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IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t

casey.github.io

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Re: IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t

#31

Post by wildbunny »

wyldfire wrote: post #23
wildbunny wrote: post #10

Not to mention that the central consensus mechanism is completely broken. You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive: Quoted from my post linked below: o) Network hashrate is the overall power of the network - in bitcoin, this is the computing power needed to generate a block. o) Bitcoin employs a mining reward which creates a competition between miners to produce a block and claim their reward…

> You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive This is not true, Proof-of-stake creates a suitable incentive to verify transactions and maintain the network. It's a legitimate alternative to proof-of-work.

Sorry, no it is not. There is no nash equilibrium in PoS at all. The only thing preventing it from collapsing completely is hidden centralisation in all the PoS protocols.

Re: IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t

#32

Post by aje403 »

matthewbauer wrote: post #22

This quote applies especially to IOTA: "Cryptocurrencies are nothing except the marketing power of inventors, financiers and others who love the idea of buying a black box (which is obviously empty) for the price of a Kia and dreaming that it will turn into a Mercedes. There have been times recently when this dream has materialized within hours. This is not just a bubble. It is not just a fraud. It is perhaps the out…

Those Singer quotes almost killed me: "limitless ignorance of swaths of the human race". He's absolutely correct, but, deep down, secretly a little upset he did not purchase Ripple at 2 cents

Re: IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t

#34

Post by tobiaswk »

granaldo wrote: post #13

as interesting iota is so they claim, my bet is on lightning network for high scalability transaction and machine to machine payment

A mesh network that requires YOU to be online to receive funds. Also you must have funds to open a channel. So in order to receive funds you must have funds already.

It seems like a really big step backwards in big big scheme of things bitcoin. All of the above problems can be solved by increasing the block size. I'm not saying it's the definitive solution... but right now it is a better solution.

A good talk about really big blocks on bitcoin and what the ramifications are; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M

Re: IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t

#35

Post by wyldfire »

andrewla wrote: post #30
wyldfire wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive This is not true, Proof-of-stake creates a suitable incentive to verify transactions and maintain the network. It's a legitimate alternative to proof-of-work.

I have yet to see a convincing argument that proof-of-stake can be made trustless. The only designs that I've seen that seem realistic rely on some notion of checkpointing to prevent large scale chain rewrites. While it may be possible to make that checkpointing distributed, the only way that I'm aware of is to use proof of work. The easier path is to just checkpoint in the client, so that the trust comes from the gi…

> I have yet to see a convincing argument that proof-of-stake can be made trustless.

It turns out that "trustless" is more subtle and not quite as discrete as we might've thought. While PoW coins like Bitcoin are probably ranked higher on this scale than others, it might not matter.

> That's not to say that trustless consensus is necessary for a currency.

Agreed. IMO these newer coins that are lower on the trustless scale would not have been possible without the high bar that Bitcoin set. But now, they are.

Re: IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t

#37

Post by wyldfire »

elmar wrote: post #27
erikj wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is proof-of-stake actually deployed anywhere yet?

Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work (2015) http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

That's not an answer to the question. The answer to the question is "yes". DPoS coins: Nano, Lisk, Ark, etc.

I think it's a good article but "equitable distribution" is a big function of PoW that I thought was a critical ingredient but now I'm not so sure.

Re: IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t

#38

Post by andrewla »

The main thing here is that IOTA is not a _decentralized_ cryptocurrency.

Given that there are centralized cryptocurrencies in circulation, it makes more sense to compare IOTA to something like Ripple or Stellar than to compare it to Bitcoin. In that light, most of the other objections go away -- censorship resistance is not an advertised feature; double-spends are only detectable when the coordinator milestone; fungibility is only effective after a milestone, etc.

The "post-quantum" cryptography is interesting to me personally not because of the quantum aspect, but because the tractability of discrete-log based cryptography is up in the air, and a vulnerability found in a year, or ten years, could have profound impact reaching back into the past. Hash-based one-time signature schemes seem to be a much more robust approach that will not fall to the discovery of better algorithms (even non-quantum) for approaching the discrete log problem.

The notion of using a DAG is also very interesting, and one of the nice things about IOTA is that it does not try to be anything other than a currency. Alternatives such as Byteball are, in my opinion, overreaching by attempting to be some sort of global computer that has the net effect of making clients much more complex and thus vulnerable to strange forking effects if client implementations diverge too much.

Re: IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t

#39

Post by tree_of_item »

bengale wrote: post #7

1.1 is a weird way of presenting that issue. Its discussed in length with explanations of why it exists now, and how they plan to remove it. It's not something required for the technology, just in its infancy.

Sorry, but that sounds like bullshit from the IOTA team to me. "We're totally gonna be decentralized in the future, honest!"

Re: IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t

#40

Post by relyio »

wyldfire wrote: post #23
wildbunny wrote: post #10

Not to mention that the central consensus mechanism is completely broken. You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive: Quoted from my post linked below: o) Network hashrate is the overall power of the network - in bitcoin, this is the computing power needed to generate a block. o) Bitcoin employs a mining reward which creates a competition between miners to produce a block and claim their reward…

> You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive This is not true, Proof-of-stake creates a suitable incentive to verify transactions and maintain the network. It's a legitimate alternative to proof-of-work.

You understood OP wrong. He is not saying that PoW is the only viable method of securing the chain, but rather, that you need a mining incentive.

There is such a mining incentive in proof-of-stake, block signers get rewarded.

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