>The IOTA source code is written in JAVA instead of C++ like most professional cryptocurrencies are. That did not instill me with confidence.
This made me lose any confidence in a person's capabilities in evaluating the coin. If anything, Java is way more (or any language with modern memory management) robust choice than C++ where security is concerned.
In any case, I am highly skeptical of the IOTA as well.
Before I read the blog post, I thought that this was a nit-picky complaint, but it speaks to the entire structure of what's he's written. The lede is horribly buried, and the road to it is paved with mild but somewhat aggrieved snark. It has the virtue of being a chronological account, but his preliminary comments are not very informative and do not sound particularly well informed. (i.e., "…something called a directed acyclic graph." Indeed.)
This is unfortunate, because the factual reporting he can offer, located towards the bottom of the page, describes a situation wildly contrary to the claims made on IOTA's behalf, and is suggestive of a code base that is unready, fragile, and teetering (at best) on the edge of fraud.
Me too. He may well have valid points but, as someone who has written mission critical software systems in Java, this destroys the credibility of the article for me.
On top of that, all of his technical issues with IOTA turned out, by his own admission, to be using the network wrong. Not understanding that buying 1,000s worth of an obscure cryptocurrency is going to come with a heafty dose of RTFM is a fool's errand. Instead of realizing this, the denial in him turns this into "victim blaming."
that said - he's right about IOTA. If that type of use is what it takes to make everything work, it has a long way to go.
I read your comment before reading the article. I expected the article to be a technical overview of IOTA.
Instead, it's a story of all the ways IOTA simply does not work.
Java vs C++ is irrelevant. Maybe the author is wrong, maybe not. Either way, it's probably a bad idea to take two sentences out of context and claim the author loses all credibility for an offhand opinion.
I don't agree with your "way more robust" argument per se, but I also didn't buy that point in the original article. It's unclear to me why the choice of programming language -- unless it was a very obscure and rarely used one, or one that's specifically used in one (unrelated) domain -- should be of any significance.
> It's unclear to me why the choice of programming language -- unless it was a very obscure and rarely used one, or one that's specifically used in one (unrelated) domain -- should be of any significance.
I'd rather use a language where e.g. a buffer overflow couldn't be turned into a remote exploit that would let you steal coins from every client on the network. Mistakes in cryptocurrency code has the potential to be very costly so you'd think minimising mistakes at all costs would be worth it.
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.
When you do a transaction, you must "mine" two others. This is WebGL for some reason and puts my workstation with only an Intel graphics card to its knees.
Not saying this is the case but to me Java looks like the choice of someone who's fresh out of school. Nobody would start a new project in Java if he had the choice.
IOTA is the only big cryptocurrency that seems extremely fishy to me. The trick is that even a fairly technical person (like me) cannot easily refute it based on the whitepaper, because the whitepaper is intentionally indecipherable, and does not have enough information to evaluate the project anyway. The average person sees such a whitepaper, and is amazed by the complicated scientific formulas. A good engineer/scientist on the other hand gets uneasy about it I think. I don't understand how a huge network of full nodes, nodes which are small indusrtrial devices can scalably reach consensus in a fast way. Even storing the full state is impossible, not to speak about history. It is independnet on whether we use the DAG or blockchain. That is why scalability plans on other networks go into the direction of sharding, or have a smaller number of powerful nodes, or use layer 2, etc...
Crypto communities fight each other (BTC vs. BCASH, DASH vs. Monero, Ethereum vs. EOS) but these are all serious projects. The whole community should speak up about IOTA instead.
Interesting... My first reaction to your post was "meh - surely he's exagerrating". But reading other replies to GP that were posted later made me reconsider. Very unconstructive replies, trying to bully the well articulated opinion... I have never seen anything like it on HN (though that's just my observation of course, maybe I was just lucky).
Do you think the people behind this are truly convinced of their cause or are they paid "web-fighters"?
I decided to see whether this statement is justified.
Before starting
---------------
I am about to read the whitepaper now, but before I do, I want to set up some standards for how I will judge that it is "intentionally indecipherable". First, I want to think of examples of intentionally indecipherable language.
I have these examples in mind:
1. We have many examples from marketing. If marketing just doesn't want to answer a question but does want to write a response to something.
>The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated aluminite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented
This is intentionally indecipherable, yet seems quite serious. It's a good example to bear before us.
3. There are times that important technical facts are deeply obfuscated. While I don't have a specific example, I think if you think of white papers on deeply unpopular features, you will get a sense of what I mean.
4. Because you add the word "intentionally" we don't need to include crank science in this judgment. That relieves us of a HUGE burden, as we will be evaluating a white paper possibly outside of our experience, and it is very difficult to tell the difference between crank and real science, totally outside of our domain.
Okay, so the above are the standards I have in mind. How will I evaluate whether the white paper is "intentionally indecipherable"?
"Intentionally indecipherable" criteria, selected before reading paper
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Does it use words that simply do not exist? For example, having zero Google results, and not being decipherable from their stems and construction of the word. Does the author offer definitions in these cases?
2. Does the author appear helpful at any point? For example, are there simplifications, or "other ways" to think about something offered? Do tricky points appear to receive careful attention?
3. Are there any clear jokes? Intentionally indecipherable writing does not contain clear jokes, because the author is "on edge", using all of their mental capacity to keep from accidentally communicating anything.
4. (a big one): Are multiple synonyms used for no reason? The intention of the indecipherable author is to keep from passing on any knowledge. If the author can use 4-5 syonnyms, that greatly reduces the chance that the reader accidentally looks up the word in question. On the other hand, landmark papers use the same terminology consistently, rather than reaching for synonyms: the author wants to convey something about concepts, and goes to great lengths to talk about it. Papers that are decipherable have high repetition of key words. Papers that are indecipherable have very low repetition (to keep from communicating.)
5. Are there vague references which are avoided being mentioned directly? This is common in marketing spin, but also in case of wanting to keep from communicating something. If something is included by reference without taking a parenthetical two words to explain what will be included there, this is another good indication of intentional indecipherability.
Okay, now I've set up the standards. Let me dive in and read the white paper!
Oh, I forgot to add but clicking that link reminded me: if it seems that sentences are made more tricky by editing after the fact, i.e. if they are not a natural way to form a sentence but seem specially edited for greater complexity, that seems a good indication. (This will be criteria 6.)
The whitepaper is linked with the words:
> The IOTA Whitepaper which describes the main technology behind IOTA - the Tangle - is available to read online. It goes into greater detail about the structure as well as the security of the Tangle.
This seems extremely focused on imparting real information. It is written in an extremely accessible, simplified style (failing indecipherability criteria 1 & 2). It does not seem unnecessarily complicated (failing indecipherability criterion 6). It actively mentions something rather than alluding to it, by mentioning "the Tangle" within dashes -- failing indecipherability criterion 5. It seems to fail criterion 4 as "the Tangle" is already mentioned twice. This sentence is written in an extremely simplified style, containing no jargon at all. It does not seem to contain any joke or lightheartedness, though it is only two sentences.
I did not need to read more than 2 pages to arrive at a judgment. My judgment based on the criteria selected beforehand, is that it is absolutely clear that the whitepaper is not intentionally indecipherable.
The author goes to extreme lengths to impart knowledge. The entirety of the Introduction goes to very carefully convey real knowledge. The author repeats himself again and again:
>The genesis transaction sent these tokens to several other “founder” addresses. Let us stress that all of the tokens were created in the genesis transaction. No tokens will be created in the future, and there will be no mining in the sense that miners receive monetary rewards “out of thin air”.
There is a measure of humor, such as the naming of the word "an iota". But the discussion is extremely serious, the author is extremely earnest. Not only does the author not use any made-up words, but goes to extreme lengths to enable the reader to read them.
See footnote 26, for example:
>This is a consequence of the so-called Large Deviation Principle. See the general book [13], and Proposition 5.2 in Section 8.5 of [14] for a simple and instructive derivation of the upper bound, and Section 1.9 of [5] for the (not so simple) derivation of the lower bound.
It is heart-breaking that the author goes to such incredible lengths to attempt to convey knowledge, they are doing everything physically possible, only to have someone who does not understand them fail to apply the principle of charity and claim that it was "intentionally indecipherable."
Concusions
----------
My conclusions, with the above methodology.
1. We set out to judge whether your statement was justified when you stated the paper is "intentionnally indecipherable." It is absolutely not a justified claim. We thought carefully about judgment criteria before we ever opened the paper. The paper failed every crtiterion for "intentional indecipherability" that we could think of.
2. More to the point, I feel you should have started by applying the principle of charity. Rather than saying "I could not follow the paper" or "I found logical inconsistencies", you made the claim that it is intentionally indecipherable. This goes too far. It's, in fact, heartbreaking, when it is clear that the author put so much time and effort into making the presented work accessible. This included finding footnotes to instructional concepts that the author felt there was any chance would not be understood.
We can go farther. This claim that a lovingly crafted paper that was read, reread, and reread, with an acknowledgment section reading:
>The author thanks Bartosz Kusmierz, Cyril Gr¨unspan and Toru Kazama who pointed out several errors in earlier drafts, and James Brogan for his contributions towards making this paper more readable.
would be "intentionally indecipherable" shuts down science and progress.
On a personal level, it makes me question whether I would ever publish anything under my own name and for a wide audience, when no matter how much effort is put into it, even the best communities on the planet will have someone come forward and say that my careful work is "intentionally indecipherable."
So we have completely rejected your statement. It fails every criteria that I carefully set up to evaluate it. You should not make such statements in the future, about anything.
(Please note that when I started this comment, I was prepared to write the opposite opinion, and agree with you.)
-
[EDIT]
- I lightly added the above
- In addition, just to be clear I have absolutely no relationship with the project or white paper. I haven't evaluated it besides deciding whether it is intentionally indecipherable.
The author describes the database the nodes maintain, and the consensus algorithm in great detail (which is much much more complicated than the consensus algorithm of any blockchain in the industry), but does not say a word about scalability. You know: absolutely basic stuff, like are nodes full nodes? Is the history maintained in each node? How much storage a node needs? How fast a transaction is confirmed? No word about it in the whitepaper of a 10 billion project. I would not need it to be included if it were trivial. But it is not trivial. In interviews they claim that it is almost infinitely scalable. Followers spread the information that it is faster as there is more usage on the network. They say that millions of small embedded hardware nodes can participate and the network enables microtransactions, which requires incredible scalability. These are ridiculous claims, and it is incredible that there is nothing about it in the whitepaper, or any easily accessible document. They intentionally don't want to explain the technology in clear and structured fashion. Yes I did'nt spend a week of my time to try to understand the technology. Maybe a week would be enough to browse the source code and have answers to my questions. But I don't have that much time for IOTA. And yes, it is fishy, that no one tries to explain it in a way that experienced engineers could have a grasp of it.
I read the paper yesterday (except some parts of section 4). Some of the math was too much to understand for a quick read. It is a good paper. I could follow everything (despite late hour). My problem was that the paper only discusses tangle-technology and finishing it I still wondered how IOTA uses the tangle and how it works. Maybe I should read more about cryptocurrencies first. Or there should be a more general paper about IOTA.
I read the first few pages of the IOTA whitepaper, including some of the math parts. I have basic undergrad math ability and although I'm not familiar with many of the concepts, most parts make sense to me and are quite thorough. It sounds like OP is trying to manipulate the market.
People who own a lot of crypto like OP generally aren't the kinds of people who would write articles for the public interest.
It sounds like OP sees an opportunity to bring the price down in order to get a better deal on their next purchase.
You don't think the concerns he listed about the instability of the network, current centralization of nodes, and the fact that one of the founders offered to buy his silence are legitimate complaints?
IOTA wallet is full of really bad bugs, just look how bad it is on first pages, the more pages you skip, the worse it is. It still doesn't work on Linux, for many users wallet crashes or shows green screen and nothing more. Doesn't work through Wine either.
https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues
Issues on github have no responses from developers since early November and there were no commits since than, what's surprising, there were a lot of blog posts on their domain and many subreddits how great they are (!!??)
BitFinex two week ago had problems paying out IOTAs, payouts were cancelled without any reason. Didn't try again since that time.
A lot of domains explaining how to buy IOTA look dodgy, like they were made by 14yo in '90s. There are dozens of domains like supportiota, forumiota, iotasupport.com, howtobuyiota.co.uk ? Why do they all exist and duplicate content?
I've also read that the devs have seized funds from users. Specifically, if you use the same address twice in IOTA (extremely common habit in cryptocurrency), you reveal your secret key, and the devs will take your money.
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..
If your software is expected to have bugs then you shouldn't allow people to put money in it. You should be setting the expectation that the chain will get regular resets while you work out the kinks. You should be discouraging exchanges at every opportunity and shouting loudly at the world not to put money in your alpha release software.
It doesn't appear that IOTA is doing any of those things.
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, drug laws, etc. Many people are using it as an investment vehicle mainly, and rarely as a exchange of value mechanism for payments, except where they actually need to. But would pay Uber with BTC, or buy a coffee? Why? if you simply way a few days, you'll make a lot more money not spending it.
A deflationary currency to replace fiat currency or centralized banking and credit seems like a contradiction. I mean, if my cash is growing at 10%-1000%, but my Visa fee is 3%, and my inflated USD is 2% inflation, I'm gonna go with the fiat currency or Visa fee.
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 News, and I saw my grandparents buying gold.
If someone has to spend lots of time and money advertising how useful something is, it’s probably more useful to them than me.
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)
The two issues are separate. Isn't there a lot of sound finical advise telling people to put money into the stock market? But isn't the stock market widely a greater fool game these days? Companies don't pay dividends anymore, voting rights are being reduced, and many companies are far too large to send a chance at being acquired.
It would be a terrible deal if 90% of the population wasn't accumulating stock via a 401K
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 currency.
I think the point is more to do with savings: in a non-deflationary environment, you have the incentive to invest your savings in potentially productive use. In a deflationary environment the incentive is simply to hide your money under your mattress, which doesn't help anyone.
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."
You could always switch to Dogecoin, which is similar to Bitcoin, but has very high inflation. You could even fork Bitcoin and make a Federal Reserve Board including yourself that could decide to issue more currency based on economic statistics. You could call it KeynesCoin. That's the great thing about Crypto. It's all open source, so do whatever you want.
Making them deflationary is more of a political statement than anything else I think. The crypto-currency crowd has this libertarian streak and of course those people believe that inflation is the devil, used by governments and banks to rob productive businessmen of their hard earned money.
> I mean, if my cash is growing at 10%-1000%, but my Visa fee is 3%, and my inflated USD is 2% inflation, I'm gonna go with the fiat currency or Visa fee.
Think really hard about what you’re saying here.
You’re currently very clearly working off some broken heuristics and not anything remotely resembling a rational or economically sound approach.
A couple rhetorical questions:
Would you prefer to use e.g. Zimbabwe dollars instead of US dollars? After all, if the depreciation of the US dollar is beneficial somehow, surely the ZWD is even better. If this isn’t the case, please explain your criteria for optimal depreciation.
Let’s say you kept 99% of your money in stocks. Expected growth is 10%/yr. Your car breaks down, and you don’t have enough cash to cover the damages. Are you going to sell some of your stocks?
The dollar is good for cash because it’s fungible, divisible, easily transported, widely accepted, and a few other useful properties. The fact that it depreciates over time is incidental and only tolerated because it has so many other positive qualities. No one with an ounce of sense keeps a large position in dollars, however. If you can create an asset that has the beneficial properties of dollars (fungible, divisible, transportable, etc.) and doesn’t depreciate, there’s no rational reason to continue using the dollar.
Your argument has multiple fallacies. The first is an either-or fallacy, that your only choices are deflation, or hyper inflation, when most OECD countries have had fairly low stable inflation rates over the last two decades.
Secondly, the idea that the response/benefit curve from monetary growth rate is linear, and therefore you can just extrapolate linearly that more is better. Our economy depends on a goldilocks region, where the extremes are bad, and the desirable area you want to inhabit is inbetween.
When currency is deflationary, no one wants to spend money, and you face an economic stagnation from a huge pull back in spending, no different than the Paradox of Thrift. There's no need to even make a philosophical argument here, we have a century of empirical evidence that deflationary causes a spiral, hell, Japan has been stuck in a deflationary spiral for 20 years.
Sure, eventually you have to eat, so you'll spend your BTC if the alternative is to starve, but is that how you see the economy being run? The only thing people spend money on are the absolute necessities? That's a very austere world, and once in which most people are unemployed because there's much lower demand for everything, except emergency car repair and basic necessities.
Likewise, you don't want hyperinflation, because it makes planning for the future impossible, wipes out investment, and induces hoarding of real assets.
But low levels of inflation, from 0-3%, do not cause such problems, and gently induce people to spend or invest money, rather than keep it under a mattress. For the same reason, something like a Land Value Tax is good because it induces people to stop hoarding land and not doing anything with it.
Same reason I don't put my money on the ponies. I have no experience at speculation and no confidence that I could do a good job of it. I'm pretty confident that every cryptocurrency bubble will burst in the near future, but I have no idea when this will happen and no confidence I will get my money out in time.
And I have serious moral objections to all existing cryptocurrencies. I'm not going to support something I consider immensely harmful as a get-rich-quick scheme.
There's a game theory problem which is that if you have a choice of cryptocurrencies at an early stage to play with, and you think they have a similar chance of success, it makes sense to invest in the cryptocurrencies with a limited supply. The fact that this will make them bad in the long run as a medium of exchange is not of interest to the early stage speculator.
> The crypto-currency crowd has this libertarian streak
I wish they did. Unfortunately the buyers who owned bitcoin the past few years are all in just coz the price is growing up. They are not in bacause the believe in anything.
If it is useful, then it does not need to have an inflating price. That people think the only reason why a cryptocurrency would ever be popular is if the price rises is a huge problem with the community.
If it weren't for the fact that the U.S. charges capital gains tax on every little purchase, I'd happily spend my cryptocurrency and just replenish it as I go. Trading between currencies makes this a non-issue.
Also, if you're really convinced a cryptocurrency will go up, your same argument suggests you should buy the cryptocurrency rather than spending dollars on anything else. If you're not doing that, it indicates you're not totally certain of the future after all, so you can just as well spend your cryptocurrency.
There's also the macroeconomic effect of deflation to consider, but that's only an issue if there's only one currency. What we're actually getting is the competing private currencies advocated by Hayek. It doesn't matter so much if one currency deflates as long as the total money supply is sufficient.
The problem is that our existing financial system probably had an intention of using inflation to encourage commerce and trade, but over the past 40 years, that focus shifted from using debt for the funding of productive enterprises to debt being used for the bidding up of fixed assets like houses, but also stocks. The only thing that mattered to this bidding process was capital growth. The solution to these bubbles wasn't to reign in debt creation, or to force the targeting of debt creation to productivity, but to simply increase it. Bubble after bubble after bubble, crisis after crisis after crisis. But not only that, a death in productive capacity, which is all too apparent to the middle-income demographic.
Because of this irresponsibility of the finance world, crypto-currency technology was developed to allow people to park their productive gains in inflation resistant financial instruments. So in order to get these people to part with their inflation resistant instrument, you will have to convince them that you will give a better return than inflation, and that means by increasing productivity. You can no longer just create more debt, because the only thing that will do is increase the value of the deflationary asset, by decreasing the value of the inflationary one. That means if you want to survive as a national currency, you better start working on education and building productive capacity, because you'll no longer be able to fleece your populace whenever banking execs are looking to buy a new bentley.
I've been tracking the IOTA controversy in the LinkedIn 'IoT Security' group in this thread[¹]. The centralized nature of the technology is a worry especially because they position themselves as a decentralized solution for IoT.
Many other currencies suffer from implementation problems (buggy wallets, etc) but at least in BTC the used cryptography is well tested. In IOTA's case they managed to both reinvented the crypto (e.g. "Curl" / "Kerl" hashes) in a broken way AND made some very dangerous assumptions in the meaning of "decentralization".
As I understand it, the problem with IOTA is that — in order to execute an attack — attackers just need to verify more transactions than all honest participants combined.
So, in other words, honest participants have no incentive to verify more transactions than required (because they don’t profit from it) while attackers have an incentive to verify more transactions, in order to successfully double spend.
> And to deal with this problem, they have "trusted supernodes", with a promise to turn them off when the network is self sustaining.
I don’t see how the network can ever become self-sustaining if attackers only need to create more transactions than everyone else combined. Sure, as usage increases, the number of transactions an attacker would need to produce increases as well, but so does the attacker’s potential reward — since there will be more IOTA users against which he can double spend.
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 with different microsoft teams == sending support tickets on azure for different services.
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.
> We are excited to partner with IOTA foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative. This next generation technology will accelerate the connected, intelligent world and go beyond blockchain that will foster innovation real world solutions, applications and pilots for our customers. --Omkar Naik, Microsoft
Maybe the best strategy for designing a cryptocurrency today is actually to make it really stupid? It's kind of like the scam logic, where you only want to get good marks in the door from the start.
If your cryptocurrency is really stupid, then only the true believers buy in, and then they all hodl. You don't want anyone too influential, and you definitely don't want people to say "okay I was tricked, I fodl".
Readit News
This made me lose any confidence in a person's capabilities in evaluating the coin. If anything, Java is way more (or any language with modern memory management) robust choice than C++ where security is concerned.
In any case, I am highly skeptical of the IOTA as well.
This is unfortunate, because the factual reporting he can offer, located towards the bottom of the page, describes a situation wildly contrary to the claims made on IOTA's behalf, and is suggestive of a code base that is unready, fragile, and teetering (at best) on the edge of fraud.
that said - he's right about IOTA. If that type of use is what it takes to make everything work, it has a long way to go.
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.
Instead, it's a story of all the ways IOTA simply does not work.
Java vs C++ is irrelevant. Maybe the author is wrong, maybe not. Either way, it's probably a bad idea to take two sentences out of context and claim the author loses all credibility for an offhand opinion.
I'd rather use a language where e.g. a buffer overflow couldn't be turned into a remote exploit that would let you steal coins from every client on the network. Mistakes in cryptocurrency code has the potential to be very costly so you'd think minimising mistakes at all costs would be worth it.
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.
Crypto communities fight each other (BTC vs. BCASH, DASH vs. Monero, Ethereum vs. EOS) but these are all serious projects. The whole community should speak up about IOTA instead.
BitConnect is in the top 20 market cap, doesn't get much fishier than that.
Do you think the people behind this are truly convinced of their cause or are they paid "web-fighters"?
Dead Comment
I decided to see whether this statement is justified.
I am about to read the whitepaper now, but before I do, I want to set up some standards for how I will judge that it is "intentionally indecipherable". First, I want to think of examples of intentionally indecipherable language.I have these examples in mind:
1. We have many examples from marketing. If marketing just doesn't want to answer a question but does want to write a response to something.
2. There are examples of nonsense. I have in mind this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator This reads:
>The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated aluminite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented
This is intentionally indecipherable, yet seems quite serious. It's a good example to bear before us.
3. There are times that important technical facts are deeply obfuscated. While I don't have a specific example, I think if you think of white papers on deeply unpopular features, you will get a sense of what I mean.
4. Because you add the word "intentionally" we don't need to include crank science in this judgment. That relieves us of a HUGE burden, as we will be evaluating a white paper possibly outside of our experience, and it is very difficult to tell the difference between crank and real science, totally outside of our domain.
Okay, so the above are the standards I have in mind. How will I evaluate whether the white paper is "intentionally indecipherable"?
1. Does it use words that simply do not exist? For example, having zero Google results, and not being decipherable from their stems and construction of the word. Does the author offer definitions in these cases?2. Does the author appear helpful at any point? For example, are there simplifications, or "other ways" to think about something offered? Do tricky points appear to receive careful attention?
3. Are there any clear jokes? Intentionally indecipherable writing does not contain clear jokes, because the author is "on edge", using all of their mental capacity to keep from accidentally communicating anything.
4. (a big one): Are multiple synonyms used for no reason? The intention of the indecipherable author is to keep from passing on any knowledge. If the author can use 4-5 syonnyms, that greatly reduces the chance that the reader accidentally looks up the word in question. On the other hand, landmark papers use the same terminology consistently, rather than reaching for synonyms: the author wants to convey something about concepts, and goes to great lengths to talk about it. Papers that are decipherable have high repetition of key words. Papers that are indecipherable have very low repetition (to keep from communicating.)
5. Are there vague references which are avoided being mentioned directly? This is common in marketing spin, but also in case of wanting to keep from communicating something. If something is included by reference without taking a parenthetical two words to explain what will be included there, this is another good indication of intentional indecipherability.
Okay, now I've set up the standards. Let me dive in and read the white paper!
I am using this link:https://iota.readme.io/v1.2.0/docs/whitepaper
Oh, I forgot to add but clicking that link reminded me: if it seems that sentences are made more tricky by editing after the fact, i.e. if they are not a natural way to form a sentence but seem specially edited for greater complexity, that seems a good indication. (This will be criteria 6.)
The whitepaper is linked with the words:
> The IOTA Whitepaper which describes the main technology behind IOTA - the Tangle - is available to read online. It goes into greater detail about the structure as well as the security of the Tangle.
This seems extremely focused on imparting real information. It is written in an extremely accessible, simplified style (failing indecipherability criteria 1 & 2). It does not seem unnecessarily complicated (failing indecipherability criterion 6). It actively mentions something rather than alluding to it, by mentioning "the Tangle" within dashes -- failing indecipherability criterion 5. It seems to fail criterion 4 as "the Tangle" is already mentioned twice. This sentence is written in an extremely simplified style, containing no jargon at all. It does not seem to contain any joke or lightheartedness, though it is only two sentences.
On to the paper! I clicked "http://iotatoken.com/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf" to read the paper.
I did not need to read more than 2 pages to arrive at a judgment. My judgment based on the criteria selected beforehand, is that it is absolutely clear that the whitepaper is not intentionally indecipherable.
The author goes to extreme lengths to impart knowledge. The entirety of the Introduction goes to very carefully convey real knowledge. The author repeats himself again and again:
>The genesis transaction sent these tokens to several other “founder” addresses. Let us stress that all of the tokens were created in the genesis transaction. No tokens will be created in the future, and there will be no mining in the sense that miners receive monetary rewards “out of thin air”.
There is a measure of humor, such as the naming of the word "an iota". But the discussion is extremely serious, the author is extremely earnest. Not only does the author not use any made-up words, but goes to extreme lengths to enable the reader to read them.
See footnote 26, for example:
>This is a consequence of the so-called Large Deviation Principle. See the general book [13], and Proposition 5.2 in Section 8.5 of [14] for a simple and instructive derivation of the upper bound, and Section 1.9 of [5] for the (not so simple) derivation of the lower bound.
It is heart-breaking that the author goes to such incredible lengths to attempt to convey knowledge, they are doing everything physically possible, only to have someone who does not understand them fail to apply the principle of charity and claim that it was "intentionally indecipherable."
My conclusions, with the above methodology.1. We set out to judge whether your statement was justified when you stated the paper is "intentionnally indecipherable." It is absolutely not a justified claim. We thought carefully about judgment criteria before we ever opened the paper. The paper failed every crtiterion for "intentional indecipherability" that we could think of.
2. More to the point, I feel you should have started by applying the principle of charity. Rather than saying "I could not follow the paper" or "I found logical inconsistencies", you made the claim that it is intentionally indecipherable. This goes too far. It's, in fact, heartbreaking, when it is clear that the author put so much time and effort into making the presented work accessible. This included finding footnotes to instructional concepts that the author felt there was any chance would not be understood.
We can go farther. This claim that a lovingly crafted paper that was read, reread, and reread, with an acknowledgment section reading:
>The author thanks Bartosz Kusmierz, Cyril Gr¨unspan and Toru Kazama who pointed out several errors in earlier drafts, and James Brogan for his contributions towards making this paper more readable.
would be "intentionally indecipherable" shuts down science and progress.
On a personal level, it makes me question whether I would ever publish anything under my own name and for a wide audience, when no matter how much effort is put into it, even the best communities on the planet will have someone come forward and say that my careful work is "intentionally indecipherable."
So we have completely rejected your statement. It fails every criteria that I carefully set up to evaluate it. You should not make such statements in the future, about anything.
(Please note that when I started this comment, I was prepared to write the opposite opinion, and agree with you.)
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[EDIT]
- I lightly added the above
- In addition, just to be clear I have absolutely no relationship with the project or white paper. I haven't evaluated it besides deciding whether it is intentionally indecipherable.
So you are evaluating the quality of a 28 pages paper by reading only the introduction ?
Are you intentionally retarded ?
Dead Comment
People who own a lot of crypto like OP generally aren't the kinds of people who would write articles for the public interest.
It sounds like OP sees an opportunity to bring the price down in order to get a better deal on their next purchase.
Issues on github have no responses from developers since early November and there were no commits since than, what's surprising, there were a lot of blog posts on their domain and many subreddits how great they are (!!??)
BitFinex two week ago had problems paying out IOTAs, payouts were cancelled without any reason. Didn't try again since that time.
A lot of domains explaining how to buy IOTA look dodgy, like they were made by 14yo in '90s. There are dozens of domains like supportiota, forumiota, iotasupport.com, howtobuyiota.co.uk ? Why do they all exist and duplicate content?
Watch out out there.
Pages and pages of issues ranging from; "Somebody stole thousands of dollars from me" to "My money is stuck and I can't get it out".
Among many other wallet related issues.
What are you talking about? I haven't used the wallet on anything but Linux, and I've had no problems.
https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/577
https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/511
https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/416
It doesn't appear that IOTA is doing any of those things.
You're saying that application and developers came completely unprepared for the market?
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, drug laws, etc. Many people are using it as an investment vehicle mainly, and rarely as a exchange of value mechanism for payments, except where they actually need to. But would pay Uber with BTC, or buy a coffee? Why? if you simply way a few days, you'll make a lot more money not spending it.
A deflationary currency to replace fiat currency or centralized banking and credit seems like a contradiction. I mean, if my cash is growing at 10%-1000%, but my Visa fee is 3%, and my inflated USD is 2% inflation, I'm gonna go with the fiat currency or Visa fee.
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 News, and I saw my grandparents buying gold.
If someone has to spend lots of time and money advertising how useful something is, it’s probably more useful to them than me.
[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)
It would be a terrible deal if 90% of the population wasn't accumulating stock via a 401K
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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 currency.
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."
Inflation harms fixed wage earners and pensioners far worse than "businessmen"
Think really hard about what you’re saying here.
You’re currently very clearly working off some broken heuristics and not anything remotely resembling a rational or economically sound approach.
A couple rhetorical questions:
Would you prefer to use e.g. Zimbabwe dollars instead of US dollars? After all, if the depreciation of the US dollar is beneficial somehow, surely the ZWD is even better. If this isn’t the case, please explain your criteria for optimal depreciation.
Let’s say you kept 99% of your money in stocks. Expected growth is 10%/yr. Your car breaks down, and you don’t have enough cash to cover the damages. Are you going to sell some of your stocks?
The dollar is good for cash because it’s fungible, divisible, easily transported, widely accepted, and a few other useful properties. The fact that it depreciates over time is incidental and only tolerated because it has so many other positive qualities. No one with an ounce of sense keeps a large position in dollars, however. If you can create an asset that has the beneficial properties of dollars (fungible, divisible, transportable, etc.) and doesn’t depreciate, there’s no rational reason to continue using the dollar.
Secondly, the idea that the response/benefit curve from monetary growth rate is linear, and therefore you can just extrapolate linearly that more is better. Our economy depends on a goldilocks region, where the extremes are bad, and the desirable area you want to inhabit is inbetween.
When currency is deflationary, no one wants to spend money, and you face an economic stagnation from a huge pull back in spending, no different than the Paradox of Thrift. There's no need to even make a philosophical argument here, we have a century of empirical evidence that deflationary causes a spiral, hell, Japan has been stuck in a deflationary spiral for 20 years.
Sure, eventually you have to eat, so you'll spend your BTC if the alternative is to starve, but is that how you see the economy being run? The only thing people spend money on are the absolute necessities? That's a very austere world, and once in which most people are unemployed because there's much lower demand for everything, except emergency car repair and basic necessities.
Likewise, you don't want hyperinflation, because it makes planning for the future impossible, wipes out investment, and induces hoarding of real assets.
But low levels of inflation, from 0-3%, do not cause such problems, and gently induce people to spend or invest money, rather than keep it under a mattress. For the same reason, something like a Land Value Tax is good because it induces people to stop hoarding land and not doing anything with it.
Why do you waste your dollars on coffee when you could invest them in a deflationary cryptoasset?
And I have serious moral objections to all existing cryptocurrencies. I'm not going to support something I consider immensely harmful as a get-rich-quick scheme.
I wish they did. Unfortunately the buyers who owned bitcoin the past few years are all in just coz the price is growing up. They are not in bacause the believe in anything.
Dead Comment
Also, if you're really convinced a cryptocurrency will go up, your same argument suggests you should buy the cryptocurrency rather than spending dollars on anything else. If you're not doing that, it indicates you're not totally certain of the future after all, so you can just as well spend your cryptocurrency.
There's also the macroeconomic effect of deflation to consider, but that's only an issue if there's only one currency. What we're actually getting is the competing private currencies advocated by Hayek. It doesn't matter so much if one currency deflates as long as the total money supply is sufficient.
1. Other cryptocurrencies 2. Fiat currencies & precious metals 3. Contraband
The problem is that our existing financial system probably had an intention of using inflation to encourage commerce and trade, but over the past 40 years, that focus shifted from using debt for the funding of productive enterprises to debt being used for the bidding up of fixed assets like houses, but also stocks. The only thing that mattered to this bidding process was capital growth. The solution to these bubbles wasn't to reign in debt creation, or to force the targeting of debt creation to productivity, but to simply increase it. Bubble after bubble after bubble, crisis after crisis after crisis. But not only that, a death in productive capacity, which is all too apparent to the middle-income demographic.
Because of this irresponsibility of the finance world, crypto-currency technology was developed to allow people to park their productive gains in inflation resistant financial instruments. So in order to get these people to part with their inflation resistant instrument, you will have to convince them that you will give a better return than inflation, and that means by increasing productivity. You can no longer just create more debt, because the only thing that will do is increase the value of the deflationary asset, by decreasing the value of the inflationary one. That means if you want to survive as a national currency, you better start working on education and building productive capacity, because you'll no longer be able to fleece your populace whenever banking execs are looking to buy a new bentley.
Why?
To control the supply early and exploit later speculators.
Many other currencies suffer from implementation problems (buggy wallets, etc) but at least in BTC the used cryptography is well tested. In IOTA's case they managed to both reinvented the crypto (e.g. "Curl" / "Kerl" hashes) in a broken way AND made some very dangerous assumptions in the meaning of "decentralization".
[¹] https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4807429/4807429-634451121504...
So, in other words, honest participants have no incentive to verify more transactions than required (because they don’t profit from it) while attackers have an incentive to verify more transactions, in order to successfully double spend.
It introduces a high degree of centralisation - and we don't know the how network shapes up as a consequence.
And the second problem is obviously the unaudited,"quantum resistant" function.
Don't forget the ternary SHA-3.
I don’t see how the network can ever become self-sustaining if attackers only need to create more transactions than everyone else combined. Sure, as usage increases, the number of transactions an attacker would need to produce increases as well, but so does the attacker’s potential reward — since there will be more IOTA users against which he can double spend.
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 with different microsoft teams == sending support tickets on azure for different services.
I wonder if this is a recurring theme in "crypto". At one point I followed NEO, and they pulled the exact same stunt.
What do you mean?
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.
The quote that set off this confusion:
> We are excited to partner with IOTA foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative. This next generation technology will accelerate the connected, intelligent world and go beyond blockchain that will foster innovation real world solutions, applications and pilots for our customers. --Omkar Naik, Microsoft
If your cryptocurrency is really stupid, then only the true believers buy in, and then they all hodl. You don't want anyone too influential, and you definitely don't want people to say "okay I was tricked, I fodl".
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