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IOTA: A tangled mess

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Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#131

Post by xenophon »

tfha wrote: post #111
cromwellian wrote: post #22

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've never really accepted this argument. If your money is inflating, that's incentive to spend because you know it's losing value. That's a terrible reason to spend money. If your money is deflating, you are still going to spend it because there are things that you want to accomplish. Whether it's eating food, sustaining a hobby, or making a difference in the world, people will continue to spend a deflationary curre…

Yes, but you'll still want those things in a month, or six months, or a year. Given the expectation that your real purchasing power will grow, and you'll be even to afford even more of that hobby if you wait, you'll decide not to transact now for many discretionary expenses. Unfortunately, this puts the store or vendor you would have transacted from in dire straits--and then they decide to consume less.

Summed over an entire economy, this sort of behavior will reduce aggregate demand and the velocity of money enough to damage productivity and growth: it's called a "deflationary spiral."

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#132

Post by jncornett »

tfha wrote: post #100
dna_polymerase wrote: post #60

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.

Single implementation is important for consensus systems. Look at e.g. the spurious dragon hardfork. The problem with multiple implementations is that if there is a tiny difference in behavior between them, you can only find out after damage has been done to the network via a split/fork.

I think the idea is that the protocol is resilient to differences in implementation. A bad actor, could for all intents and purposes, manipulate the implementation to their advantage. An implementation, reference or not, is merely a convenience for users who do not want to write their own clients (which is essential for adoption).

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#133

Post by jackstraw14 »

akerro wrote: post #113
jayjay13 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know there are no bugs in the wallet it's just not completly self explaining. tbh from my view there are just the wrong people in the whole space... 95% of the people are here to get rich quick and not for the developement and it's excatly these people who have problems with Key reuses and so on.. the people have to do their research in such a young space..

>95% of the people are here to get rich quick and not for the developement You're saying that application and developers came completely unprepared for the market?

No, the market was unprepared for an application that is still in alpha.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#134

Post by jackstraw14 »

jeffwass wrote: post #17
matthewbauer wrote: post #8

The post mentions the psychology today article but I’d like to say it’s actually a pretty okay article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201... (Author should disclose if he owns IOTA however)

That's an interesting article into the psychology and mind-tactics of crypto fans. Not sure why you've been downvoted but the article is worth a look.

I think this is so much more interesting than all the yelling about these currencies that are not even being used like currencies. Why do people feel so personally and emotionally invested?

I mean here in this thread l’m running around trying to correct toxic misinformation, but what’s making me doing that? And what’s making the guy who brought up Cardano casually mention the rankings on coinmarketcap as if that means anything except to instill FOMO. I hope we see more articles on the psychology and sociology behind fear cycles in crypto.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#135

Post by mhluongo »

catwell wrote: post #102
acoye wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He may be biased, but you may be too. Are you a Java developer (or android)? That said, I know some great software can be produced in Java, ElasticSearch been one on top of my mind. If Security is the goal, nor CPP nor Java is great. Proven Haskell or Rust might be more of a valid option.

AFAIK Cardano (ADA), which is booming (passed IOTA and became the 6th largest coin this week), is implemented in Haskell.

A coin "booking" doesn't imply technical strength- that's the problem here.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#136

Post by dnautics »

xenophon wrote: post #131
tfha wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really accepted this argument. If your money is inflating, that's incentive to spend because you know it's losing value. That's a terrible reason to spend money. If your money is deflating, you are still going to spend it because there are things that you want to accomplish. Whether it's eating food, sustaining a hobby, or making a difference in the world, people will continue to spend a deflationary curre…

Yes, but you'll still want those things in a month, or six months, or a year. Given the expectation that your real purchasing power will grow, and you'll be even to afford even more of that hobby if you wait, you'll decide not to transact now for many discretionary expenses. Unfortunately, this puts the store or vendor you would have transacted from in dire straits--and then they decide to consume less. Summed over a…

Summed over an entire economy, inflationary behavior will result in stealing from the poor and middle class to fund the wealthy and overconsumption and ecologic destruction.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#137

Post by andr »

It's pretty understandable that fanboys are badgering skeptics on social networks. If I had a few hundred thousand pop out of the blue from a cryptocurrency fad, maybe I would be doing it as well. And that's a big problem, because mainstream journalists are guilty of that as well.

MIT Technology Review, to pick one example, wrote an article about IOTA, mentioning their partnerships with mainstream companies, even though IOTA refuted the partnership notion the same day. Clearly, the author didn't reach out to any of those companies for confirmation.

I can't help but think that many of those articles are written by people, influenced by their own cryptocurrency assets. In fact, this conflict of interest for journalists could be one of the key driving forces of the bubble.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#138

Post by dnautics »

afpx wrote: post #69
cromwellian wrote: post #22

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…

The deflationary aspect is the number one reason I’ve never bought into a crypto currency. I have serious ethical and moral issues that prevent me. In addition to hoarding, deflationary currencies (like gold) cause people to spend lots of money and effort trying to get other people to buy into them too. For me, it’s a very sad thing to watch unfold. It’s like when the ‘buy gold’ commercials started appearing on Fox N…

I don't understand why that's an ethical dilemma. Do you not have a problem with disproportionately increasing the cost of living for the poor[0] or forcing the mddle class to subsidize big corporations [1] or creating an economy where corporate survival is tied to consumption, leading to innovations in "disposable product strategies"?

[0] let's say you're spending 90% of your income on cost of living and there's 10% inflation. That's way worse than in you're spending 20% of your income on necessaries and there's 10% inflation.

[1] in order to preserve wealth in an inflationary regime, the middle class is encouraged to put money into the stock market, which basically becomes a mechanism to socialize the costs of corporate r&d while the Lions share of the gains go elsewhere (the scraps are thrown back at the middle class, enough to keep them from seeing the inherent problem with the system)

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#139

Post by dnautics »

mbrock wrote: post #36
cromwellian wrote: post #22

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…

If I want an Uber or a coffee, sure, I'll spend BTC. I could make more money by waiting, but I can't live without coffee or transportation. Why do you waste your dollars on coffee when you could invest them in a deflationary cryptoasset?

Maybe it isn't the worst thing in the world to force people to think twice about opportunity costs before engaging in wanton spending?

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#140

Post by DennisP »

jncornett wrote: post #132
tfha wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single implementation is important for consensus systems. Look at e.g. the spurious dragon hardfork. The problem with multiple implementations is that if there is a tiny difference in behavior between them, you can only find out after damage has been done to the network via a split/fork.

I think the idea is that the protocol is resilient to differences in implementation. A bad actor, could for all intents and purposes, manipulate the implementation to their advantage. An implementation, reference or not, is merely a convenience for users who do not want to write their own clients (which is essential for adoption).

In fact, last year an attacker launched a denial of service on the main Ethereum implementation, and the network barely hiccuped because people just switched over to one of the others.
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