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IOTA fans say that IOA is scalable and capable of microtransactions. They often say that it gets faster and faster as there are more transactions, which seem to

by nadam 9y ago

IOTA fans say that IOA is scalable and capable of microtransactions. They often say that it gets faster and faster as there are more transactions, which seem to be an incredible bullshit to me. I started to read the whitepaper, but I just don't understand how it is scalable. The whitepaper goes into details about how the transaction DAG is maintained, but absolutely basic things seem to be missing: Are nodes all full nodes? Is the history stored on all nodes? Is account state stored on all nodes? There is another project which is designed specifically to be extremely scalable, called EOS (https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation/blob/master/TechnicalWhitePaper.md https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation/blob/master/Technical...). Reading its whitepaper I understood how EOS is scalable pretty clearly. I cannot understand the IOTA whitepaper at all. At least not how it is scalable. Currently IOTA seems to me a project that wants to impress people with good-sounding concepts like DAG, ternary number system, etc... but does not seem to be good engineering to me. Or at least its whitepaper is extremely poorly written and missing critical information IMHO.

tfha 9y ago
EOS has made security compromises though. If you aren't validating every transaction on the network yourself you have no way to be certain that the money you are being paid is legitimate
- nadam 9y ago
  Token holders vote for 21 block producers. Pretty much all of these block producers have to be controlled by the same malicious party so that an invalid transaction could go through unnoticed. (In fact I think even more than 21 nodes will track the network, as runner-ups are rewarded also to some extent) Malicious block producers, when noticed, are voted out of the system by token holders probably for ever. Unlike in case of most other currencies, block producers will be actual respectable 'real world' people (but the physical location of their servers will be unknown) In fact one can say that in case of POW if an entity can get cheaper electricity than others, it can happen the mining is unprofitable for everyone except this entity, so the system can become centralized simply by fierce competition to mine efficiently. I am not saying that I know for sure which will be the more secure method in the future: I have diversified my investments into DPOS and POW based currencies (BTC, DASH, EOS)

by nadam 9y ago

tfha 9y ago

EOS has made security compromises though. If you aren't validating every transaction on the network yourself you have no way to be certain that the money you are being paid is legitimate

nadam 9y ago
Token holders vote for 21 block producers. Pretty much all of these block producers have to be controlled by the same malicious party so that an invalid transaction could go through unnoticed. (In fact I think even more than 21 nodes will track the network, as runner-ups are rewarded also to some extent) Malicious block producers, when noticed, are voted out of the system by token holders probably for ever. Unlike in case of most other currencies, block producers will be actual respectable 'real world' people (but the physical location of their servers will be unknown) In fact one can say that in case of POW if an entity can get cheaper electricity than others, it can happen the mining is unprofitable for everyone except this entity, so the system can become centralized simply by fierce competition to mine efficiently. I am not saying that I know for sure which will be the more secure method in the future: I have diversified my investments into DPOS and POW based currencies (BTC, DASH, EOS)