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Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#41

Post by jotto »

tim333 wrote: post #19
Roritharr wrote: post #14

The crypto space to me is really frustrating. I've seen friends become something very close to scammers, I can't have interesting technical discussions about the topic without being called doomsayer and even when I pitch an idea what to use the Blockchain for, all I get is:"let's do an ICO and raise a shitton of money!" although that doesn't really make sense towards what I'm proposing. I feel like the nerd in class…

Humans can be kind of money motivated. Such is life. For me one of the interesting things with crypto is whether you can use that for something positive in society.

...the greatest conqueror in history, a conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, thereby turning people into ardent disciples. This conqueror is money.

from Sapiens: https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html?id=FmyBAwA...

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#43

Post by lolc »

> The researchers disclosed to IOTA that the hash function they were using, which was an in-house concotion called Curl, was broken.

Classy. Not only do they keep their cryptocoin proprietary, they did use a proprietary hash function too.

I wanted to predict the inevitable fall of the currency but realized that the enterprise might just turn into a bank. If they are the gatekeepers to every transaction, they are already sort of a bank. An unregulated bank. With their own bank notes.

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#44

Post by tialaramex »

mbgaxyz wrote: post #32
josephagoss wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that if half of their ideas could actually work and be secure, it would be a good thing. If IOTA was a real thing for example I would happily be apart of that community. Unfortunately it's a total waste of time. I remember avoiding IOTA early on due to the arrogance of the founders, I really didn't like their tune. I know most of Hackernews hates Ethereum, but I really like Ethereum and their ideals, although…

What is a "real thing"? Like Bosch using IOTA to build smart cities in China? https://twitter.com/BoschPresse/status/968479596868980737

Name say, four of these smart cities they've built with IOTA, those would be real things. In contrast, even though the city council is a real thing, and candidates for city councillor are real people, and the leaflets through my door are real pieces of paper, the pictures of a would-be councillor "Yogic flying" do not mean that it's actually possible to levitate using the power of your mind. Yogic Flying is not a real thing in the sense we mean.

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#45

Post by espadrine »

mbgaxyz wrote: post #38
TD-Linux wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is there even to discuss? The disclosures and email tell me everything I wanted to know.

Where is the code which exploits the supposed vulnerability in IOTA? After all, there are code samples available today which demonstrate the SPECTRE and MELTDOWN attacks.

That is akin to this:

“Hey, your house door is unlocked.”

“What are you talking about? I left it unlocked on purpose, but it is safe, I wired the metal handle to the power plug, nobody bad can get in.”

“What about the good ones?”

“I installed a Coordinator™ that calls me when you ring, and I can open the door remotely.”

“Wait, didn’t you make this house with the promise that everyone with the key could use it?”

“… well, I don’t see you finding a vulnerability!”

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#47

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

mbgaxyz wrote: post #38
TD-Linux wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is there even to discuss? The disclosures and email tell me everything I wanted to know.

Where is the code which exploits the supposed vulnerability in IOTA? After all, there are code samples available today which demonstrate the SPECTRE and MELTDOWN attacks.

discussing vulnerabilities is misleading since it's in this case not something you can put into a PoC. It's not code that's vulnerable¹. The whole argument is that the math is wrong but more correctly should be that the behavior of Curl has never been defined. You can't proof something doesn't behave the way it should when it was never defined what that behavior is in the first place.

¹ though there are several actual code vulns that have been dismissed by the IOTA team as "FUD" and even threatening researchers with litigation https://prizz.github.io/iota-transaction-spammer-webapp/

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#49

Post by bringtheaction »

loxias wrote: post #33
josephagoss wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that if half of their ideas could actually work and be secure, it would be a good thing. If IOTA was a real thing for example I would happily be apart of that community. Unfortunately it's a total waste of time. I remember avoiding IOTA early on due to the arrogance of the founders, I really didn't like their tune. I know most of Hackernews hates Ethereum, but I really like Ethereum and their ideals, although…

> Hackernews hates Ethereum It does? I admit I'm pretty ignorant of the nuances of all the little alt coins, but I know Ethereum has something to do with distributed applications, with a VM, and I've always thought that cool in the abstract. (though I have no idea what I'd do with it.) Just probing for information, not trying to have any "tone", do you know what the distaste for Ethereum is rooted in?

I never got the impression that HN “hates” Ethereum, but I will say that the primary language used for writing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain has some disconcerting properties.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008

It is still not entirely clear to me how much of these things are problems with Solidity (name of said language) only, or if any of those issues are core to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) itself.

I remain hopeful that other languages targeting the EVM will bring to fruition the full potential of Ethereum in a safer manner.

https://medium.com/@Hibryda/why-solidity-isnt-solid-3341af77...

Also some people dislike the fact that Ethereum is executing every program for every message on every blockchain node. I agree that it would be better if it didn’t have to do so but I don’t know how it could be avoided in a distributed trustless system.

https://www.multichain.com/blog/2015/11/smart-contracts-good...

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#50

Post by weavie »

lolc wrote: post #43

> The researchers disclosed to IOTA that the hash function they were using, which was an in-house concotion called Curl, was broken. Classy. Not only do they keep their cryptocoin proprietary, they did use a proprietary hash function too. I wanted to predict the inevitable fall of the currency but realized that the enterprise might just turn into a bank. If they are the gatekeepers to every transaction, they are alre…

Is there any (valid) reason why someone would want to use their own hash function? Secure hash functions, as far as I am aware, are pretty established and widely available and really easy to use..
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