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Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#71

Post by StavrosK »

chadbennett wrote: post #2

I Abandoned IOTA months ago after looking at their Github issues page. https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues Great idea, just a little too early for massive adoption.

I abandoned it after hearing about the Curl debacle, and trying to abandon it (and selling all of my $100 worth of IOTA) just validated my decision. The wallet couldn't show the right balance unless I "reattached" a bunch of times, and, get this: In order to validate a monetary transaction, the wallet transmit zero-amount "validation" transactions that refer back to the original one, essentially validating itself. Such secure.

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#72

Post by mnw21cam »

hal9000xp wrote: post #68
Angostura wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want examples of where the free market you can look at any of the tragedy of the commons. In these situations, government helps. There is an endless list of the stupidity of the free market.

Tragedy of commons perfectly applied to communism and socialism where shared resources are overused. Free market is quite opposite to tragedy of commons since it's based on private property, not on shared resources.

Yet there are some resources that are hard to privatise, for instance the atmosphere. Government regulation is what turns the commons (which are open to tragedy) into either tightly regulated (for example, dumping of hazardous materials) or a free market (for example, emissions trading).

Without the government interference, the market wouldn't exist. To some extent that goes all the way down to buying your groceries, because without some government, nothing would be stopping someone with a bigger gun coming in and stealing whatever groceries they want.

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#73

Post by wepple »

arcticbull wrote: post #4

58 days ago I posted a bunch of evidence about why IOTA didn't make sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039802 I think Bruce Schneier's take was particularly prescient: "In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system secure is low." The question is…

I’m beginning to feel that any type of gentle academic evidence of flaws in a given scheme or technology in the crypto currency space is blasted as “FUD”, so

Here’s a though exercise: if all the cryptocurrency communities call out research as paid shilling FUD, are we morally obliged to exploit weaknesses and attempt to demonstrate flaws with actual real collateral damage?

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#74

Post by mratzloff »

Roritharr wrote: post #14

The crypto space to me is really frustrating. I've seen friends become something very close to scammers, I can't have interesting technical discussions about the topic without being called doomsayer and even when I pitch an idea what to use the Blockchain for, all I get is:"let's do an ICO and raise a shitton of money!" although that doesn't really make sense towards what I'm proposing. I feel like the nerd in class…

I had a conversation with a guy creating a crypto startup recently. It only took five minutes in before the thin veneer of an actual business model fell away and the real motive—free money—starting coming out.

His position, distilled: if people are stupid enough to give me money, who am I to say no?

I suggested his easy money might not be so easy if (for US investors) the SEC, FTC, CFTC, etc. crack down and claw back investor money. Maybe that's fine if you've become hugely profitable in that time, but if you haven't...

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#75

Post by deadbunny »

hal9000xp wrote: post #54
nukeop wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentioning the "free market" in any other context than a joke will make most people not take your post seriously.

I assume only die hard leftists like you downvoted my comment despite me writing: > Smart regulators can help free market to get rid of dishonest projects. I gave you one unrelated example of total stupidity of regulators - H1B visa. Instead of high salary requirement, it has bachelor degree requirement. Having bachelor degree tells absolutely nothing about qualification of employee. In fact, there are shitload of ba…

> leftists

Well that's an easy way to gather downvotes.

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#76

Post by ndury »

josephagoss wrote: post #23
abhv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a researcher in cryptography who just read the full email transcript posted at [1]. I found Ethan and Neha's email responses to be patient and sincere. In contrast, the IOTA team members Sergey and David have no idea what they are talking about. The IOTA constructions were broken, and instead of understanding that, they made bogus points and tried to attack the four DCI researchers in various ways. In that conte…

It doesn't surprise me that IOTA followers are toxic considering the founders are toxic individuals. I find it interesting how IOTA founders are the complete opposite of Satoshi and Vitalik.

I am an avid follower of the current crypto space and I cannot grasp how unprofessional and immature the IOTA team handles their issues. It's almost as if 75% of the crypto space as of late is ran by children/teenagers/adults which cannot grasp the basic concepts of being civil to one another. This is all very unfortunate for the overall growth and perceptions of the crypto community as a whole

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#77

Post by dingo_bat »

mratzloff wrote: post #74
Roritharr wrote: post #14

The crypto space to me is really frustrating. I've seen friends become something very close to scammers, I can't have interesting technical discussions about the topic without being called doomsayer and even when I pitch an idea what to use the Blockchain for, all I get is:"let's do an ICO and raise a shitton of money!" although that doesn't really make sense towards what I'm proposing. I feel like the nerd in class…

I had a conversation with a guy creating a crypto startup recently. It only took five minutes in before the thin veneer of an actual business model fell away and the real motive—free money—starting coming out. His position, distilled: if people are stupid enough to give me money, who am I to say no? I suggested his easy money might not be so easy if (for US investors) the SEC, FTC, CFTC, etc. crack down and claw back…

I agree with your friend. Dumb people will give away their money anyway. Might as well give it to me. What's wrong with free money as long as I'm not doing illegal stuff.

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#78

Post by akvadrako »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #60
once_inc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There is no valid reason to do so.

if you understand the Math and agree that whatever you do needs to go through a proper peer review then why not. Saying "nobody may research the subject because you'll fail" is bad science. If you work in this space, know your Math, and don't rely on your invention to be put into production this year then why not study the problem space and innovate by following the established best practices!? Problems arise when so…

> if you understand the Math and agree that whatever you do needs to go through a proper peer review then why not.

Because crypto is really hard and you can't prove your new algorithm is secure. Only after being a popular high value target for years can you have much trust in your new hash. Even SHA2 might have flaws nobody knows about - that's the main purpose behind having SHA3 standardised - as a backup.¹

If you are not the designer of the algorithm it's even worse, because an exploit could be put in intentionally by proper choice of constants which are in some cases undetectable.

[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/152360/should-w...

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#79

Post by hal9000xp »

mnw21cam wrote: post #72
hal9000xp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tragedy of commons perfectly applied to communism and socialism where shared resources are overused. Free market is quite opposite to tragedy of commons since it's based on private property, not on shared resources.

Yet there are some resources that are hard to privatise, for instance the atmosphere. Government regulation is what turns the commons (which are open to tragedy) into either tightly regulated (for example, dumping of hazardous materials) or a free market (for example, emissions trading). Without the government interference, the market wouldn't exist. To some extent that goes all the way down to buying your groceries,…

> nothing would be stopping someone with a bigger gun coming in and stealing whatever groceries they want

That's why we need government - to prevent violence and stealing. Free market can work only in non-violence environment.

However, government tries to do much more than that. And this I consider as a problem, namely excessive regulation.

Re: Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

#80

Post by dingo_bat »

sdenton4 wrote: post #27
Legogris wrote: post #15

I appreciate how the example collision (page 18 in the email dump) uses the lyrics of "Push it to the limit" by David Hasselhoff. The number 9 seems to be appearing a lot both in the collision raw text and previously when they refer to the bleed. I guess it has something to do with the function being based on trinary logic - could there be another flaw there related to this? Also kind of amusing seeing the different…

My favorite part was the IOTA folks insisting that their 'higher level' protocol would fix all their rookie mistakes. (Yes! We intentionally built our castle on quicksand! But look how hard the walls are!) It's a great example of why you need to start from sound foundations.

I mean that logic works for a lot of network stuff. Like you can have a nice fast torrent even though all the packets are UDP.
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