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IOTA is kind of a joke IMHO: * They have this thing called the "coordinator" which is a master-node run by them, which is a single point of failure. The codeba

by knocte 9y ago

IOTA is kind of a joke IMHO: * They have this thing called the "coordinator" which is a master-node run by them, which is a single point of failure. The codebase that this node runs is proprietary software. They claim there will be no need for this masternode in the long run but they never say any ETA about when to remove it (which hints that removing it may always expose the security flaws of their network). This means it's Proof of Authority instead of Proof of Work, therefore, not decentralized. * It's 100% premined, which smells as scammy as Ripple. It's not a coin, it's an entity handing you gift vouchers with their name on it. * I've heard they rolled their own crypto. Yes, let that sink. Haven't verified this myself though. * There's no way for new nodes joining the network to recover the full history of the transactions (a IOTA speaker told me there are some public FTP servers or something where you can get a copy...). So yeah, it's an "append and forget" blockchain, lol. Be prepared for a big (&deserved) crash.

nlperguiy 9y ago
Ethereum had a master node too. Other than that, yeah it's weird. Although I'm not sure why there's so many announcements of businesses like Microsoft, Fujitsu doing partnerships with IOTA. Sounds very weird and overpumped.
- gst 9y ago
  > Ethereum had a master node too. Ethereum never depended on a centralized master node.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    There were the canary contracts, which while they were active (they've been deactivated in mid 2016). These simply stated whether a chain was good or bad, and they were controlled by the makers of ethereum. I don't know if they were ever used to mark a chain as bad, but they certainly represented centralized control. I do see your point that most of the time, ethereum functioned using the decentralized protocol, but there was a centralized fallback.
    - bhaak 9y ago
      From what I gathered from the links below, they were intended to stop mining if an unintentional hard fork would have happened. Or maybe also to force miners to upgrade? Did the Frontier release not yet have the ice age mechanism? The wiki page suggests that there was an option to ignore the canary contracts. So you could mine nevertheless without recompiling the source. There's no such option with IOTA as the coordinator is closed source. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Bad-Chain-Canary https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Bad-Chain-Canary https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/22/frontier-is-coming-what-to-expect-and-how-to-prepare/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/22/frontier-is-coming-what...
- JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
  Businesses do that all the time, it has no drawback for them. I suspect it is like the ones with Ethereum, that will never mean they actually use Ethereum, they are just learning about it.
- csomar 9y ago
  That's not the point. The coordinator gets to decide their "blockchain". They don't have mining or another election mechanism.
- Legogris 9y ago
  Microsoft has been very promiscuous with partnerships in the recent years. It doesn't really signify much in terms of promise of individual projects.
makomk 9y ago
I've heard that they didn't just roll their own crypto, but that it was in fact unsurprisingly found to be broken and the devs then claimed that this was intentional to stop anyone setting up a clone without the central closed-source coordinator.
- knocte 9y ago
  Hahahaha!
- madsravn 9y ago
  It's the second time I hear that today. I don't deny it's true, but can't we put some sources on this? I think it is a little childish to just be spreading rumors.
  - DalasNoin 9y ago
    It took me while to find this, he calls the vulnerability a "copy-protection measure" https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543c786f9e35b84a https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543...
gst 9y ago
> I've heard they rolled their own crypto. Yes, let that sink. Haven't verified this myself though. They decided it's a good idea to use ternary logic instead of binary logic so they had to write their own cryptographic primitives based on ternary. Here's a good analysis about the security issues: https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367 https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...
- hobofan 9y ago
  > the IOTA developers had written their own hash function, _Curl_ Did...did they intentionally name it curl, so that when you search for "Is curl secure?" you will find articles saying that curl - the widely used library - is secure, in the hope that people will confuse the two? I know that you shouldn't assume malice when it can be explained with incompetence, but combined with some of the other points here, I can't help but feel that this was intentional.
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    I think the insecurity of their function was a mistake. I doubt they would deliberately code something that threw collisions and have a cover up plan that is basically name it curl and hope people get it mixed up with the real curl.
    - eternalban 9y ago
      fwiw, was bored and exploring for the first time the (my God) toxic social timelines of these crypto coins and happened to end with IOTA and the story of the home grown hash function. Just posting what I just read about this topic and not an +/- either way on the topic at hand: Sergey Ivancheglo (@Come-from-Beyond) claims the collisions were intentional and for the purposes of IOTA the hash merely had to be a one way function: https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543c786f9e35b84a https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543... He addresses his base-3 number system design decision as well (by appealing to authority no less :) > name it curl In above he references Curl-P and the final letter (see his last gist) also explicitly asks that the MIT security blogger use the full name which she declined.
lewi 9y ago
It's 100% premined, which smells as scammy as Ripple. It needed to be as there are no miners in the IOTA network. Additionally, In contrast to conventional ICOs, IOTA had 0% of their ICO reserved for founders. Not a single iota. The founders had to purchase their technology back during the ICO. Furthermore, there was no allocation for foundation or ecosystem funds. They asked the community to donate for this foundation to exist. They reached 5% of total supply and that is what the foundation runs on. (~140Ti) I've heard they rolled their own crypto. Its easily searchable, please inform your self. it's an "append and forget" blockchain, lol. Can you please explain the issue with this?
- tromp 9y ago
  > IOTA had 0% of their ICO reserved for founders. So the founders were forced to buy IOTA from themselves if they wanted some?
  - lewi 9y ago
    Yes
    - Mithorium 9y ago
      Think about what that means. If I issue my own currency and "sell" it to myself, any amount I bought would be free
      - ryanmerket 9y ago
        As long as the price goes up...
- nhaehnle 9y ago
  So they didn't reserve any iotas for themselves; instead, they got the BTC that people used to buy the initial iotas. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. ... which isn't actually so bad when you think about it, as long as those BTC all went to their foundation. Iota has bigger problems, like pretending to be more efficient by using a DAG, when in reality everybody still needs to see the whole tangle to verify transactions.
rootsudo 9y ago
Yep they rolled their own crypto and are broadcasting it as a feature vs a con.
lojack 9y ago
I see this argument against premining all the time, and while I’m not bullish on IOTA, I think it’s worth at least calling out... just because it’s premined doesn’t mean it’s a scam. Most of the time I see this argument from crypto purists that think the only valid currency is evenly distributed. Using XRP as an example (because I’m most familiar with it), Ripple has been nothing about transparent about the supply of XRP and what it’s being used for. They have made it clear that they own the majority at the current time, and their holdings will be used to further their partnerships. Everything Ripple has done has been completely upfront and transparent. Their mission is well stated, and they have a clear plan. Whether or not they will achieve their goals is a different story, but there is nothing they’ve done that seems remotely like a scam to me. You may not agree with premining for other reasons, but please don’t call something a scam just because someone is trying to be a capitalist. In the context of deceiving users and leading them to believe there is a more even distribution than there is in reality – premining could be a scam. The examples you gave, however, don’t fit the bill.
- gtrubetskoy 9y ago
  > just because it’s premined doesn’t mean it’s a scam Not a scam, but there is a problem with premining. Consider the first 1 million Satoshi's bitcoins, which, albeit unintentional, still qualifies as pre-mining IMO - we don't know who owns them and whether they are spendable, their value is mind-boggling and if any one of them is spent, it can cause a panic.
  - gruez 9y ago
    It's not premining because it was publicly announced so you at least had a chance of getting it
    - knocte 9y ago
      This.
jp_rider 9y ago
It appears their own crypto was already vulnerable. A friend pointed me to this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/09/07/mit-and-bu-researchers-uncover-critical-security-flaw-in-2b-cryptocurrency-iota/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/09/07/mit-and-bu... He was also concerned that there's no security proof in the whitepaper. To me, it seems like you could feasibly launch an attack with less than a majority of the computing resources.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  So, how come no one has done that?
  - Buttes 9y ago
    The closed-source coordinator, presumably.
- Buttes 9y ago
  My understanding is you only need 33% of the hash power at any given time. Since PoW is only done as part of sending transactions, it probably takes less hash power than you'd think to cause problems.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Why does everyone repeat that Byzantine consensus requires maximum 33% of participants to be dishonest? If messages cannot be forged, then a consensus could make positive progress with even 99% of participants being dishonest.
    - Buttes 9y ago
      >Why does everyone repeat that Byzantine consensus requires maximum 33% of participants to be dishonest? Not 33% of participants, 33% of the hash power, could just be one participant with a pile of GPUs or ASICS or "JINN" chips lol. That's the claim made by the IOTA author, anyway. Right now it wouldn't surprise me if someone could amass 90+% of IOTA hash power anyway. >If messages cannot be forged Tbh this is not even a given with IOTA.
baby 9y ago
Ripples sounds more legit to me. I mean look at this thread about IOTA: https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/70ya29/time_for_a_paradigm_shift_has_come/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/70ya29/time_for_a_par... Anyone putting their money in IOTA is an absolute idiot.
- tuddman 9y ago
  > Anyone putting their money in IOTA is an absolute idiot. I bought in when it was trading well under $1. I'm holding long term so I don't much care about today's price, but it _is_ nice to be up >700% so far. I don't consider myself an absolute idiot on this one.
  - CyberDildonics 9y ago
    Winning money at a casino doesn't mean you made a good investment.
- carolita 9y ago
  What do you mean?
tuddman 9y ago
> It's 100% premined, which smells as scammy as Ripple. It's not a coin, it's an entity handing you gift vouchers with their name on it. No scam. There was an announced, publicly available crowd sale available to anyone paying attention & interested in 2015. Sorry you missed it.
markatkinson 9y ago
You seem to be a pretty big bitcoin fan (all your other comments), so I would say it is fair that you may be slightly biased against IOTA. IOTA does not proclaim to be finished, it is still in beta. Hence the need for the coordinator. The coordinator will be turned off once there are enough transactions to secure the network.
- knocte 9y ago
  > Hence the need for the coordinator. The coordinator will be turned off once there are enough transactions to secure the network. I already said this in my comment, no need to reiterate it. You didn't repeat, though, that there's no ETA or rough threshold of when it would be safe to turn it off.
sepherothika 9y ago
This is total nonsense. Complete FUD. The coordinator is not a 'masternode', and it is not a 'single point of failure'. For ex: The coo was shutdown a month or so ago and -> Txs still were being processed, and some being confirmed. The coo just literally makes an array for tip selection, for helping bootstrap the network. The COO will also be opensourced soon anyways, and ontop of that, it will be removed at some point. (It is 100% optional for a fullnode to even listen to the coo giving the array for tip selection purposes anyways), you can run your node without use of the coordinator. So your post is actually a complete joke, massive FUD, and disinformation. The crypto being rolled, is actually being reviewed by cryptographers, and also it is being evolved and optimized/perfected by Artificial Intelligence. https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/70ya29/time_for_a_paradigm_shift_has_come/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/70ya29/time_for_a_par... Let that sink in.
carolita 9y ago
* Coordinator is a mechanism put in place to aid the network in its infancy. Same as with Bitcoin. * I don't see the correlation between pre-mined and scammy. Please elaborate. In my view it eliminates greed/TX costs because there is no mining. * Has been discussed ad nauseam months ago, but here it is again https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-updates-d12145e381eb https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-updates-d12145e381eb * ?

by knocte 9y ago

nlperguiy 9y ago

Ethereum had a master node too. Other than that, yeah it's weird. Although I'm not sure why there's so many announcements of businesses like Microsoft, Fujitsu doing partnerships with IOTA. Sounds very weird and overpumped.

gst 9y ago
> Ethereum had a master node too. Ethereum never depended on a centralized master node.
- rocqua 9y ago
  There were the canary contracts, which while they were active (they've been deactivated in mid 2016). These simply stated whether a chain was good or bad, and they were controlled by the makers of ethereum. I don't know if they were ever used to mark a chain as bad, but they certainly represented centralized control. I do see your point that most of the time, ethereum functioned using the decentralized protocol, but there was a centralized fallback.
  - bhaak 9y ago
    From what I gathered from the links below, they were intended to stop mining if an unintentional hard fork would have happened. Or maybe also to force miners to upgrade? Did the Frontier release not yet have the ice age mechanism? The wiki page suggests that there was an option to ignore the canary contracts. So you could mine nevertheless without recompiling the source. There's no such option with IOTA as the coordinator is closed source. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Bad-Chain-Canary https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Bad-Chain-Canary https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/22/frontier-is-coming-what-to-expect-and-how-to-prepare/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/22/frontier-is-coming-what...
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
Businesses do that all the time, it has no drawback for them. I suspect it is like the ones with Ethereum, that will never mean they actually use Ethereum, they are just learning about it.
csomar 9y ago
That's not the point. The coordinator gets to decide their "blockchain". They don't have mining or another election mechanism.
Legogris 9y ago
Microsoft has been very promiscuous with partnerships in the recent years. It doesn't really signify much in terms of promise of individual projects.

makomk 9y ago

I've heard that they didn't just roll their own crypto, but that it was in fact unsurprisingly found to be broken and the devs then claimed that this was intentional to stop anyone setting up a clone without the central closed-source coordinator.

knocte 9y ago
Hahahaha!
madsravn 9y ago
It's the second time I hear that today. I don't deny it's true, but can't we put some sources on this? I think it is a little childish to just be spreading rumors.
- DalasNoin 9y ago
  It took me while to find this, he calls the vulnerability a "copy-protection measure" https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543c786f9e35b84a https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543...

gst 9y ago

> I've heard they rolled their own crypto. Yes, let that sink. Haven't verified this myself though. They decided it's a good idea to use ternary logic instead of binary logic so they had to write their own cryptographic primitives based on ternary. Here's a good analysis about the security issues: https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367 https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...

hobofan 9y ago
> the IOTA developers had written their own hash function, _Curl_ Did...did they intentionally name it curl, so that when you search for "Is curl secure?" you will find articles saying that curl - the widely used library - is secure, in the hope that people will confuse the two? I know that you shouldn't assume malice when it can be explained with incompetence, but combined with some of the other points here, I can't help but feel that this was intentional.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  I think the insecurity of their function was a mistake. I doubt they would deliberately code something that threw collisions and have a cover up plan that is basically name it curl and hope people get it mixed up with the real curl.
  - eternalban 9y ago
    fwiw, was bored and exploring for the first time the (my God) toxic social timelines of these crypto coins and happened to end with IOTA and the story of the home grown hash function. Just posting what I just read about this topic and not an +/- either way on the topic at hand: Sergey Ivancheglo (@Come-from-Beyond) claims the collisions were intentional and for the purposes of IOTA the hash merely had to be a one way function: https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543c786f9e35b84a https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543... He addresses his base-3 number system design decision as well (by appealing to authority no less :) > name it curl In above he references Curl-P and the final letter (see his last gist) also explicitly asks that the MIT security blogger use the full name which she declined.

lewi 9y ago

It's 100% premined, which smells as scammy as Ripple. It needed to be as there are no miners in the IOTA network. Additionally, In contrast to conventional ICOs, IOTA had 0% of their ICO reserved for founders. Not a single iota. The founders had to purchase their technology back during the ICO. Furthermore, there was no allocation for foundation or ecosystem funds. They asked the community to donate for this foundation to exist. They reached 5% of total supply and that is what the foundation runs on. (~140Ti) I've heard they rolled their own crypto. Its easily searchable, please inform your self. it's an "append and forget" blockchain, lol. Can you please explain the issue with this?

tromp 9y ago
> IOTA had 0% of their ICO reserved for founders. So the founders were forced to buy IOTA from themselves if they wanted some?
- lewi 9y ago
  Yes
  - Mithorium 9y ago
    Think about what that means. If I issue my own currency and "sell" it to myself, any amount I bought would be free
    - ryanmerket 9y ago
      As long as the price goes up...
nhaehnle 9y ago
So they didn't reserve any iotas for themselves; instead, they got the BTC that people used to buy the initial iotas. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. ... which isn't actually so bad when you think about it, as long as those BTC all went to their foundation. Iota has bigger problems, like pretending to be more efficient by using a DAG, when in reality everybody still needs to see the whole tangle to verify transactions.

rootsudo 9y ago

Yep they rolled their own crypto and are broadcasting it as a feature vs a con.

lojack 9y ago

I see this argument against premining all the time, and while I’m not bullish on IOTA, I think it’s worth at least calling out... just because it’s premined doesn’t mean it’s a scam. Most of the time I see this argument from crypto purists that think the only valid currency is evenly distributed. Using XRP as an example (because I’m most familiar with it), Ripple has been nothing about transparent about the supply of XRP and what it’s being used for. They have made it clear that they own the majority at the current time, and their holdings will be used to further their partnerships. Everything Ripple has done has been completely upfront and transparent. Their mission is well stated, and they have a clear plan. Whether or not they will achieve their goals is a different story, but there is nothing they’ve done that seems remotely like a scam to me. You may not agree with premining for other reasons, but please don’t call something a scam just because someone is trying to be a capitalist. In the context of deceiving users and leading them to believe there is a more even distribution than there is in reality – premining could be a scam. The examples you gave, however, don’t fit the bill.

gtrubetskoy 9y ago
> just because it’s premined doesn’t mean it’s a scam Not a scam, but there is a problem with premining. Consider the first 1 million Satoshi's bitcoins, which, albeit unintentional, still qualifies as pre-mining IMO - we don't know who owns them and whether they are spendable, their value is mind-boggling and if any one of them is spent, it can cause a panic.
- gruez 9y ago
  It's not premining because it was publicly announced so you at least had a chance of getting it
  - knocte 9y ago
    This.

jp_rider 9y ago

It appears their own crypto was already vulnerable. A friend pointed me to this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/09/07/mit-and-bu-researchers-uncover-critical-security-flaw-in-2b-cryptocurrency-iota/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/09/07/mit-and-bu... He was also concerned that there's no security proof in the whitepaper. To me, it seems like you could feasibly launch an attack with less than a majority of the computing resources.

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
So, how come no one has done that?
- Buttes 9y ago
  The closed-source coordinator, presumably.
Buttes 9y ago
My understanding is you only need 33% of the hash power at any given time. Since PoW is only done as part of sending transactions, it probably takes less hash power than you'd think to cause problems.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Why does everyone repeat that Byzantine consensus requires maximum 33% of participants to be dishonest? If messages cannot be forged, then a consensus could make positive progress with even 99% of participants being dishonest.
  - Buttes 9y ago
    >Why does everyone repeat that Byzantine consensus requires maximum 33% of participants to be dishonest? Not 33% of participants, 33% of the hash power, could just be one participant with a pile of GPUs or ASICS or "JINN" chips lol. That's the claim made by the IOTA author, anyway. Right now it wouldn't surprise me if someone could amass 90+% of IOTA hash power anyway. >If messages cannot be forged Tbh this is not even a given with IOTA.

baby 9y ago

Ripples sounds more legit to me. I mean look at this thread about IOTA: https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/70ya29/time_for_a_paradigm_shift_has_come/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/70ya29/time_for_a_par... Anyone putting their money in IOTA is an absolute idiot.

tuddman 9y ago
> Anyone putting their money in IOTA is an absolute idiot. I bought in when it was trading well under $1. I'm holding long term so I don't much care about today's price, but it _is_ nice to be up >700% so far. I don't consider myself an absolute idiot on this one.
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  Winning money at a casino doesn't mean you made a good investment.
carolita 9y ago
What do you mean?

tuddman 9y ago

> It's 100% premined, which smells as scammy as Ripple. It's not a coin, it's an entity handing you gift vouchers with their name on it. No scam. There was an announced, publicly available crowd sale available to anyone paying attention & interested in 2015. Sorry you missed it.

markatkinson 9y ago

You seem to be a pretty big bitcoin fan (all your other comments), so I would say it is fair that you may be slightly biased against IOTA. IOTA does not proclaim to be finished, it is still in beta. Hence the need for the coordinator. The coordinator will be turned off once there are enough transactions to secure the network.

knocte 9y ago
> Hence the need for the coordinator. The coordinator will be turned off once there are enough transactions to secure the network. I already said this in my comment, no need to reiterate it. You didn't repeat, though, that there's no ETA or rough threshold of when it would be safe to turn it off.

sepherothika 9y ago

This is total nonsense. Complete FUD. The coordinator is not a 'masternode', and it is not a 'single point of failure'. For ex: The coo was shutdown a month or so ago and -> Txs still were being processed, and some being confirmed. The coo just literally makes an array for tip selection, for helping bootstrap the network. The COO will also be opensourced soon anyways, and ontop of that, it will be removed at some point. (It is 100% optional for a fullnode to even listen to the coo giving the array for tip selection purposes anyways), you can run your node without use of the coordinator. So your post is actually a complete joke, massive FUD, and disinformation. The crypto being rolled, is actually being reviewed by cryptographers, and also it is being evolved and optimized/perfected by Artificial Intelligence. https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/70ya29/time_for_a_paradigm_shift_has_come/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/70ya29/time_for_a_par... Let that sink in.

carolita 9y ago

* Coordinator is a mechanism put in place to aid the network in its infancy. Same as with Bitcoin. * I don't see the correlation between pre-mined and scammy. Please elaborate. In my view it eliminates greed/TX costs because there is no mining. * Has been discussed ad nauseam months ago, but here it is again https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-updates-d12145e381eb https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-updates-d12145e381eb * ?