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IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

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Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#81

Post by Barrin92 »

cultus wrote: post #47
lawn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During a lunch the topic of cryptocurrencies came up and a co-worker of mine said he'd invested in IOTA and EOS (another nonsense coin). The thing is I think he's smart and a programmer with the head in the right place and has made a ton of very good decisions at work. So if you think these projects only attract idiots and fools you're wrong. Smart people can also be fooled.

Gullibility and analytical intelligence are not mutually exclusive.

there's also an ideological component to it tied into all the libertarian crypto fantasies that makes people believe they're sticking it to the man and so on.

A lot of these crypto companies frame themselves as liberators from the banks who don't want to give you a share of the pie and so on, targetting vulnerable people who seek opportunity. It's very cynical.

Another space where I have observed this is online education startups. Lots of "you don't need a degree", "the universities are just trying to keep you out", "we're bringing education to the masses" etc. Same sales pitch.

Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#82

Post by jki275 »

psychlops wrote: post #69
jki275 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They "corrected" it when they were called out on it, while claiming it wasn't a problem, and also claiming they did it on purpose so that if someone "stole" their code they could attack and destroy anything someone else would create. Truly bizarre bullshit.

I don't recall reading about their rationale that way. Only the unholy way in which they defended it, while swapping it out then sequestering all iota until claimed through centralized means. Sadly, I don't think that the blind defense of flawed security is that bizarre and is all too common today. That said, it was corrected and seems solid to date.

Solid? The entire ecosystem has been down for two weeks because it's a centralized shitcoin.

There's nothing "solid" about this. It's a scam.

And yes, that's exactly how they described it.

Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#83

Post by Blackthorn »

Barrin92 wrote: post #81
cultus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gullibility and analytical intelligence are not mutually exclusive.

there's also an ideological component to it tied into all the libertarian crypto fantasies that makes people believe they're sticking it to the man and so on. A lot of these crypto companies frame themselves as liberators from the banks who don't want to give you a share of the pie and so on, targetting vulnerable people who seek opportunity. It's very cynical. Another space where I have observed this is online educa…

The worst thing about those online education startups is how they've actually made online education worse.

All those universities that donated lecture videos to places like edx and Coursera? Yeah, you can't access most of those lectures anymore. They're either paywalled or deemed not to fit in with their paywall platform of the day and are no longer accessible.

For a brief glorious moment it actually seemed like we'd have a great quantity of quality University material available over the internet for anyone who wanted it. But it's all gone now.

Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#84

Post by lawn »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #49
lawn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During a lunch the topic of cryptocurrencies came up and a co-worker of mine said he'd invested in IOTA and EOS (another nonsense coin). The thing is I think he's smart and a programmer with the head in the right place and has made a ton of very good decisions at work. So if you think these projects only attract idiots and fools you're wrong. Smart people can also be fooled.

OK, I'll take the bait, why is EOS a nonsense coin?

Because the decentralization is highly questionable with only a small set of controlling nodes, who also receive a big payout which means their control over the network grows even more. (Due to proof-of-stake.)

We're also making fun of how IOTA stopped their network, but EOS had a similar situation in 2018. Granted they have more than a single fricking node, but that it was even possible should tell you something about the network.

Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#85

Post by krrrh »

nradov wrote: post #74
lawn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During a lunch the topic of cryptocurrencies came up and a co-worker of mine said he'd invested in IOTA and EOS (another nonsense coin). The thing is I think he's smart and a programmer with the head in the right place and has made a ton of very good decisions at work. So if you think these projects only attract idiots and fools you're wrong. Smart people can also be fooled.

As another example, doctors and dentists have traditionally been prime targets for investment scammers long before cryptocurrencies were invented. They're intelligent in a particular field and have money, but often lack business experience and common sense.

Dentacoin meanwhile continues its slide from a top market cap of nearly $2B (currently at around $15M). It's really worth watching the video which has gone through several iterations and still makes no sense.

https://dentacoin.com

Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#86

Post by psychlops »

jki275 wrote: post #82
psychlops wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall reading about their rationale that way. Only the unholy way in which they defended it, while swapping it out then sequestering all iota until claimed through centralized means. Sadly, I don't think that the blind defense of flawed security is that bizarre and is all too common today. That said, it was corrected and seems solid to date.

Solid? The entire ecosystem has been down for two weeks because it's a centralized shitcoin. There's nothing "solid" about this. It's a scam. And yes, that's exactly how they described it.

What's not solid about their current Kerl implementation?

It's a scam? Any link to how they are intentionally stealing money? I'd like to know how you know.

Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#87

Post by zelly »

decentralised wrote: post #76
zelly wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blockchain alone is a horrible data structure for random access lookup. There were so many hacks that had to be done to make Bitcoin work efficiently on BerkeleyDB and LevelDB. Ethereum lets you do general purpose computing, so there are nameservers that just use a hash table. That's how ENS (.eth) works. But at that point it's not really "DNS as a blockchain"; it's more like ICANN but running on Ethereum miners's…

You are making an assumption about how blockchains work. Do you think the linked-list like structure of how blocks are added to the chain is how data is stored and retrieved? For reference: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Core_0.11_(ch_2):_Data_St... https://hackernoon.com/getting-deep-into-ethereum-how-data-i...

I'm aware it is implemented more efficiently. The problem it is trying to solve is orthogonal to what DNS does: search vs. verification.

DNS needs to resolve an name on the order of nanoseconds across a distributed system. It is designed with this in mind. A blockchain is designed with integrity in mind. Wallets can verify transactions on the order of nanoseconds with SPV--also distributed because a client can get the intermediate block headers from any server. Querying data, like for DNS, has constraints different from verifying integrity, like for a ledger.

Sure, you can use a blockchain for storage, but who do you trust to do the lookups? It can't be on chain because it will be far too slow. You'd end up having to trust some entity like Cloudflare to run a DNS-on-blockchain node that stores the ground truth, going full circle back to regular DNS. What's the equivalent of SPV for DNS-on-blockchain where I can do and verify name resolution with limited resources?

Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#88

Post by Canada »

zelly wrote: post #35
zelly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is not one of the scams with no working software I was talking about. The information comes from a leveldb database you can download from peers after installing this client: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

> "how do people know who has how many coins, for a coin which has reportedly never shipped a working binary"? They have a MySQL type database that stores IOUs for the people who bought the ICO tokens. They promise to deliver the actual coins once they finish the software, which in many cases has never happened. Others are less egregious than this and have working binaries on a testnet--the future main network is pro…

EOS mainnet launched in 2018 and it certainly has wallets. As far as I can tell it does what they said it would do.

Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#89

Post by Zenbit_UX »

jki275 wrote: post #54
Zenbit_UX wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'll take the bait, why is EOS a nonsense coin?

It does exactly nothing better than anything that was done before it.

That's not an analysis or an answer to my question, but in response to your statement, EOS does do things differently than most POW chains as it is DPOS, does that make it better? Who can say.

I'm not looking for dogmatic crypto-tribalistic nonsense, simply an answer to why the GP felt necessary to lump EOS into his ad hominem attack. Too often these discussions resemble drunk bar patrons arguing over which cities sports team is better, I hoped HN would be better than that.

Re: IOTA being shut off is the latest chapter in an absurdist history

#90

Post by bdcravens »

ForHackernews wrote: post #68
acpacp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very much like most of the crypto projects/subs work. Lot of people with no technical understanding, completely disconnected from reality, probably owning substantial amounts of coins. Honourable mentions to subs like /r/lisk or /r/arkecosystem

Yeah, I was gonna say, this pretty standard /r/buttcoin fare. The main difference with BTC (pick your flavour...) is only that the pyramid hasn't toppled (yet?).

Not sure why you've been downvoted (usually HN isn't terribly pro-BTC). Perhaps it's referencing the buttcoin subreddit, which for those who don't know, is an actual subreddit that is very cynical towards cryptocurrency.
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