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IOTA: Cannot be used for IoT, loss of funds may occur

120 points by davidgerard 9y ago

blakenomad 9y ago
I held IOTA from when it was $0.30 and always kept it on Bitfinex as to me, the wallet was unusable (sorry, I’m not an engineer). I hodl’d until a couple of months ago but couldn’t take having my coins on an exchange. I even tried setting up the mobile wallet but kept getting errors, like in this post. I’m over it. But I think you need to see this from a layperson’s point of view. It’s difficult to use and overly complex. Until that changes, I won’t be back.
abrkn 9y ago
I'm the author of the blog post. Thanks for posting! I can answer any questions you have about the IOTA review or other shitcoin reviews.
- buttershakes 9y ago
  I love this idea, can I write some guest shitcoin reviews? :)
  - abrkn 9y ago
    That could happen! Send me a Twitter DM, @abrkn
- muthdra 9y ago
  I love learning about cryptocurrencies through shitcoins. It helps keeping perspective in check. Keep up the great work.
  - abrkn 9y ago
    Thanks! If you have a shitcoin you want me to review, I'm open to suggestions.
    - justboxing 9y ago
      Don't know if it's a shitcoin, but can you review XRP / Ripple? The company claims that 100s of banks and financial institutes are using their technology, but ALL 100+ institutions are only evaluating / doing pilots. Company has been around since 2011, I am very curious why there isn't a single big name that has put it's weight behind this for real production use.
      - abrkn 9y ago
        I interviewed to work at Ripple in 2013! I don't know how interesting the review would be. Ripple is completely centralized. I'll think about it.
        wiradikusuma 9y ago
        Few days ago there was a post in HN basically saying "centralized = no need blockchain" -- why they need to do in blockchain then?
        stefano 9y ago
        Blockchains seem to be really good at raising capital.
        simias 9y ago
        These days I feel like it's more "if it's even a little bit decentralized and uses public key cryptography then you can call it a Blockchain and people will throw money at you". It's the new "Cloud Computing" basically. Cryptocurrencies are pretty mainstream nowadays, everybody and their grandfather want to be a crypto-millionaire. Very few have the skills to decide whether experimental technologies like Ripple or IOTA have a future[1], it's just speculation for speculation's sake. Ask the average Ripple owner what they think of the "trustlines" and the risks associated with it. Actually, just ask them what a Ripple trustline is. I doubt you'll get many answers. [1] Honestly I feel pretty knowledgeable about how cryptocurrencies work and yet it's not rare for one of these whitepapers to lose me. For many of them you need a pretty good technical background on cryptography, game theory and economy (with maybe a hint of sociology) to really be able to gauge whether an idea has merit or not.
- Vekz 9y ago
  Great blog idea. I really enjoy how you are reviewing the hands-on user experience of working with a coin and chain.
  - abrkn 9y ago
    Thanks! It takes quite a while to do it this way, but lets people scroll through and look at screenshots of the nightmare they will now hopefully avoid.
- justboxing 9y ago
  I hate how all the coin subs on reddit call anything that's not postive about their coin as F.U.D. Someone posted this 'rebuff' to your blog post on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7we3x0/rebuff_for_andreas_brekkens_recent_fud_to_iota/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7we3x0/rebu... Direct link: https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-clue-about-the-internet-of-things-823a0b03e0ea https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-cl...
  - abrkn 9y ago
    IOTA an insane cult driven by fear of losing money. No one uses the software. They use social media to attract more bag holders. I read the "rebuff". He looked up the wrong company named "Helix"... I'm not affiliated with the entity he mentions.
    - justboxing 9y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. I posted your review on r/cryptocurrency and was quickly down-voted to oblivion. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say your statement about shitcoins using social media to attract bag holders sounds about right. I've noticed the mods on r/ripple are even worse. They ruthlessly delete any post that raises legitimate concerns about XRP and it's so called touted use of providing liquidity for cross border payment, that not a single bank appears to be using in a production environment.
    - nuttycoin 9y ago
      If this was IOTA in its final form the value of IOTA should be 0. It's great that this is not the case! And yes, statements like "IOTA an insane cult driven by fear of losing money" are FUD, regardless of how much sense your argument may or may not make.
- dannytatom 9y ago
  Nano is the first crypto I've been really excited about that's just a currency, and a hold quite a bit of it. Would love your opinion (or a post) on it. It's still fairly new and there hasn't been enough thought out criticism.
- generalizethis 9y ago
  Why didn't you use a lightnode? Or the most recent exe? I did it the other day and it took a few minutes--your article made me feel like a genius.
  - nemetroid 9y ago
    > Why didn't you use a lightnode? Or the most recent exe? It says why right in the article: "A blockchain client has to be open-source for the users to predict its behavior."
    - generalizethis 9y ago
      The most recent is exe is opensource--it's right there on the top of the git. In fact, he probably had to scroll past it to download v2.5.6 I looked: https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/releases https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/releases Also, a few user-friendly wallets are going to be released soon, but he chose to not wait? The whole thing smacks of deliberate attempt to fail. He couldn't have made worse choices--unless he had decided to wear a blindfold and rewrite the code.
      - nemetroid 9y ago
        The exe is likely built from open source code. Maybe someone modified the code to insert a back door before building? If you use precompiled binaries, you have to trust * the maintainers of the project, who built the executable, and * that the build process itself hasn't been compromised. Since a selling point for cryptocurrencies in general is that it's a system that works without having to trust third parties, the argument being made is that it should be easy to build things from scratch.
        generalizethis 9y ago
        No, you can peruse the code for yourself if you need to look for backdoors. He was obviously choosing the path of most resistance so he could prove his own conclusion--not that small devices need to run a wallet or the process won't be automated in the future or it won't be competent IOT developers performing these task--still not sure how P2P usability equates to M2M usability, but let's skip over those details and rationalize why he spent more time finding ways to screw up than to honestly perform the task of using a wallet--in any case, his bungling hardly seems genuine.
andr 9y ago
Of course it's not meant for IoT. It's written in Java, has the whole ternary nonsense going, and uses custom crypto, which would be really slow to implement, compared to hardware-accelerated RSA or AES most cheap embedded chips have nowadays. I, for one, am excited for the moment a cryptocurrency arrives that is actually usable for its supposed use. Every time someone claims to be a cryptocurrency for X (be it file sharing, IoT, attention, etc.), X is really just speculation.
- abrkn 9y ago
  They've had some other scandals too! "Emptied IOTA Wallets: Hackers Steal Millions Using Malicious Seed Generators"[1] [1] https://www.ccn.com/a-number-of-iota-wallets-emptied-by-hackers-due-to-online-seed-generators/ https://www.ccn.com/a-number-of-iota-wallets-emptied-by-hack...
  - gsich 9y ago
    That's not IOTAs fault.
    - bjl 9y ago
      It kind of is, since this functionality should've shipped with the wallet, like it does with every other crypto.
      - generalizethis 9y ago
        They've never been focused on P2P and have made that clear to users--obviously they didn't hear, "Be your own bank." when that was said.
    - davidgerard 9y ago
      It kind of is, given they put a link to it in their subreddit's sidebar. The key problem is that IOTA's incompetence is pervasive. e.g. https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1908194b https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1...
Tepix 9y ago
Great article. I chuckled quite a bit. This reminds me of my attempts to check out Cardano. There was no working Linux client. (I checked again today: Still no Linux client. The latest release of the software appears to be from September 2017). I then tried to build from source. I'm doing some Node development so I have Node v8.x installed (the current LTS version). Turns out the wallet requires Node v6. At that point I gave up. I also read that Cardano has some great concepts but right now it's still in its first, centralized phase.
- abrkn 9y ago
  > its first, centralized phase Yikes.
- Ixiaus 9y ago
  There is a working Linux client. Note that the "wallet" is a Haskell-based node (cardano-sl) that serves a restful http server that the front-end app (Daedalus) connects to. I built both components back in November and could run it, I just did the same now. Official Linux packaging would be great but until they get there you can build and run everything yourself.
- acejam 9y ago
  You make it sound like switching Node versions on Linux is a hassle. Allow me to introduce you to nvm: https://github.com/creationix/nvm https://github.com/creationix/nvm
  - dvlsg 9y ago
    I do love nvm, but I'm a little surprised that the source requires an older version of node. I wonder if it doesn't actually require it, but the package.json has the engines prop pinned to v6 anyways.
- blacksmith_tb 9y ago
  There's a lot of beating the dead horse for laughs, though. I had a friend who wanted to send me some Iota, and I installed everything on Ubuntu without any trouble. If you screenshot every step of any process, it becomes absurd (and maybe it really is, but we've gotten used to jumping through a lot of hoops).
dsgriffin 9y ago
For anyone interested, there's been a response to this article by Ralf Rottmann: https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-clue-about-the-internet-of-things-823a0b03e0ea https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-cl...
- empath75 9y ago
  so basically an ad hominem attack that doesn't really respond to anything.
  - oflannabhra 9y ago
    I have no dog in the IOTA fight (or in cryptocurrencies at all), but FTA: >On the Internet of Things, edge nodes are mostly low-powered, occasionally connected devices, sometimes with just a few kilobytes of on-device memory. Nobody expects those devices to be in sync with anything. That is, why IOTA has a concept of nodes. Fullnodes and permanodes. These nodes stay in sync with the Tangle. Or, if you consider use cases which require offline-capabilities, even just with subparts of the Tangle, which can be attached back to the main Tangle at a later point... Andreas seemed to be suggesting that no IoT device would be able to take part in the IOTA network, because his attempt to run a full-node required lots of data.
  - SamBam 9y ago
    To be fair, the main argument in the response article is that Andreas's troubles installing a full-node wallet doesn't relate to how an IoT device would use it, so the article's conclusion isn't well established. All the arguments about "how can something that's pre-alpha be worth billions of dollars" are perfectly valid, but the original article seemed to address IOTA's worth for IoT devices, and seems to have missed the plot on that.
- abrkn 9y ago
  I saw that. He's mentioning a company, "Helix Capital Investments Ltd", that I've never heard of.
  - 9y ago
simias 9y ago
His experience is what I would expect from anybody trying pre-alpha software which is probably what IOTA is right now (at least, that seems to be the common defense from it's proponents, "it's temporary, it's going to change"). The absurd part is that it's pre-alpha software that has a market cap in billions of dollars thanks to the wild speculation around cryptocurrency/blockchain stuff. I mean, the simple fact that IOTA currently de-facto centralized, doesn't plan on using PoW to secure the chain and promises almost-free transactions should make investors very cautious. They're promising what nobody has managed to achieve yet and the only thing they have to show for it is a whitepaper and the promise that very clever people are working on it.
- abrkn 9y ago
  Why would something that is "pre alpha" be worth billions of dollars? Just doesn't make sense. IOTA has no utility today.
  - simias 9y ago
    That was my point yes, sorry if I was being unclear. Thank you for your articles by the way, they're always insightful. It's nice to see somebody actually using those cryptocurrencies instead of merely speculating about them.
  - nuttycoin 9y ago
    IOTA has no utility today. Neither does any crypto. Neither does the Boring Company. Yet they all have value. It's foolish to think IOTA is worth nothing even though it is not production ready, because when it is, it will be worth much more than it is today.
- iuguy 9y ago
  Before we get to the fact that it's effectively poorly written pre-alpha garbage, let me make something abundantly clear: There is no IoT use case for IOTA. Let me repeat that. There. Is. No. IoT. Use. Case. For. IOTA. I'm not having a pop at the parent here, I just want to make it clear that there is no reason for IOTA to exist. IOTA not only fails to solve a problem, it's failing at solving a problem that IoT doesn't have. I'd be interested to see an actual application of IOTA for any IoT device that can only be, or is optimally solved by IOTA. But there isn't one. Because there's no freaking use case that can't be done more optimally using already production-level alternatives.
testdeep 9y ago
Nano is a great alternative and was thought out before IOTA. It was one of the first paper to be published about Block Lattice. It is what Bitcoin said it would be fast and fee-less cryptocurrency. https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks
- dangero 9y ago
  Bitshares did low cost transactions at high volume years ago, so I'm never quite sure why Nano gets so much attention because those features aren't novel. Furthermore, free transactions with minimal POW don't create proper incentives and will not scale because there is an extremely low cost to spam the network. This means you can essentially use full historical nodes as a data storage for anything you want.
  - stri8ed 9y ago
    Adding to this, representative nodes (DPOS) do not get any rewards for being online and behaving correctly. Which is a recipe for tragedy of the commons. Worse yet, a voter can issue two conflicting votes, and the system has no mechanism let alone penalty for handling this. The defense against these attacks seems to be, reps have stake, therefor they wont take actions detrimental to coin value.. The marketing is strictly speaking false. A transaction is not instant, as you must wait for sufficient time to ensure that a conflicting transaction has not been published (and hope that you are not network partitioned). Otherwise, you might as well settle for "instant" BTC 0-conf transactions. Free, is debatable, considering the difficulty of POW that would be required to effectively deter spam.
Asdfbla 9y ago
It's funny how many of the cryptocoins pretend that they have some domain-specific use case (here IoT, which for reasons(?) needs a distributed ledger) that justifies their existence. Guess people can make a business out of thinking up ever more creative justifications for new coins.
arcaster 9y ago
IOTA is a fantastic example of how far a heap of shit (yes, we're talking unary logic shit-tier) can get with a home run marketing wise and an absolute lack of ethics. The IOTA team deserves every bit of backlash coming their way...
nuttycoin 9y ago
While IOTA is not anywhere near production ready, it is important to realize that the value of IOTA is based on the expected value of utility that the tangle provides. This form of valuation is not unique to IOTA; it applies to all cryptocurrencies (and assets like growth stocks, for that matter). For this reason, IOTA's current user experience is not of the utmost importance. The author seems to think otherwise. It is clear to me that the author has an inclination to portray IOTA in a negative light, and that he does not understand how IOTA works. It will take time for the tangle to grow to the level that the IOTA foundation envisions, and it does not take a genius to realize that fact. People in this thread are mocking those who call articles like this one FUD, but that's simply what it is. Nothing about this article supports the argument that IOTA will not be able to be used for IoT in the future.
elevaet 9y ago
"Are you making a blockchain product and want me to advise or review? I can be bought. Send me a paid message at https://earn.com/berken/" https://earn.com/berken/" What is this guy, some kind of digital extortionist?
SippinLean 9y ago
Where does this claim in the title come from? >IOTA: Cannot be used for IoT The author has this caption under the screenshot of the official documentation: >They also write that you can’t use IOTA for IoT ...but they clearly don't write that, I can read it in the screenshot. They say it doesn't work on smaller IoT devices, and that this will change when you can compile from source. So that's out as a source of this claim. The other source: >I upgraded to this machine after reading on the Discord chat that people were unable to stay in sync with less powerful hardware [citation needed] That's the requirements for running the Wallet GUI on Linux, not IOTA core (which as the author mentions, has been implemented in python and JS). Nuance matters, concluding "IOTA cannot be used on Internet-of-Things devices" at the end seems like an oversimplification; especially for an article that seems overly-specific when it's trying to make IOTA seem complicated (Is setting up an AWS instance of Ubuntu for your Windows host a concern for EVERY user of IOTA? Is it really important that you set up your firewall incorrectly?). Another strange omission is not mentioning IOTA as being in beta, which is the reason it can't run on smaller devices: >This means that the current Java implementation is a reference implementation
generalizethis 9y ago
Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum: https://medium.com/@perfectstormtd/my-experience-of-building-a-full-iota-node-on-an-arm64-board-3df6459929fe https://medium.com/@perfectstormtd/my-experience-of-building...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

120 points by davidgerard 9y ago

I held IOTA from when it was $0.30 and always kept it on Bitfinex as to me, the wallet was unusable (sorry, I’m not an engineer). I hodl’d until a couple of months ago but couldn’t take having my coins on an exchange. I even tried setting up the mobile wallet but kept getting errors, like in this post. I’m over it. But I think you need to see this from a layperson’s point of view. It’s difficult to use and overly complex. Until that changes, I won’t be back.

abrkn 9y ago

I'm the author of the blog post. Thanks for posting! I can answer any questions you have about the IOTA review or other shitcoin reviews.

buttershakes 9y ago
I love this idea, can I write some guest shitcoin reviews? :)
- abrkn 9y ago
  That could happen! Send me a Twitter DM, @abrkn
muthdra 9y ago
I love learning about cryptocurrencies through shitcoins. It helps keeping perspective in check. Keep up the great work.
- abrkn 9y ago
  Thanks! If you have a shitcoin you want me to review, I'm open to suggestions.
  - justboxing 9y ago
    Don't know if it's a shitcoin, but can you review XRP / Ripple? The company claims that 100s of banks and financial institutes are using their technology, but ALL 100+ institutions are only evaluating / doing pilots. Company has been around since 2011, I am very curious why there isn't a single big name that has put it's weight behind this for real production use.
    - abrkn 9y ago
      I interviewed to work at Ripple in 2013! I don't know how interesting the review would be. Ripple is completely centralized. I'll think about it.
      - wiradikusuma 9y ago
        Few days ago there was a post in HN basically saying "centralized = no need blockchain" -- why they need to do in blockchain then?
        stefano 9y ago
        Blockchains seem to be really good at raising capital.
        simias 9y ago
        These days I feel like it's more "if it's even a little bit decentralized and uses public key cryptography then you can call it a Blockchain and people will throw money at you". It's the new "Cloud Computing" basically. Cryptocurrencies are pretty mainstream nowadays, everybody and their grandfather want to be a crypto-millionaire. Very few have the skills to decide whether experimental technologies like Ripple or IOTA have a future[1], it's just speculation for speculation's sake. Ask the average Ripple owner what they think of the "trustlines" and the risks associated with it. Actually, just ask them what a Ripple trustline is. I doubt you'll get many answers. [1] Honestly I feel pretty knowledgeable about how cryptocurrencies work and yet it's not rare for one of these whitepapers to lose me. For many of them you need a pretty good technical background on cryptography, game theory and economy (with maybe a hint of sociology) to really be able to gauge whether an idea has merit or not.
Vekz 9y ago
Great blog idea. I really enjoy how you are reviewing the hands-on user experience of working with a coin and chain.
- abrkn 9y ago
  Thanks! It takes quite a while to do it this way, but lets people scroll through and look at screenshots of the nightmare they will now hopefully avoid.
justboxing 9y ago
I hate how all the coin subs on reddit call anything that's not postive about their coin as F.U.D. Someone posted this 'rebuff' to your blog post on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7we3x0/rebuff_for_andreas_brekkens_recent_fud_to_iota/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7we3x0/rebu... Direct link: https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-clue-about-the-internet-of-things-823a0b03e0ea https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-cl...
- abrkn 9y ago
  IOTA an insane cult driven by fear of losing money. No one uses the software. They use social media to attract more bag holders. I read the "rebuff". He looked up the wrong company named "Helix"... I'm not affiliated with the entity he mentions.
  - justboxing 9y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. I posted your review on r/cryptocurrency and was quickly down-voted to oblivion. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say your statement about shitcoins using social media to attract bag holders sounds about right. I've noticed the mods on r/ripple are even worse. They ruthlessly delete any post that raises legitimate concerns about XRP and it's so called touted use of providing liquidity for cross border payment, that not a single bank appears to be using in a production environment.
  - nuttycoin 9y ago
    If this was IOTA in its final form the value of IOTA should be 0. It's great that this is not the case! And yes, statements like "IOTA an insane cult driven by fear of losing money" are FUD, regardless of how much sense your argument may or may not make.
dannytatom 9y ago
Nano is the first crypto I've been really excited about that's just a currency, and a hold quite a bit of it. Would love your opinion (or a post) on it. It's still fairly new and there hasn't been enough thought out criticism.
generalizethis 9y ago
Why didn't you use a lightnode? Or the most recent exe? I did it the other day and it took a few minutes--your article made me feel like a genius.
- nemetroid 9y ago
  > Why didn't you use a lightnode? Or the most recent exe? It says why right in the article: "A blockchain client has to be open-source for the users to predict its behavior."
  - generalizethis 9y ago
    The most recent is exe is opensource--it's right there on the top of the git. In fact, he probably had to scroll past it to download v2.5.6 I looked: https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/releases https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/releases Also, a few user-friendly wallets are going to be released soon, but he chose to not wait? The whole thing smacks of deliberate attempt to fail. He couldn't have made worse choices--unless he had decided to wear a blindfold and rewrite the code.
    - nemetroid 9y ago
      The exe is likely built from open source code. Maybe someone modified the code to insert a back door before building? If you use precompiled binaries, you have to trust * the maintainers of the project, who built the executable, and * that the build process itself hasn't been compromised. Since a selling point for cryptocurrencies in general is that it's a system that works without having to trust third parties, the argument being made is that it should be easy to build things from scratch.
      - generalizethis 9y ago
        No, you can peruse the code for yourself if you need to look for backdoors. He was obviously choosing the path of most resistance so he could prove his own conclusion--not that small devices need to run a wallet or the process won't be automated in the future or it won't be competent IOT developers performing these task--still not sure how P2P usability equates to M2M usability, but let's skip over those details and rationalize why he spent more time finding ways to screw up than to honestly perform the task of using a wallet--in any case, his bungling hardly seems genuine.

andr 9y ago

Of course it's not meant for IoT. It's written in Java, has the whole ternary nonsense going, and uses custom crypto, which would be really slow to implement, compared to hardware-accelerated RSA or AES most cheap embedded chips have nowadays. I, for one, am excited for the moment a cryptocurrency arrives that is actually usable for its supposed use. Every time someone claims to be a cryptocurrency for X (be it file sharing, IoT, attention, etc.), X is really just speculation.

abrkn 9y ago
They've had some other scandals too! "Emptied IOTA Wallets: Hackers Steal Millions Using Malicious Seed Generators"[1] [1] https://www.ccn.com/a-number-of-iota-wallets-emptied-by-hackers-due-to-online-seed-generators/ https://www.ccn.com/a-number-of-iota-wallets-emptied-by-hack...
- gsich 9y ago
  That's not IOTAs fault.
  - bjl 9y ago
    It kind of is, since this functionality should've shipped with the wallet, like it does with every other crypto.
    - generalizethis 9y ago
      They've never been focused on P2P and have made that clear to users--obviously they didn't hear, "Be your own bank." when that was said.
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    It kind of is, given they put a link to it in their subreddit's sidebar. The key problem is that IOTA's incompetence is pervasive. e.g. https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1908194b https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1...

Tepix 9y ago

Great article. I chuckled quite a bit. This reminds me of my attempts to check out Cardano. There was no working Linux client. (I checked again today: Still no Linux client. The latest release of the software appears to be from September 2017). I then tried to build from source. I'm doing some Node development so I have Node v8.x installed (the current LTS version). Turns out the wallet requires Node v6. At that point I gave up. I also read that Cardano has some great concepts but right now it's still in its first, centralized phase.

abrkn 9y ago
> its first, centralized phase Yikes.
Ixiaus 9y ago
There is a working Linux client. Note that the "wallet" is a Haskell-based node (cardano-sl) that serves a restful http server that the front-end app (Daedalus) connects to. I built both components back in November and could run it, I just did the same now. Official Linux packaging would be great but until they get there you can build and run everything yourself.
acejam 9y ago
You make it sound like switching Node versions on Linux is a hassle. Allow me to introduce you to nvm: https://github.com/creationix/nvm https://github.com/creationix/nvm
- dvlsg 9y ago
  I do love nvm, but I'm a little surprised that the source requires an older version of node. I wonder if it doesn't actually require it, but the package.json has the engines prop pinned to v6 anyways.
blacksmith_tb 9y ago
There's a lot of beating the dead horse for laughs, though. I had a friend who wanted to send me some Iota, and I installed everything on Ubuntu without any trouble. If you screenshot every step of any process, it becomes absurd (and maybe it really is, but we've gotten used to jumping through a lot of hoops).

dsgriffin 9y ago

For anyone interested, there's been a response to this article by Ralf Rottmann: https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-clue-about-the-internet-of-things-823a0b03e0ea https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-cl...

empath75 9y ago
so basically an ad hominem attack that doesn't really respond to anything.
- oflannabhra 9y ago
  I have no dog in the IOTA fight (or in cryptocurrencies at all), but FTA: >On the Internet of Things, edge nodes are mostly low-powered, occasionally connected devices, sometimes with just a few kilobytes of on-device memory. Nobody expects those devices to be in sync with anything. That is, why IOTA has a concept of nodes. Fullnodes and permanodes. These nodes stay in sync with the Tangle. Or, if you consider use cases which require offline-capabilities, even just with subparts of the Tangle, which can be attached back to the main Tangle at a later point... Andreas seemed to be suggesting that no IoT device would be able to take part in the IOTA network, because his attempt to run a full-node required lots of data.
- SamBam 9y ago
  To be fair, the main argument in the response article is that Andreas's troubles installing a full-node wallet doesn't relate to how an IoT device would use it, so the article's conclusion isn't well established. All the arguments about "how can something that's pre-alpha be worth billions of dollars" are perfectly valid, but the original article seemed to address IOTA's worth for IoT devices, and seems to have missed the plot on that.
abrkn 9y ago
I saw that. He's mentioning a company, "Helix Capital Investments Ltd", that I've never heard of.
- 9y ago

simias 9y ago

His experience is what I would expect from anybody trying pre-alpha software which is probably what IOTA is right now (at least, that seems to be the common defense from it's proponents, "it's temporary, it's going to change"). The absurd part is that it's pre-alpha software that has a market cap in billions of dollars thanks to the wild speculation around cryptocurrency/blockchain stuff. I mean, the simple fact that IOTA currently de-facto centralized, doesn't plan on using PoW to secure the chain and promises almost-free transactions should make investors very cautious. They're promising what nobody has managed to achieve yet and the only thing they have to show for it is a whitepaper and the promise that very clever people are working on it.

abrkn 9y ago
Why would something that is "pre alpha" be worth billions of dollars? Just doesn't make sense. IOTA has no utility today.
- simias 9y ago
  That was my point yes, sorry if I was being unclear. Thank you for your articles by the way, they're always insightful. It's nice to see somebody actually using those cryptocurrencies instead of merely speculating about them.
- nuttycoin 9y ago
  IOTA has no utility today. Neither does any crypto. Neither does the Boring Company. Yet they all have value. It's foolish to think IOTA is worth nothing even though it is not production ready, because when it is, it will be worth much more than it is today.
iuguy 9y ago
Before we get to the fact that it's effectively poorly written pre-alpha garbage, let me make something abundantly clear: There is no IoT use case for IOTA. Let me repeat that. There. Is. No. IoT. Use. Case. For. IOTA. I'm not having a pop at the parent here, I just want to make it clear that there is no reason for IOTA to exist. IOTA not only fails to solve a problem, it's failing at solving a problem that IoT doesn't have. I'd be interested to see an actual application of IOTA for any IoT device that can only be, or is optimally solved by IOTA. But there isn't one. Because there's no freaking use case that can't be done more optimally using already production-level alternatives.

testdeep 9y ago

Nano is a great alternative and was thought out before IOTA. It was one of the first paper to be published about Block Lattice. It is what Bitcoin said it would be fast and fee-less cryptocurrency. https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks

dangero 9y ago
Bitshares did low cost transactions at high volume years ago, so I'm never quite sure why Nano gets so much attention because those features aren't novel. Furthermore, free transactions with minimal POW don't create proper incentives and will not scale because there is an extremely low cost to spam the network. This means you can essentially use full historical nodes as a data storage for anything you want.
- stri8ed 9y ago
  Adding to this, representative nodes (DPOS) do not get any rewards for being online and behaving correctly. Which is a recipe for tragedy of the commons. Worse yet, a voter can issue two conflicting votes, and the system has no mechanism let alone penalty for handling this. The defense against these attacks seems to be, reps have stake, therefor they wont take actions detrimental to coin value.. The marketing is strictly speaking false. A transaction is not instant, as you must wait for sufficient time to ensure that a conflicting transaction has not been published (and hope that you are not network partitioned). Otherwise, you might as well settle for "instant" BTC 0-conf transactions. Free, is debatable, considering the difficulty of POW that would be required to effectively deter spam.

Asdfbla 9y ago

It's funny how many of the cryptocoins pretend that they have some domain-specific use case (here IoT, which for reasons(?) needs a distributed ledger) that justifies their existence. Guess people can make a business out of thinking up ever more creative justifications for new coins.

arcaster 9y ago

IOTA is a fantastic example of how far a heap of shit (yes, we're talking unary logic shit-tier) can get with a home run marketing wise and an absolute lack of ethics. The IOTA team deserves every bit of backlash coming their way...

nuttycoin 9y ago

While IOTA is not anywhere near production ready, it is important to realize that the value of IOTA is based on the expected value of utility that the tangle provides. This form of valuation is not unique to IOTA; it applies to all cryptocurrencies (and assets like growth stocks, for that matter). For this reason, IOTA's current user experience is not of the utmost importance. The author seems to think otherwise. It is clear to me that the author has an inclination to portray IOTA in a negative light, and that he does not understand how IOTA works. It will take time for the tangle to grow to the level that the IOTA foundation envisions, and it does not take a genius to realize that fact. People in this thread are mocking those who call articles like this one FUD, but that's simply what it is. Nothing about this article supports the argument that IOTA will not be able to be used for IoT in the future.

elevaet 9y ago

"Are you making a blockchain product and want me to advise or review? I can be bought. Send me a paid message at https://earn.com/berken/" https://earn.com/berken/" What is this guy, some kind of digital extortionist?

SippinLean 9y ago

Where does this claim in the title come from? >IOTA: Cannot be used for IoT The author has this caption under the screenshot of the official documentation: >They also write that you can’t use IOTA for IoT ...but they clearly don't write that, I can read it in the screenshot. They say it doesn't work on smaller IoT devices, and that this will change when you can compile from source. So that's out as a source of this claim. The other source: >I upgraded to this machine after reading on the Discord chat that people were unable to stay in sync with less powerful hardware [citation needed] That's the requirements for running the Wallet GUI on Linux, not IOTA core (which as the author mentions, has been implemented in python and JS). Nuance matters, concluding "IOTA cannot be used on Internet-of-Things devices" at the end seems like an oversimplification; especially for an article that seems overly-specific when it's trying to make IOTA seem complicated (Is setting up an AWS instance of Ubuntu for your Windows host a concern for EVERY user of IOTA? Is it really important that you set up your firewall incorrectly?). Another strange omission is not mentioning IOTA as being in beta, which is the reason it can't run on smaller devices: >This means that the current Java implementation is a reference implementation

generalizethis 9y ago

Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum: https://medium.com/@perfectstormtd/my-experience-of-building-a-full-iota-node-on-an-arm64-board-3df6459929fe https://medium.com/@perfectstormtd/my-experience-of-building...

deleted 9y ago

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