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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 peo

by 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
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by mahemm 9y ago

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]