rather than the same coin, so that you don't come a cropper of the private key issue). This is possible in pretty much all cryptocurrencies, and their mechanisms for dealing with it (ie only honouring one of the tr…

Perhaps the downvoters can explain why that isn't the case.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#165
post #157
post #152

BTW, administrative issues: I wonder why my previous post with the same link less than 1 day ago was not reused for this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935601 is this a HN bug? Just today I tried to post an article already posted three days ago and I was directed to the first post thread.

There is a query parameter "m=1" at the end of this URL. I guess that's why it wasn't marked as duplicate.

That is a HN bug since the canonical page is without that suffix:

  

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the market was unprepared for an application that is still in alpha.

Still in alpha but accepts real-money deposits in the tens of thousands. I think the market was unprepared for anyone being that brazen.

Who is accepting deposits, and why tens of thousands? Real money is deposited into exchange accounts to buy crypto assets. No one is making fiat deposits into an IOTA organization.

You should examine your reality if you think developers of alpha software have any obligation to provide non-technical folks with a way to use it. It's open source, nothing is stopping you from building your own wallet if you want something better. But they don't owe you anything on the basis of the protocol simply existing. Ask yourself, why do you expect that?

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#167
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 N…

I don't understand why that's an ethical dilemma. Do you not have a problem with disproportionately increasing the cost of living for the poor[0] or forcing the mddle class to subsidize big corporations [1] or creating an economy where corporate survival is tied to consumption, leading to innovations in "disposable product strategies"? [0] let's say you're spending 90% of your income on cost of living and there's 10%…

What you did is point out a few real problems in our current economic reality of which inflation is one part. In no way does this say anything about how deflation solves any of them, or even leads to worse scenarios.. Think about the issues you mentioned - wage stagnation, unsustainable expectation of growth in corporate profits, systemic inequality etc. - Now ask yourself "how will removing monetary inflation and replacing it with monetary deflation affect these systemic issues, in which direction will it drive them, how and why?" If you still come out on the pro-deflation side, I'd be happy to hear your perspective.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#168
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trouble is, right now there seems to be a lot of savings sloshing around compared to the potentially productive uses they could be put to. So the price of every investment from houses to shares to made-up internet money is going through the roof as people look for somewhere, anywhere, they can put their money where it won't be eaten away by inflation.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#169
post #57

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.

Different tools have different advantages and Java is as suitable as many others. IOTA needs to prove that protocol is sound, so it doesn't matter if it's in Java, Rust, Go, Python... This point makes the author much less credible in my eyes.

That said, I steer clear of IOTA too. Relevant search terms for me are "IOTA roll your own crypto", "IOTA ternary logic" and "IOTA hash collision". And their whitepaper is indecipherable. Red flags all over the place, IMHO it's a scam.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#170
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…

I read the first few pages of the IOTA whitepaper, including some of the math parts. I have basic undergrad math ability and although I'm not familiar with many of the concepts, most parts make sense to me and are quite thorough. It sounds like OP is trying to manipulate the market.

People who own a lot of crypto like OP generally aren't the kinds of people who would write articles for the public interest.

It sounds like OP sees an opportunity to bring the price down in order to get a better deal on their next purchase.

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