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MIT Media Lab's concerns about the cryptocurrency IOTA

147 points by dsr12 9y ago

mahemm 9y ago
It's mind boggling to me that anyone takes IOTA seriously anymore. The fact that it's in ternary should be enough to convince the more risk-averse technical people of the folly of its design. More optimistic techies should have been convinced when researchers showed that its hash function was trivially broken. Everyone else should've jumped ship when it was revealed that all of their "corporate partnerships" were made up to pump the coin. It goes to show that anyone with good marketing can make a killing in the cryptocurrency world.
- kruhft 9y ago
  What's wrong with Ternary? Other than being obscure? I'm not happy they seem to be spending more on PR than development, but that does seem to be the case for most startups these days.
  - T4NG 9y ago
    >whats wrong with Ternary The dude just mentioned a bunch of reasons, read his post
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - jerf 9y ago
    In an engineering context, the question is "does the benefits of ternary exceed its costs?" The benefits of ternary over binary on binary hardware are basically nothing. There is no operation made possible by ternary that isn't possible in binary, especially given that, again, you're on binary hardware, nor is anything made particularly easier. (Except useless things like "modulo 3" that aren't particularly hard in binary anyhow.) The costs are programming complexity and runtime penalties for conversions, which is an ongoing price paid by all users. So in engineering terms, "zero benefits, non-zero costs", it's no contest; use binary, or, more generally, use the native integer system on the hardware you are running on. That is, the same argument would apply in reverse on an already-existing ternary-native system. There is still a non-zero chance we'll see such a thing in our lifetime, once we run out of other ways of squeezing performance out of things (although if ternary logic is possible, if we can also get to quaternary logic that has a very trivial mapping to the binary world, so that might win instead).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
kruhft 9y ago
The Spam problem is difficult to solve with IOTA and 'valueless' transactions; the Tangle is elegant but doesn't seem to be standing up to real world usage just yet. I'm looking into helping verify the IOTA network by writing a simulator based on the Tangle WhitePaper to do some stress testing and to see if the holes can be plugged. Arguably, it's still Alpha.
- lurr 9y ago
  > Arguably, it's still Alpha. Billions of dollars says it's not, or at least that "it's Alpha" isn't a valid excuse. Especially not with the behaviour of the devs.
zerostar07 9y ago
Response three is quite the bullshit. every transaction in every coin uses some kind of computing power already, even without the confirmation part. what kind of computer is not powerful enough to handle iota? I don't know the exact numbers, but i read even internet routers can do it. I have no stake in iota at all, but this response makes one wonder
- phoneboy 9y ago
  why? please add some comment.
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    because the fees thing is very semantical people have an abundance of computational power and can process IOTA transactions there is no lowered balance of IOTA for performing this or sending more IOTA to a destination the article goes on about how the computational power is a fee for no other reason except to discredit the IOTA devs would be stronger if that point was removed, it isn't a point of contention and can be explained elsewhere
    - kogepathic 9y ago
      > the article goes on about how the computational power is a fee for no other reason except to discredit the IOTA devs Well someone has to buy hardware and pay for electricity to run the computers. Computational power is not free, unless you're running a botnet or something. > people have an abundance of computational power and can process IOTA transactions And they get in return... ? A warm fuzzy feeling for having paid money for hardware and electricity so someone else can put something on a blockch-- whoops, I mean a "Tangle."
      - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
        yeah but I didn't ask you or anyone about that, or say that it wasn't a form of a fee, I was explaining what the grand parent comment saw as obvious as it was obvious to me too.
seanwilson 9y ago
Can anyone explain the reason behind the push for ternary? They say that with special ternary hardware added to IoT devices (which is a big ask), it'll make their proof of work process more efficient on those devices. Why not just make the proof of work easier then? It's not like thousands of low power IoT devices are going to be able to compete against the hash rate of a few powerful PCs anyway unless I'm missing something. I've tried asking in other places but I've just had people regurgitating buzzwords at me... It's quite worrying how easily convinced non-technical people find jargon when there's so many red flags here. I can't believe some people are really buying the story that the broken hash function was a deliberate form of copy-protection to prevent open source copy cats.
- kruhft 9y ago
  Supposedly it creates lower power chips.
  - QML 9y ago
    Are we at that point where we can have ternary signals though?
    - kruhft 9y ago
      Here are the logic levels in standard VHDL: https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/reference/std_logic/1164/std_logic.html https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/reference/std_logic/1164/std_... Maybe some of those can be multiplexed to create Ternary chips with todays tools?
- ttt111222333 9y ago
  Apparently ternary is the 'sweet spot' for computing because it's closer to e (2.7...). We used binary for a while because on / off was the only way we processed stuff but now we have the ability to do ternary with more accurate measures of voltage? Something like that. Apparently ternary makes math easier in terms of signs etc. as well. The below article explains it better. https://dev.to/buntine/the-balanced-ternary-machines-of-soviet-russia https://dev.to/buntine/the-balanced-ternary-machines-of-sovi... Given the wealth of experience with binary though I don't think its prudent to jump to ternary...
ShabbosGoy 9y ago
> However, later, he offered a conflicting explanation that he didn’t write the curl at all, but that an AI wrote it. Does this guy even know how to code? Edit: Here’s another gem! > IOTA was created to be immune to quantum computer attacks, today I have revealed that it was also created to be immune to attacks from an AI.[1] Wow dude, it’s not only immune to Shor’s Algorithm, but an AGI too! [1] http://come-from-beyond.com/time-for-a-paradigm-shift-has-come/ http://come-from-beyond.com/time-for-a-paradigm-shift-has-co...
whataretensors 9y ago
1. > IOTA’s relationships with top-tier companies continue to be nebulous. Not a big deal to me. 2. > IOTA network relies on the “coordinator” And it's planned to be removed in the future. 3. > while IOTA users do the proof of work on their own devices, per transaction Because of that proof of work can be rethought and built into cheap hardware for IOT. 4. Security vulnerabilities I'm pretty accepting of software having bugs at the beginning, even stupid obvious ones.
- chinathrow 9y ago
  > And it's planned to be removed in the future Common response. Everything is promised to be fixed and shiny in the future in the cryptoworld these days.
- tylersmith 9y ago
  > I'm pretty accepting of software having bugs at the beginning, even stupid obvious ones. Even cryptographic security bugs intentionally placed by the lead developer? https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543c786f9e35b84a https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543...
  - UncleEntity 9y ago
    > Remembering how quickly Nxt protection was disarmed I was keeping in secret the fact of existence of such mechnism in IOTA. Not to mention they don't even learn from their past mistakes... Though I find it perfectly reasonable to protect ~2 billion dollars through hidden backdoors published on github.
- AboutTheWhisles 9y ago
  > 2. > IOTA network relies on the “coordinator” And it's planned to be removed in the future. If someone told you they were going to create their own currency by releasing a completely decentralized 100% electronic brand new form of money based on cryptography, would you have believed them before bitcoin was released? Even when it was already up and working for 5 years, people were STILL saying it wouldn't work! Now for some reason instead of being skeptical, people buy into wild claims with nothing backing them up.
m3kw9 9y ago
So now adding the term cryptocurrency to your product to make it look good is a thing now?
- zaat 9y ago
  Yes, even if you sell iced tea: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-craze-sees-long-island-iced-tea-rename-as-long-blockchain https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-cr...
  - zeep 9y ago
    that would sound crazy even on April 1st
ola 9y ago
> The first explanation was that the flaw was intentional—that it was meant to serve as a form of “copy protection.” If anyone used this code in their own work, he said, the IOTA developers would be able to exploit the flaw and damage other systems that were using the hash function. Is this a common practice in the cryptocurrency community? Seems sort of pointless to put flaws and bugs in an open source project as copy protection instead of just keeping it closed source.
- kruhft 9y ago
  No, it's not. I assumed that it was 'like cartographers putting in fake streets into maps' and put that to them. Not common practice in software, but something that other industries have been doing for a while.
- tuxxy 9y ago
  Be rest assured that this is NOT a common practice. This is clearly someone trying to save face over a practically trivial break in their hashing function.
  - xwvvvvwx 9y ago
    Think about what kind of engineer would try to save face by claiming to have deliberately introduced a critical security vulnerability into their payment system.
kbwt 9y ago
Pretty surprised that Bosch actually invested in IOTA. The tech seems fishy even at first glance. Have they not done any research beyond reading the marketing materials?
amckenna 9y ago
Take a few minutes to read the blog posts by the creator. Writing aside the general process and motivation around creating a custom hashing algorithm is very strange - "Curl-P was created by following the idea of simplicity. While de-jure I can say that it was me who created Curl-P, de-facto it was created by a primitive AI created by me. That wasn’t AI of general purpose; an improved version of the AI is working on the final version of Curl now while I’m writing this post. This situation is quite funny because it look unusual, interesting if in the future we’ll see cases similar to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/monkey-selfie-case-animal-photo-copyright https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/monkey-selfie-... but with an AI instead of an animal. By the way, there are a lot of attempts to create a lightweight hashing function, I’d be grateful if someone confirmed or refuted my observation that Curl-P is winning this competition. IOTA was created to be immune to quantum computer attacks, today I have revealed that it was also created to be immune to attacks from an AI. IOTA was the very first distributed ledger technology to consider imminent threat from technologies which look exotic now. NSA already validated our prediction regarding quantum computers. I think that the both threats (QC and AI) have equal chances to become real in the near future and I’m confident that in few years we’ll see confirmations that the prediction about AI was prophetic too. If someone hasn’t got it yet – IOTA is about the future and it relies only on those paradigms which pass the test of critical thinking." - http://come-from-beyond.com/time-for-a-paradigm-shift-has-come/ http://come-from-beyond.com/time-for-a-paradigm-shift-has-co...
- wyldfire 9y ago
  I believe that CFB could be an extraordinary talent and could possibly have created something valuable that is tremendously unlike anything we have ever seen. But I also think that it's much more likely that they are just rolled their own crypto which might be BOTH novel/groundbreaking and critically flawed. Stay away from IOTA, it's off the charts risky.
  - matthewdgreen 9y ago
    The problem is not that they rolled their own crypto. I mean that is a problem, but it's not the problem. The real problem is that these people have a substantial degree of control over the IOTA network (centralized coordinator, control of wallets and clients, access to funds), and their actions and words are not those of a competent, reasonable technical team. They're at best bizarre. There are real people who have invested a ton of money into this currency, and they stand to be really hurt if this blows apart.
redka 9y ago
Some of the points of the article, albeit not new, still stand. The coordinator and the evident immaturity of the network as well as the tech are off putting. At the same time I feel like this write-up, and also a lot of the attitude here on HN, is too harsh, borderline deceiving. The first quote is backed by links to two articles by IOTA team members. The response conveys the notion that David intentionally mislead the readers into thinking that IOTA is formally partnering with the companies he, as the source article reads, presents as merely participants. The word partner is casually used by the representatives of the participating companies and that's what the other linked blog post explains - it's not an admission of wrong-doing as the author suggests. The third response is also something of a rather unfair nature. By nitpicking to the concept of free transactions the article accuses IOTA team of deceptive practices. The response seems like it's trying to not only downplay the significance of zero-fee transactions but to event present the current model as the better thing - a notion that seems preposterous considering the actual dollar value of current bitcoin transaction fees.
disappointedrdr 9y ago
I expect more from the HN community. Are you guys doing your homework before commenting? Doesn't seem so. 1. about crypto Every time there is some news about iota here the usual 'don't roll your own crypto' comes up. Yes, I think everyone agrees that doing that, if you don't know what you are doing, is dangerous. This is especially the case for you app and web developers. You guys have no business rolling your own crypto. But think about it, if nobody rolls their own crypto then how will crypto progress? Their use case is valid, they need something lightweight for IoT. They are trying to push the current state of the art. They hired a company to help them improve their algorithms. https://blog.iota.org/iota-foundation-hires-cybercrypt-615d2df79001 https://blog.iota.org/iota-foundation-hires-cybercrypt-615d2... 2. about 'fake' corporate partnerships There is already so much clarification to be found via google but let me repeat. We had this blog post announcing the data marketplace: https://blog.iota.org/iota-data-marketplace-cb6be463ac7f https://blog.iota.org/iota-data-marketplace-cb6be463ac7f where some quotes from companies can be found. The mass media took this and interpreted it the way they wanted to. I mean just check headlines in newspapers etc. They are 90% bullshit. And because of that you give the iota people so much flack? You denounce them as liars and whatnot. Very unprofessional. They never themselves said 'we have a formal partnership with Microsoft'. It's the people writing news articles, writing reddit comments, doing YouTube videos that interpret things, and other people just accept that as the truth. Go to the source for information, don't take third party info for the truth. I know the crypto space has a lot of people manipulating markets and ripping people off. But having followed the iota people for some time they, to me, don't seem like ill-natured people. 3. about ternary Similar to point 1, keep an open mind. They have a hardware startup working on ternary hardware for IoT. So arguing that emulating ternary on binary is shit makes no sense. That's not the purpose for iota. Iota is for IoT. The project is kept under wraps so we don't know much about it and now you might say, why believe them? Well, no proof but, if you think about Bosch investing a large sum in iota and knowing they tried their tech for the last your, don't you think they vetted it and thought it could have potential? Bosch is a huge company with LOTS of experience in hardware. I am pretty sure they got a look at the ternary hardware, too. Instead you guys think you are better than Bosch in making decisions, even you have none of the info Bosch has. Ridiculous. 4. coordinator There is not much to say here. If I say 'in the future there won't be a coordinator' you guys will just say that won't happend. Anyway, think about how decentralized Bitcoin is.. got it? Not much. Pretty much centralized. 2-3 companies having most of the mining power. So why cry about the coordinator? No idea. I wish for this community to be a bit more open and forward thinking and not just regurgitate things like 'don't roll your own crypto'.
BLKNSLVR 9y ago
All of the other points aside, this is the About Me page of one of the four founders of IOTA: http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ Even if this is a joke, and I consider it 99.9% likely to be a joke, if any startup had a founder that was publishing some like this, venture capital wouldn't touch them. I can only conclude that IOTA is a long-term social experiment in 'doing as much wrong as possible' and yet still being able to turn a profit based on heavy PR spend and humanity's tendency for "wanting in on the latest craze". On the topic of their 'partnerships' with leading technology brands, they're still listed on the Wikipedia page, so it's obviously a convenient misunderstanding. Excerpts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOTA_(technology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOTA_(technology%29: "With the participation of Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft, and Fujitsu,[8] the Foundation opened up a data marketplace using IOTA technology.[9] The IOTA Foundation is also a founding member of the Trusted IOT Alliance, which includes the companies Bosch, Consensys, and USbank" "The project gathered participation of over twenty global organizations, including Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Airbus, Samsung, Orange S.A., Fujitsu, and China's Huawei Group." I don't have a dog in any cryptocurrency fight, but don't take my word for anything. Do your own research and determine how they all 'smell'. For me, IOTA smells pretty bad.
shiven 9y ago
Ramblings of a schizophrenic? http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ Or, it is all a part of an elaborate MIT prank!

147 points by dsr12 9y ago

It's mind boggling to me that anyone takes IOTA seriously anymore. The fact that it's in ternary should be enough to convince the more risk-averse technical people of the folly of its design. More optimistic techies should have been convinced when researchers showed that its hash function was trivially broken. Everyone else should've jumped ship when it was revealed that all of their "corporate partnerships" were made up to pump the coin. It goes to show that anyone with good marketing can make a killing in the cryptocurrency world.

kruhft 9y ago
What's wrong with Ternary? Other than being obscure? I'm not happy they seem to be spending more on PR than development, but that does seem to be the case for most startups these days.
- T4NG 9y ago
  >whats wrong with Ternary The dude just mentioned a bunch of reasons, read his post
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- jerf 9y ago
  In an engineering context, the question is "does the benefits of ternary exceed its costs?" The benefits of ternary over binary on binary hardware are basically nothing. There is no operation made possible by ternary that isn't possible in binary, especially given that, again, you're on binary hardware, nor is anything made particularly easier. (Except useless things like "modulo 3" that aren't particularly hard in binary anyhow.) The costs are programming complexity and runtime penalties for conversions, which is an ongoing price paid by all users. So in engineering terms, "zero benefits, non-zero costs", it's no contest; use binary, or, more generally, use the native integer system on the hardware you are running on. That is, the same argument would apply in reverse on an already-existing ternary-native system. There is still a non-zero chance we'll see such a thing in our lifetime, once we run out of other ways of squeezing performance out of things (although if ternary logic is possible, if we can also get to quaternary logic that has a very trivial mapping to the binary world, so that might win instead).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

kruhft 9y ago

The Spam problem is difficult to solve with IOTA and 'valueless' transactions; the Tangle is elegant but doesn't seem to be standing up to real world usage just yet. I'm looking into helping verify the IOTA network by writing a simulator based on the Tangle WhitePaper to do some stress testing and to see if the holes can be plugged. Arguably, it's still Alpha.

lurr 9y ago
> Arguably, it's still Alpha. Billions of dollars says it's not, or at least that "it's Alpha" isn't a valid excuse. Especially not with the behaviour of the devs.

zerostar07 9y ago

Response three is quite the bullshit. every transaction in every coin uses some kind of computing power already, even without the confirmation part. what kind of computer is not powerful enough to handle iota? I don't know the exact numbers, but i read even internet routers can do it. I have no stake in iota at all, but this response makes one wonder

phoneboy 9y ago
why? please add some comment.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  because the fees thing is very semantical people have an abundance of computational power and can process IOTA transactions there is no lowered balance of IOTA for performing this or sending more IOTA to a destination the article goes on about how the computational power is a fee for no other reason except to discredit the IOTA devs would be stronger if that point was removed, it isn't a point of contention and can be explained elsewhere
  - kogepathic 9y ago
    > the article goes on about how the computational power is a fee for no other reason except to discredit the IOTA devs Well someone has to buy hardware and pay for electricity to run the computers. Computational power is not free, unless you're running a botnet or something. > people have an abundance of computational power and can process IOTA transactions And they get in return... ? A warm fuzzy feeling for having paid money for hardware and electricity so someone else can put something on a blockch-- whoops, I mean a "Tangle."
    - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
      yeah but I didn't ask you or anyone about that, or say that it wasn't a form of a fee, I was explaining what the grand parent comment saw as obvious as it was obvious to me too.

seanwilson 9y ago

Can anyone explain the reason behind the push for ternary? They say that with special ternary hardware added to IoT devices (which is a big ask), it'll make their proof of work process more efficient on those devices. Why not just make the proof of work easier then? It's not like thousands of low power IoT devices are going to be able to compete against the hash rate of a few powerful PCs anyway unless I'm missing something. I've tried asking in other places but I've just had people regurgitating buzzwords at me... It's quite worrying how easily convinced non-technical people find jargon when there's so many red flags here. I can't believe some people are really buying the story that the broken hash function was a deliberate form of copy-protection to prevent open source copy cats.

kruhft 9y ago
Supposedly it creates lower power chips.
- QML 9y ago
  Are we at that point where we can have ternary signals though?
  - kruhft 9y ago
    Here are the logic levels in standard VHDL: https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/reference/std_logic/1164/std_logic.html https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/reference/std_logic/1164/std_... Maybe some of those can be multiplexed to create Ternary chips with todays tools?
ttt111222333 9y ago
Apparently ternary is the 'sweet spot' for computing because it's closer to e (2.7...). We used binary for a while because on / off was the only way we processed stuff but now we have the ability to do ternary with more accurate measures of voltage? Something like that. Apparently ternary makes math easier in terms of signs etc. as well. The below article explains it better. https://dev.to/buntine/the-balanced-ternary-machines-of-soviet-russia https://dev.to/buntine/the-balanced-ternary-machines-of-sovi... Given the wealth of experience with binary though I don't think its prudent to jump to ternary...

ShabbosGoy 9y ago

> However, later, he offered a conflicting explanation that he didn’t write the curl at all, but that an AI wrote it. Does this guy even know how to code? Edit: Here’s another gem! > IOTA was created to be immune to quantum computer attacks, today I have revealed that it was also created to be immune to attacks from an AI.[1] Wow dude, it’s not only immune to Shor’s Algorithm, but an AGI too! [1] http://come-from-beyond.com/time-for-a-paradigm-shift-has-come/ http://come-from-beyond.com/time-for-a-paradigm-shift-has-co...

whataretensors 9y ago

1. > IOTA’s relationships with top-tier companies continue to be nebulous. Not a big deal to me. 2. > IOTA network relies on the “coordinator” And it's planned to be removed in the future. 3. > while IOTA users do the proof of work on their own devices, per transaction Because of that proof of work can be rethought and built into cheap hardware for IOT. 4. Security vulnerabilities I'm pretty accepting of software having bugs at the beginning, even stupid obvious ones.

chinathrow 9y ago
> And it's planned to be removed in the future Common response. Everything is promised to be fixed and shiny in the future in the cryptoworld these days.
tylersmith 9y ago
> I'm pretty accepting of software having bugs at the beginning, even stupid obvious ones. Even cryptographic security bugs intentionally placed by the lead developer? https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543c786f9e35b84a https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543...
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  > Remembering how quickly Nxt protection was disarmed I was keeping in secret the fact of existence of such mechnism in IOTA. Not to mention they don't even learn from their past mistakes... Though I find it perfectly reasonable to protect ~2 billion dollars through hidden backdoors published on github.
AboutTheWhisles 9y ago
> 2. > IOTA network relies on the “coordinator” And it's planned to be removed in the future. If someone told you they were going to create their own currency by releasing a completely decentralized 100% electronic brand new form of money based on cryptography, would you have believed them before bitcoin was released? Even when it was already up and working for 5 years, people were STILL saying it wouldn't work! Now for some reason instead of being skeptical, people buy into wild claims with nothing backing them up.

m3kw9 9y ago

So now adding the term cryptocurrency to your product to make it look good is a thing now?

zaat 9y ago
Yes, even if you sell iced tea: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-craze-sees-long-island-iced-tea-rename-as-long-blockchain https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-cr...
- zeep 9y ago
  that would sound crazy even on April 1st

ola 9y ago

> The first explanation was that the flaw was intentional—that it was meant to serve as a form of “copy protection.” If anyone used this code in their own work, he said, the IOTA developers would be able to exploit the flaw and damage other systems that were using the hash function. Is this a common practice in the cryptocurrency community? Seems sort of pointless to put flaws and bugs in an open source project as copy protection instead of just keeping it closed source.

kruhft 9y ago
No, it's not. I assumed that it was 'like cartographers putting in fake streets into maps' and put that to them. Not common practice in software, but something that other industries have been doing for a while.
tuxxy 9y ago
Be rest assured that this is NOT a common practice. This is clearly someone trying to save face over a practically trivial break in their hashing function.
- xwvvvvwx 9y ago
  Think about what kind of engineer would try to save face by claiming to have deliberately introduced a critical security vulnerability into their payment system.

kbwt 9y ago

Pretty surprised that Bosch actually invested in IOTA. The tech seems fishy even at first glance. Have they not done any research beyond reading the marketing materials?

amckenna 9y ago

Take a few minutes to read the blog posts by the creator. Writing aside the general process and motivation around creating a custom hashing algorithm is very strange - "Curl-P was created by following the idea of simplicity. While de-jure I can say that it was me who created Curl-P, de-facto it was created by a primitive AI created by me. That wasn’t AI of general purpose; an improved version of the AI is working on the final version of Curl now while I’m writing this post. This situation is quite funny because it look unusual, interesting if in the future we’ll see cases similar to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/monkey-selfie-case-animal-photo-copyright https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/monkey-selfie-... but with an AI instead of an animal. By the way, there are a lot of attempts to create a lightweight hashing function, I’d be grateful if someone confirmed or refuted my observation that Curl-P is winning this competition. IOTA was created to be immune to quantum computer attacks, today I have revealed that it was also created to be immune to attacks from an AI. IOTA was the very first distributed ledger technology to consider imminent threat from technologies which look exotic now. NSA already validated our prediction regarding quantum computers. I think that the both threats (QC and AI) have equal chances to become real in the near future and I’m confident that in few years we’ll see confirmations that the prediction about AI was prophetic too. If someone hasn’t got it yet – IOTA is about the future and it relies only on those paradigms which pass the test of critical thinking." - http://come-from-beyond.com/time-for-a-paradigm-shift-has-come/ http://come-from-beyond.com/time-for-a-paradigm-shift-has-co...

wyldfire 9y ago
I believe that CFB could be an extraordinary talent and could possibly have created something valuable that is tremendously unlike anything we have ever seen. But I also think that it's much more likely that they are just rolled their own crypto which might be BOTH novel/groundbreaking and critically flawed. Stay away from IOTA, it's off the charts risky.
- matthewdgreen 9y ago
  The problem is not that they rolled their own crypto. I mean that is a problem, but it's not the problem. The real problem is that these people have a substantial degree of control over the IOTA network (centralized coordinator, control of wallets and clients, access to funds), and their actions and words are not those of a competent, reasonable technical team. They're at best bizarre. There are real people who have invested a ton of money into this currency, and they stand to be really hurt if this blows apart.

redka 9y ago

Some of the points of the article, albeit not new, still stand. The coordinator and the evident immaturity of the network as well as the tech are off putting. At the same time I feel like this write-up, and also a lot of the attitude here on HN, is too harsh, borderline deceiving. The first quote is backed by links to two articles by IOTA team members. The response conveys the notion that David intentionally mislead the readers into thinking that IOTA is formally partnering with the companies he, as the source article reads, presents as merely participants. The word partner is casually used by the representatives of the participating companies and that's what the other linked blog post explains - it's not an admission of wrong-doing as the author suggests. The third response is also something of a rather unfair nature. By nitpicking to the concept of free transactions the article accuses IOTA team of deceptive practices. The response seems like it's trying to not only downplay the significance of zero-fee transactions but to event present the current model as the better thing - a notion that seems preposterous considering the actual dollar value of current bitcoin transaction fees.

disappointedrdr 9y ago

I expect more from the HN community. Are you guys doing your homework before commenting? Doesn't seem so. 1. about crypto Every time there is some news about iota here the usual 'don't roll your own crypto' comes up. Yes, I think everyone agrees that doing that, if you don't know what you are doing, is dangerous. This is especially the case for you app and web developers. You guys have no business rolling your own crypto. But think about it, if nobody rolls their own crypto then how will crypto progress? Their use case is valid, they need something lightweight for IoT. They are trying to push the current state of the art. They hired a company to help them improve their algorithms. https://blog.iota.org/iota-foundation-hires-cybercrypt-615d2df79001 https://blog.iota.org/iota-foundation-hires-cybercrypt-615d2... 2. about 'fake' corporate partnerships There is already so much clarification to be found via google but let me repeat. We had this blog post announcing the data marketplace: https://blog.iota.org/iota-data-marketplace-cb6be463ac7f https://blog.iota.org/iota-data-marketplace-cb6be463ac7f where some quotes from companies can be found. The mass media took this and interpreted it the way they wanted to. I mean just check headlines in newspapers etc. They are 90% bullshit. And because of that you give the iota people so much flack? You denounce them as liars and whatnot. Very unprofessional. They never themselves said 'we have a formal partnership with Microsoft'. It's the people writing news articles, writing reddit comments, doing YouTube videos that interpret things, and other people just accept that as the truth. Go to the source for information, don't take third party info for the truth. I know the crypto space has a lot of people manipulating markets and ripping people off. But having followed the iota people for some time they, to me, don't seem like ill-natured people. 3. about ternary Similar to point 1, keep an open mind. They have a hardware startup working on ternary hardware for IoT. So arguing that emulating ternary on binary is shit makes no sense. That's not the purpose for iota. Iota is for IoT. The project is kept under wraps so we don't know much about it and now you might say, why believe them? Well, no proof but, if you think about Bosch investing a large sum in iota and knowing they tried their tech for the last your, don't you think they vetted it and thought it could have potential? Bosch is a huge company with LOTS of experience in hardware. I am pretty sure they got a look at the ternary hardware, too. Instead you guys think you are better than Bosch in making decisions, even you have none of the info Bosch has. Ridiculous. 4. coordinator There is not much to say here. If I say 'in the future there won't be a coordinator' you guys will just say that won't happend. Anyway, think about how decentralized Bitcoin is.. got it? Not much. Pretty much centralized. 2-3 companies having most of the mining power. So why cry about the coordinator? No idea. I wish for this community to be a bit more open and forward thinking and not just regurgitate things like 'don't roll your own crypto'.

BLKNSLVR 9y ago

All of the other points aside, this is the About Me page of one of the four founders of IOTA: http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ Even if this is a joke, and I consider it 99.9% likely to be a joke, if any startup had a founder that was publishing some like this, venture capital wouldn't touch them. I can only conclude that IOTA is a long-term social experiment in 'doing as much wrong as possible' and yet still being able to turn a profit based on heavy PR spend and humanity's tendency for "wanting in on the latest craze". On the topic of their 'partnerships' with leading technology brands, they're still listed on the Wikipedia page, so it's obviously a convenient misunderstanding. Excerpts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOTA_(technology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOTA_(technology%29: "With the participation of Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft, and Fujitsu,[8] the Foundation opened up a data marketplace using IOTA technology.[9] The IOTA Foundation is also a founding member of the Trusted IOT Alliance, which includes the companies Bosch, Consensys, and USbank" "The project gathered participation of over twenty global organizations, including Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Airbus, Samsung, Orange S.A., Fujitsu, and China's Huawei Group." I don't have a dog in any cryptocurrency fight, but don't take my word for anything. Do your own research and determine how they all 'smell'. For me, IOTA smells pretty bad.

shiven 9y ago

Ramblings of a schizophrenic? http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ Or, it is all a part of an elaborate MIT prank!