I made a post on the Iota subreddit which supported the MIT team, removed 30 minutes later. It honestly terrifies me how easy it is to manipulate discourse online - there are many other posts calling the MIT team frauds and the general tone is that Iota were saints defending against corrupt evil cryptography researchers.
Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
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Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#62I made a post on the Iota subreddit which supported the MIT team, removed 30 minutes later. It honestly terrifies me how easy it is to manipulate discourse online - there are many other posts calling the MIT team frauds and the general tone is that Iota were saints defending against corrupt evil cryptography researchers.
back when something awful and metafilter were comparatively big, much of the impetus for the paywalls they put on registrations was to structurally prevent the possibility of this sort of thing. worked fine, although those two communities themselves are pretty moribund.
it would all be solved forever and anon with a paywall. 5 mao men, botheads, shilling, you would raise the cost to them by orders of magnitude (stealing other people's credit card numbers cost real money)
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#63Interesting 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 have this guilty pleasure of occasionally pulling up /r/CryptoCurrency just to find something terrible to laugh at.
(I do think there are cryptocurrencies worth a bet in the long term, if you can afford to take a chance. Better to start with basics like the Princeton course and form your own judgements.)
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally. And not to sound holier than thou, I'm guilty of "unnecessary re-implementation" possibly more than most. I use my own window manager, have written my own high performance disk archival compression, wrote my own (super)multichannel (>8) lossless audio format, am working on my own large sequence data (think: DNA) native clustering algorithm.... But for the love of god man, /never invent your own crypto/
Also, honest question: Anyone know of any exchange or means to take a short position on IOTA? I only did so though "never buying any".
Friendly reminder that iota's cryptographic weaknesses are immaterial, because it's not actually a decentralized currency - there's the coordinator, a server run by the iota team that controls transactions. The entire value of it today is speculation - if a demonstration of the complete incompetence and dishonesty of the team, exposed by a researchers at a world renowned institution that laymen are familiar with wouldn't make the price drop to zero, what hope is there that the crash will happen before you have to close your short position? And if crypto currencies crash, what is the likelihood that whatever exchange you placed your bet on is still solvent?
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Be content to eat popcorn and wait.
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#65I only got to page 30 before moving on, but this line is telling: > In this case you are right, second-preimage resistance is an anti-feature, collision resistance threat is nullified by Coordinator while allows us to easily attack scam-driven copycats. (pg. 24) The Coordinator referenced is a validation node ran by the IOTA team which currently processes all transactions.
Telling of what? The paper makes a simple claim that because collision-resistance is broken, their custom signature scheme is broken
A creator of IOTA said that broken collision-resistance is actually a feature, allowing them to use their centralized node to attack "scammers".
The whole narrative from the start has been decentralized cryptocurrencies; but IOTA it seems is neither decentralized nor a currency backed by secure cryptography.
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#66hahaha, you guys are funny; what a show you're putting on here... Burn the witch!
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#67Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're gonna have a bad time." A major wake-up call for me in the crypto currency world was Gavin Andresen's ludicrous "validation" of Colin Wright as Satoshi. When a so-called leader clearly does not even understand the basics you realise it's 98% shit. Sturgeon's law applies again. But I keep on forgetting that.
The crypto world has certainly inspired me to pursue whole new fields of research. Not in cryptocurrencies, because while the idea of a distributed ledger I think is solid and here to stay, but because at least 90% of these "currencies" must have their value drop to zero given a long enough time frame -- there's simply no reason for the market to support anything else. No, for the past half a year or so I've been try…
This is an extremely dangerous way to think - it preys on the natural irrationality of the human mind. Someone is out there laying bait of all kinds. Iota is bait for people who think they barely missed out on bitcoin, but this new thing with buzzword salad as it's description and a lead developer that has clearly lost touch with reality will make then rich.
Then there's the second level bait - since there are all these suckers out there, surely money can be made by predicting them!
And then it's turtles all the way down. You won't know if you're a sucker or at the very top level until it all comes crashing down.
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#69Confirming basically everything I already suspected about IOTA -- don't trust anything crypto related that's not written by a professional. "You're gonna have a bad time." [Edit to add this plug for Zcash! Made with real cryptographers ]
> You're gonna have a bad time." A major wake-up call for me in the crypto currency world was Gavin Andresen's ludicrous "validation" of Colin Wright as Satoshi. When a so-called leader clearly does not even understand the basics you realise it's 98% shit. Sturgeon's law applies again. But I keep on forgetting that.
Why do you think it was ludicurous? Admittedly I don't remember any detailed account of these events - but as I understand it Wright demonstrated that he can construct a message with Satoshi private keys. Most probably he used some trick there, a rigged laptop or maybe even rigged internet connection. But it was quite reasonable proof for me - I would not expect someone to do tricks on me when he could not demonstrate the same thing publicly - because what would be the goal of that? And if you are so sure that you could not be tricked - then good luck.
Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]
#70Fascinating 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.
I'm intrigued by your comment, I thought Sergey was also very thoughtful -- or are we not talking about the Sergey of google?