IOTA: A tangled mess • Hacker News Board

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#251

Post by dnautics » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:27 PM UTC

ultraluminous wrote: post #167

dnautics wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

What you did is point out a few real problems in our current economic reality of which inflation is one part. In no way does this say anything about how deflation solves any of them, or even leads to worse scenarios.. Think about the issues you mentioned - wage stagnation, unsustainable expectation of growth in corporate profits, systemic inequality etc. - Now ask yourself "how will removing monetary inflation and re…

real wage stagnation is a social policy, not an emergent phenomenon. Politicians are concerned about unemployment numbers, and there is this bogeyman that "sticky wages" of lower classes gets in the way. The prescribed way around this is to decrease the real value of money and incrementally dislodge the liability of employing lower classes.

Systemic inequality is generated, by deliberate inflationary policy[0], it is not a "universal constant of the universe".

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...

"Even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."

[0] I do, for what it's worth, think that liberal economists aren't acting in bad faith, they're just clueless, mostly because if you're a liberal economist (or almost any economist, really) you've probably never been poor.

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#252

Post by logicallee » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:38 AM UTC

nadam wrote: post #212

logicallee wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind if a write a version of the comment you've just written (making it a bit less harsh) to the author of the white paper, and quote here any replies I receive? (I also notice you list a contact in your HN profile, so I'm happy to include you on CC - but I think we should share any eventual response to your questions in this thread after we get it.)

Yes go for it. A well articulated communication on technical details of IOTA scalability is needed, and I think the whitepaper need to be upgraded with such information.

in case anyone is reading this thread later: per the above, I wrote the author a lightly edited version of nadam's question and a summary of this thread. He replied as below, offering to connect with people who know more. I asked nadam if he was interested but didn't receive a reply. So I didn't follow up except to say "thank you" and let the author now I've copied his comments into the thread.

Author's reply:

------

Hi,

thank you for reaching out to me, and for your interest in IOTA. You are right about the Tangle paper - I've put a lot of effort in it, and also tried not to overcomplicate it. But, well, it's "make things as simple as possible, but not simpler" thing - nothing comes for free, and so IOTA is really much more complicated than traditional cryptos, one simply cannot understand it without investing some effort first.

Regarding your questions: first of all, I'd like to stress that that paper is more about the Tangle - an idealized mathematical model, than about concrete details of IOTA's implementation. In view of this,

- are nodes full nodes?

In the paper it doesn't matter, there the nodes are just entities that sign the transactions and (more importantly) choose where these transactions will be attached.

- Is the history maintained in each node?

In principle, yes. Note, however, that the tip selection algorithm only uses the recent history of the system (that cumulative weight calculation only depends on this). This opens possibilities for periodic snapshotting: for the system to work, a node should know that recent history, and the account's balances before.

- How much storage does a node need?

- How fast is a transaction confirmed?

This depends too much on the concrete details of the implementation. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert there, I'm too much a "theory" guy. Should I connect you with someone more qualified?

Best regards,

Re: IOTA: A tangled mess

#253

Post by rootsudo » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 2:11 PM UTC

djm_ wrote: post #178

rootsudo wrote: post #96

I went to the IOTA meetup in Chicago, which was hosted and presented by the IOTA team. Never before did I see an entire audience be wowed by a women engineer. They ignored the whole Microsoft partnership idea; anyone that asked just was given the answer "it'd be explained in a future PR release." The drama was IOTA lied about microsoft partnership and deemed hosting on azure == partnership with microsoft. In talks wi…

>Never before did I see an entire audience be wowed by a women engineer. What do you mean?

Whenever she talked, the crowd went "wow!" sort of like the laugh track on a 90's sitcom.

The crowd was 99.9% men. I'm a man too, and I will admit she is attractive. But what she demonstrated was nothing new, about the Tangle network which was discussed in the whitepaper, on youtube, bitcointalk, 4chan /biz/ and reddit.

Seeing IOT devices communicate by sending and receiving packets is nothing new or that exciting.

It was the same as if someone was showing you a bitcoin transaction. Literally, some tech babble, look at the pretty picture (girl in this example) and go wow.

When someone took a picture of her,a public figure of the IOTA team, other men with dates decided to white knight and tell the guy off "Don't take her picture." It almost escalated when one white knight went for his phone. Guy in question was taking pictures of presenters all night long yet no one complained.

I'm not an expert in any of these matters, but just witnessing the crowd reaction was really depressing as it goes to show Cryptocurrency is now mainstream (Good), alot of gender bias still exists (bad) and people do judge intelligence/authority on gender and age (double bad.)

Still the IOTA team is blah for lying about the MSFT partnership and the audience that night in which I was able to witness was double blah.