Fascinating read.
I think we've all worked with a Sergey in our careers so far. And most of us end up doing what Ethan did.
Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
51–60 of 162 posts
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#52I'm curious, is the date header important or not? OMG, Is this a real conversation? Even this tweet from the tangleblog who leak this document is hilarious: https://twitter.com/tangleblog/status/966286394636296192
also this: https://twitter.com/tangleblog/status/967513038374031360
That thread is full of IOTA fans who are convinced that this leak "exposes" malfeasance and conflict of interest on the part of DCI. One has to wonder if they actually read the whole transcript, or just jumped on the assumption bandwagon...
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
One priceless line from Ethan Heilman to support that observation: Probably best not to use informal stackoverflow answers and Wikipedia for understanding the security of your system. Yowza.
IOTA is one of the only crypto currencies in the green today, however. Which is the real "yowza" imho.
This is because this information is celebrated as proof that there was in fact "no vulnerability in IOTA and it was all FUD" by Reddit (and possibly elsewhere)
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7zztey/full...
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#54Interesting to see the range of opinions about IOTA. The conclusions on HN are (so far) completely at odds from those on the cryptocurrency subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7zztey/full... Meanwhile the commercial world seems happy to engage with IOTA: "Volkswagen CDO will join the supervisory board of the IOTA foundation. And now, Volkswagen is going to utilise this technology in their auto…
I suppose the difference is that people who know about cryptography think that the iota team obviously don't know what they're doing, and people who don't understand cryptography and have a financial stake in iota not being worthless feel differently.
I've taken some cryptography classes and a graduate level cryptanalysis course, and I could immediately tell that the people on the iota side clearly don't know what they're doing. For example, this should trip anyone's bullshit detector:
"IOTA was created to be immune to quantum computer attacks, today I have revealed that it was also created to be immune to attacks from an AI"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/70ya29/time_for_a_par...
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#55Interesting to see the range of opinions about IOTA. The conclusions on HN are (so far) completely at odds from those on the cryptocurrency subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7zztey/full... Meanwhile the commercial world seems happy to engage with IOTA: "Volkswagen CDO will join the supervisory board of the IOTA foundation. And now, Volkswagen is going to utilise this technology in their auto…
/r/CryptoCurrency is best used for entertainment, not technical analysis.
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a vague memory of once upon a time reading a paper alleging that if you could start everything over again from the beginning, that somehow ternary was more efficient than binary for a digital architecture, something having to do with power usage. But other than that it just sounds like nonsense.
Love to see that paper; seems like nonsense to me. If someone came up with a more optimized transistor architecture than CMOS I'd love to have a look at it.
Oh! I remembered more details about it if it helps. It has to do with e being the "most efficient" numbering base. The reason e is the "most efficient" has to do with wanting to minimize both the size of the alphabet of symbols as well as the number of digits in an average computation. If you allow for a non-integer base, and a non-integer number of digits, the optimum base is e. e rounds to 3. ;-)
Now, full disclosure, I'm not entirely sure I believe in this, I'm just citing sources but check these out:
http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmS... https://hackaday.com/2016/12/16/building-the-first-ternary-m...
Also, Don Knuth likes balanced ternary, and, well, I guess that counts for something.
(again, personally I have no idea if I think it's nonsense or not)
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can also setup a chat with our ex-NSA post-Quantum hash function experts Is there a modern secure hash function considered to be under threat from quantum computing? I was under the impression there isnt one. It's scary to see marketing spiels thrown into technical discussions, it's even worse when the thread is released as some sort of defense and those less informed see the big words and appeal-to-authority na…
It's only asymmetric crypto used today that's broken under quantum. Symmetric and Hashes should be OK.
Grover's algorithm means you need to double the length of your hashes, but that hardly puts sha-512 in danger. Even sha-256 is safer than a naive calculation would suggest:
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#58I can't believe I read that entire train wreck front to back. If IOTA published this to "expose" MIT, it does quite the opposite. Rule number one, all together now, don't roll your own crypto.
It makes the IOTA team look naive and dismissive of serious concerns.
I'm not sure how this was meant to "expose" MIT or be pro-IOTA in any way.
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#59Interesting to see the range of opinions about IOTA. The conclusions on HN are (so far) completely at odds from those on the cryptocurrency subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7zztey/full... Meanwhile the commercial world seems happy to engage with IOTA: "Volkswagen CDO will join the supervisory board of the IOTA foundation. And now, Volkswagen is going to utilise this technology in their auto…
/r/CryptoCurrency is best used for entertainment, not technical analysis.
Yes, the best technical analysis is done in /r/buttcoin.
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#60> I have a feeling that you refuse to accept existence of cryptographic protocols not mentioned in the textbooks read by you. That is a cringe worthy statement by someone doing a cryptographic decentralized project. The whole conversation is a trainwreck. :/
The best part is that part of their argument for why it's not a real vulnerability is that the coordinator might have rejected it - except that the coordinator is essentially a server run by them, which makes the entire "crypto" part of crypto currency totally unnecessary.