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IOTA: A tangled mess

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211–220 of 253 posts

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#211
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“IOTA clarifies it has no formal partnership with Microsoft”: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/12/12/iota-partnership-...

https://mobile.twitter.com/thenextweb/status/940613855071391...

The update from IOTA was included in the linked article from The Next Web.

The IOTA founders' statement is: "We have never stated that there was any formal partnership with Microsoft, and instead always referred to them as a participant to the marketplace."

You can link to a Twitter thread where they threaten to sue someone, but that doesn't mean anything. (If anything, it's another black mark against the IOTA team that they'd use this technique straight out of the Donald Trump playbook -- threaten to sue, then never follow through.)

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#212
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Yes go for it. A well articulated communication on technical details of IOTA scalability is needed, and I think the whitepaper need to be upgraded with such information.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#213
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?

>would you agree with me that it's not purposefully written to be obfuscated and indecipherable? Yes, but with one exception. It is possible to obfuscate by ommiting information. Assume there is a flaw in IOTA which is not in tangle-structre itself. One could obfuscate the flaw by writing an honest paper about tangle and refusing to talk about IOTA. From the introduction: "The concrete implementation of the iota protocol is not discussed."

I don't say (or think) there is an obfuscation. Just that my feeling was that I got too few information to judge about IOTA (or even tangle) from that paper.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#214
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some estimates have Satoshi owning around one million BTC. That's 5% of all the Bitcoins that will ever exist.

Yes, but many believe Satoshi to be dead or to have lost the keys. I'm not arguing that the wealth distribution is good, I'm just saying it's a little ridiculous to assume that the choice was malicious.

It's clearly malicious.

Satoshi could have used a linear growth curve. Instead he used a log curve, giving himself and the smallest user group possible (first users to run the software within the limited timeframe where the hyperinflation took place) control of the majority of the supply for the least amount of work possible.

All users entering the system late beyond users before them are needlessly exploited.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You would be better off writing a blog post and linking by to it.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#216

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".

[deleted]

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The author is also a LLVM engineer who's worked for Qualcomm, Dell and AMD.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#218
post #97

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 mean, if my cash is growing at 10%-1000%, but my Visa fee is 3%, and my inflated USD is 2% inflation, I'm gonna go with the fiat currency or Visa fee. Think really hard about what you’re saying here. You’re currently very clearly working off some broken heuristics and not anything remotely resembling a rational or economically sound approach. A couple rhetorical questions: Would you prefer to use e.g. Zimbabwe do…

Your argument has multiple fallacies. The first is an either-or fallacy, that your only choices are deflation, or hyper inflation, when most OECD countries have had fairly low stable inflation rates over the last two decades.

Secondly, the idea that the response/benefit curve from monetary growth rate is linear, and therefore you can just extrapolate linearly that more is better. Our economy depends on a goldilocks region, where the extremes are bad, and the desirable area you want to inhabit is inbetween.

When currency is deflationary, no one wants to spend money, and you face an economic stagnation from a huge pull back in spending, no different than the Paradox of Thrift. There's no need to even make a philosophical argument here, we have a century of empirical evidence that deflationary causes a spiral, hell, Japan has been stuck in a deflationary spiral for 20 years.

Sure, eventually you have to eat, so you'll spend your BTC if the alternative is to starve, but is that how you see the economy being run? The only thing people spend money on are the absolute necessities? That's a very austere world, and once in which most people are unemployed because there's much lower demand for everything, except emergency car repair and basic necessities.

Likewise, you don't want hyperinflation, because it makes planning for the future impossible, wipes out investment, and induces hoarding of real assets.

But low levels of inflation, from 0-3%, do not cause such problems, and gently induce people to spend or invest money, rather than keep it under a mattress. For the same reason, something like a Land Value Tax is good because it induces people to stop hoarding land and not doing anything with it.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#219
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Deflation also helps creditors and hurts those in debt, so it swings both ways.

Often the Libertarian/Austrian-econ crowd posits a false choice between deflation and hyperinflation, both are bad, and ignores the third option which is an inflation rate that's non-zero, but low and stable.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum has a Go implementation. The Java argument is BS obivously. The protocol needs to be valid, not a single implementation.

To be fair, Ethereum also has a C++ and a Rust implementation.

Sure, just wanted to make it clear that not all cryptos completely rely on C++.
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