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IOTA: A tangled mess

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Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#201

Post by afpx »

islanderfun wrote: post #89
afpx wrote: 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'm very curious on your stance. Would be able to elaborate further?

See my comment above.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#202

Post by logicallee »

dorgo wrote: post #197
logicallee wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the whitepaper is intentionally indecipherable I decided to see whether this statement is justified. Before starting --------------- I am about to read the whitepaper now, but before I do, I want to set up some standards for how I will judge that it is "intentionally indecipherable". First, I want to think of examples of intentionally indecipherable language. I have these examples in mind: 1. We have many examples f…

I read the paper yesterday (except some parts of section 4). Some of the math was too much to understand for a quick read. It is a good paper. I could follow everything (despite late hour). My problem was that the paper only discusses tangle-technology and finishing it I still wondered how IOTA uses the tangle and how it works. Maybe I should read more about cryptocurrencies first. Or there should be a more general p…

For some reason, my comment objecting to someone calling it intentionally indecipherable is now at -4.

You wrote "It is a good paper. I could follow everything" -- would you agree with me that it's not purposefully written to be obfuscated and indecipherable?

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#203

Post by nadam »

logicallee wrote: post #188
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…

>the whitepaper is intentionally indecipherable I decided to see whether this statement is justified. Before starting --------------- I am about to read the whitepaper now, but before I do, I want to set up some standards for how I will judge that it is "intentionally indecipherable". First, I want to think of examples of intentionally indecipherable language. I have these examples in mind: 1. We have many examples f…

The author describes the database the nodes maintain, and the consensus algorithm in great detail (which is much much more complicated than the consensus algorithm of any blockchain in the industry), but does not say a word about scalability. You know: absolutely basic stuff, like are nodes full nodes? Is the history maintained in each node? How much storage a node needs? How fast a transaction is confirmed? No word about it in the whitepaper of a 10 billion project. I would not need it to be included if it were trivial. But it is not trivial. In interviews they claim that it is almost infinitely scalable. Followers spread the information that it is faster as there is more usage on the network. They say that millions of small embedded hardware nodes can participate and the network enables microtransactions, which requires incredible scalability. These are ridiculous claims, and it is incredible that there is nothing about it in the whitepaper, or any easily accessible document. They intentionally don't want to explain the technology in clear and structured fashion. Yes I did'nt spend a week of my time to try to understand the technology. Maybe a week would be enough to browse the source code and have answers to my questions. But I don't have that much time for IOTA. And yes, it is fishy, that no one tries to explain it in a way that experienced engineers could have a grasp of it.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#204

Post by cryptodogemoon »

chrisco255 wrote: post #155
cryptodogemoon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is inflationary until the year 2140, and assuming no fork changes that sooner. If you actually understand Satoshis algorithm and history you'll take notice at how the supply was intended to benefit the first few users to run the software during the brief phase of hyperinflation and production for minimal work, while later users are punished merely for running the same protocol and offering the same computatio…

You presume that the future was predictable in 2009. Satoshi had no way of knowing whether the Bitcoin experiment would truly work or not. How many times have we thought, "Bitcoin is surely dead" due to some Mt Gox / Silk Road / China ban scandal? It's crazy to call the people who stuck it out and believed in the coin "exploitative" when they lost 90% of their value time and time again and still did not sell.

Production costs of 50BTC per every 10 minutes has historically been a fractions of or a few pennies. Only for later users has the cost gradually increased.

The way you and many others approach Bitcoin as a tool to horde and sell to other rubes is indicative of the manipulative design where unsuspecting new users don't understand the history.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#205

Post by amenod »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #143
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.

Interesting... My first reaction to your post was "meh - surely he's exagerrating". But reading other replies to GP that were posted later made me reconsider. Very unconstructive replies, trying to bully the well articulated opinion... I have never seen anything like it on HN (though that's just my observation of course, maybe I was just lucky).

Do you think the people behind this are truly convinced of their cause or are they paid "web-fighters"?

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#206

Post by woodpanel »

logicallee wrote: post #202
dorgo wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the paper yesterday (except some parts of section 4). Some of the math was too much to understand for a quick read. It is a good paper. I could follow everything (despite late hour). My problem was that the paper only discusses tangle-technology and finishing it I still wondered how IOTA uses the tangle and how it works. Maybe I should read more about cryptocurrencies first. Or there should be a more general p…

For some reason, my comment objecting to someone calling it intentionally indecipherable is now at -4. You wrote "It is a good paper. I could follow everything" -- would you agree with me that it's not purposefully written to be obfuscated and indecipherable?

Without criticizing you or the validity of your intention for posting the above comment, I can tell you that said comment comes across as extremely spammy.

Why? In a heated space, such as critiques of certain cryptocurrencies often evolve to, certainly with lots of vested interests ($$$ that is), posting such a huge amount of text under the top-rated comment while adding little information, but basically pushing all other arguments below-the-fold is destined to evoke ones fishiness tastebuds.

Whether or not you intended to push critique out of view, it definitely calls for HN to introduce some sort of folding/auto-truncate feature.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#207

Post by logicallee »

nadam wrote: post #203
logicallee wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the whitepaper is intentionally indecipherable I decided to see whether this statement is justified. Before starting --------------- I am about to read the whitepaper now, but before I do, I want to set up some standards for how I will judge that it is "intentionally indecipherable". First, I want to think of examples of intentionally indecipherable language. I have these examples in mind: 1. We have many examples f…

The author describes the database the nodes maintain, and the consensus algorithm in great detail (which is much much more complicated than the consensus algorithm of any blockchain in the industry), but does not say a word about scalability. You know: absolutely basic stuff, like are nodes full nodes? Is the history maintained in each node? How much storage a node needs? How fast a transaction is confirmed? No word…

Do you mind if a write a version of the comment you've just written (making it a bit less harsh) to the author of the white paper, and quote here any replies I receive?

(I also notice you list a contact in your HN profile, so I'm happy to include you on CC - but I think we should share any eventual response to your questions in this thread after we get it.)

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#208

Post by sireat »

scrollbar wrote: post #198
sireat wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scary thing is that IOTA is considered a top 10 cryptocurrency. The worst thing is that I can't find a useful alternative crypto currency that can be used stand alone (ie without converting to BTC) for e-commerce. Only choices are BTC with its high fees and to some extent BCH. Even Litecoin which is easy to use doesn't have many uses. Dash, Monero and Zcash make bold claims but aren't particularly useful at the m…

I was just researching currencies with fastest transfer time and verified that Ripple works fast and with low fee. Curious if you've taken a look at it for your use case? I bought a small amount recently but am mostly just curious about which of these thousands of coins are actually useful for practical purposes.

Forgot to mention Ripple which is an interesting case with its mission to "The world’s only enterprise blockchain solution for global payments".

However, searching for useful things to do with Ripple as an individual leads to nada. All the use cases are provisional.

All the top 20 google results are for how to buy Ripple itself(in order to speculate).

I've started and stopped mining various currencies since BTC in 2011. Each time I stop because I do not see meaningful progress in usability.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#209

Post by seanwilson »

chrisco255 wrote: post #150
chrisco255 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Tezos, not Texas, auto correct...

Hmm, interesting. I wasn't sure if they were only name dropping that formal verification was possible but they say their developers have backgrounds in it. People mention about making Ethereum more secure using formal verification for example but it's not something you can just do as an afterthought.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#210

Post by logicallee »

woodpanel wrote: post #206
logicallee wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, my comment objecting to someone calling it intentionally indecipherable is now at -4. You wrote "It is a good paper. I could follow everything" -- would you agree with me that it's not purposefully written to be obfuscated and indecipherable?

Without criticizing you or the validity of your intention for posting the above comment, I can tell you that said comment comes across as extremely spammy. Why? In a heated space, such as critiques of certain cryptocurrencies often evolve to, certainly with lots of vested interests ($$$ that is), posting such a huge amount of text under the top-rated comment while adding little information, but basically pushing all…

You know, woodpanel, the reason I chose the structure I chose is because when I began to write it, I thought that I would be able to find that the whitepaper easily meets the criteria I selected beforehand for intentional indecipherability. In other words, I thought I would be able to show that it is just fishy.

For this reason, I decided to be very thorough in my review methodology, so that I wouldn't be accused of cherry-picking. After all, no paper is perfect. That's why I set up criteria beforehand. I had never read the paper.

As you can see, the paper actually (to my surprise) totally fails the intentional indecipherability criteria I picked.

The top-level comment in this case was totally unwarranted.

This is not the conclusion I expected to come to when I did the review. It would not be honest of me to hide my actual results.

(In addition to myself, you will notice that another person wrote "It is a good paper. I could follow everything".)

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