This is the dumbest article i ever read on HN news.
Could you please comment civilly and substantively or not at all?
Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails
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Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails
#12258 days ago I posted a bunch of evidence about why IOTA didn't make sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039802 I think Bruce Schneier's take was particularly prescient: "In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system secure is low." The question is…
I’m beginning to feel that any type of gentle academic evidence of flaws in a given scheme or technology in the crypto currency space is blasted as “FUD”, so Here’s a though exercise: if all the cryptocurrency communities call out research as paid shilling FUD, are we morally obliged to exploit weaknesses and attempt to demonstrate flaws with actual real collateral damage?
That's the world today - ignore facts that don't agree with your reconceived views and deny deny deny.
The problem with exploiting vulnerabilities for personal gain is that you're hurting more innocent investors, too. It's kinda like carpet bombing, in that you'll accomplish your goal of killing the enemy, but you're taking a lot of other people with them because they have a spurious link.
OTOH, maybe you can gain enough influence to make changes that would marginalize or punish the corrupt operators. A lot of these quasi-cryptos have a hidden layer to prevent this (Ripple, IOTA, etc.). Their coins are more like unregulated stock in the founder's company than a decentralized machine. I'm not sure if that makes them more or less susceptible to a single, strong outside force. They could simply delete your coins, but without knowing the exploit that's just temporary. You would have an actual target (other than 'the system'), which you could pressure (aka blackmail), but they could cash out immediately and walk away.
If I was running a scamcoin (and a terrible person) I'd probably bring the exploit finder into the inner circle to gain positive media (with the associated price bump), wait for the first major act of the new person and then cash out, step down, and disclose the vulnerability. Spin it as the new person trying to cover up problems they caused or improperly addressing the original problem and preventing a good solution.
To counter that, the exploit finder could condition their involvement on releasing the hidden layer's source as a matter of transparency, but really be working on a way to fork without the hidden layer or replace it with a democratized layer. Now you can claim the founders were greedy and didn't want to fix the exploit, and that your working solution was rejected because it took away their ability to manipulate the market. Turn it into an announcement of the new 'fixed' coin.
It'd be a fun movie plot, but probably terribly boring to watch.
Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails
#123The amount of brigading by IOTA community also shows how toxic it is. Just look at the comments on the ieee article. Or the some of the tweets. They were also spamming the /r/MIT subreddit about the DCI. Just watching this all unfold is making me realize how toxic parts of the cryptocurrency community is and it's making me really sad.
Feels like those people defending the Solar Road Way...
Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails
#124Earlier 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
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Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails
#125Everything about this project is weird. I started looking into it since I do IoT stuff and there was so much hype.
Then you find out about the curl issue. The unnecessary ternary. Read the white paper and all issues with tip selection was "solved" with hand waving. Then you find out it doesn't even have a client that works on a typical IoT device... Reading the email chain made it ultimately clear: these people have no idea what they're doing. They just threw a bunch of random ultra cool sounding tech together ("post-quantum crypto", of course) and started hyping, while the code never worked. Obvious scam.
Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nothing would be stopping someone with a bigger gun coming in and stealing whatever groceries they want That's why we need government - to prevent violence and stealing. Free market can work only in non-violence environment. However, government tries to do much more than that. And this I consider as a problem, namely excessive regulation.
Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? That is emphatically not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What I worry about HN is that you didn't tell this to `nukeop` on his comment. If you told this to `both sides`, I wouldn't have a doubt.
Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? That is emphatically not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What I worry about HN is that you didn't tell this to `nukeop` on his comment. If you told this to `both sides`, I wouldn't have a doubt.
We tell this to "both sides" all the time, as you can check by looking at the comment history. If there was another egregious comment in the thread that we didn't chide, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We can't come close to reading all the comments.
Edit: nukeop's comment was a bad one because shallow and snide, so I'd say it was correctly downvoted. But I wouldn't say it rose to the same level of off-topicness and guidelines violation as your comments in this thread did. We're really trying to avoid generic ideological tangents here.