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Cryptographers Urge People to Abandon IOTA After Leaked Emails

212 points by charlysl 9y ago

lucideer 9y ago
IOTA has seemed questionable for quite a while, and I'd also urge people to stay away from it, but is it just me or is Green's conduct here pretty out of line? He says: > If you want a postcard summary of why you should avoid the Iota project — with your brains and your money — this conversation is it. but if you read the conversation he's referencing, he doesn't come off as reasonable in it either.
- abhv 9y ago
  I am a researcher in cryptography who just read the full email transcript posted at [1]. I found Ethan and Neha's email responses to be patient and sincere. In contrast, the IOTA team members Sergey and David have no idea what they are talking about. The IOTA constructions were broken, and instead of understanding that, they made bogus points and tried to attack the four DCI researchers in various ways. In that context, I think Green's tweet represented a bit of frustration at the way public rhetoric is being misused. [1] http://www.tangleblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/letters.pdf http://www.tangleblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/letters...
  - josephagoss 9y ago
    It doesn't surprise me that IOTA followers are toxic considering the founders are toxic individuals. I find it interesting how IOTA founders are the complete opposite of Satoshi and Vitalik.
    - ndury 9y ago
      I am an avid follower of the current crypto space and I cannot grasp how unprofessional and immature the IOTA team handles their issues. It's almost as if 75% of the crypto space as of late is ran by children/teenagers/adults which cannot grasp the basic concepts of being civil to one another. This is all very unfortunate for the overall growth and perceptions of the crypto community as a whole
      - tarken 9y ago
        that's what happens to people when they feel like they're competing in a closing-off market. want to see a similar level of people clawing at each other's throats, being petty & antagonistic, competing for scraps? look no further than the music industry, especially the amateur scenes. more beef than an industrial cattle farm.
chadbennett 9y ago
I Abandoned IOTA months ago after looking at their Github issues page. https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues Great idea, just a little too early for massive adoption.
- user5454 9y ago
  Wow! Speaking of trust, unsigned installers [1]?!? [1] https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/1084 https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/1084
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I abandoned it after hearing about the Curl debacle, and trying to abandon it (and selling all of my $100 worth of IOTA) just validated my decision. The wallet couldn't show the right balance unless I "reattached" a bunch of times, and, get this: In order to validate a monetary transaction, the wallet transmit zero-amount "validation" transactions that refer back to the original one, essentially validating itself. Such secure.
Alex3917 9y ago
Somehow I doubt kind of people buying IOTA are going to abandon it just because the core team is incompetent. And to be honest they may be right. Because crypto offers instant liquidity, unlike in venture the people who are going to make the most money aren't necessarily going to be the best at picking the winners.
arcticbull 9y ago
58 days ago I posted a bunch of evidence about why IOTA didn't make sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039802 I think Bruce Schneier's take was particularly prescient: "In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system secure is low." The question is, though, is this going to make a difference to the people playing? Very little about the crypto space makes any sense. It's in a lot of ways just a database but harder -- so much harder -- because the community insists nobody can be trusted. In reality there are very few situations in which you really can't trust one other entity.
- wepple 9y ago
  I’m beginning to feel that any type of gentle academic evidence of flaws in a given scheme or technology in the crypto currency space is blasted as “FUD”, so Here’s a though exercise: if all the cryptocurrency communities call out research as paid shilling FUD, are we morally obliged to exploit weaknesses and attempt to demonstrate flaws with actual real collateral damage?
  - xbkingx 9y ago
    That's the world today - ignore facts that don't agree with your reconceived views and deny deny deny. The problem with exploiting vulnerabilities for personal gain is that you're hurting more innocent investors, too. It's kinda like carpet bombing, in that you'll accomplish your goal of killing the enemy, but you're taking a lot of other people with them because they have a spurious link. OTOH, maybe you can gain enough influence to make changes that would marginalize or punish the corrupt operators. A lot of these quasi-cryptos have a hidden layer to prevent this (Ripple, IOTA, etc.). Their coins are more like unregulated stock in the founder's company than a decentralized machine. I'm not sure if that makes them more or less susceptible to a single, strong outside force. They could simply delete your coins, but without knowing the exploit that's just temporary. You would have an actual target (other than 'the system'), which you could pressure (aka blackmail), but they could cash out immediately and walk away. If I was running a scamcoin (and a terrible person) I'd probably bring the exploit finder into the inner circle to gain positive media (with the associated price bump), wait for the first major act of the new person and then cash out, step down, and disclose the vulnerability. Spin it as the new person trying to cover up problems they caused or improperly addressing the original problem and preventing a good solution. To counter that, the exploit finder could condition their involvement on releasing the hidden layer's source as a matter of transparency, but really be working on a way to fork without the hidden layer or replace it with a democratized layer. Now you can claim the founders were greedy and didn't want to fix the exploit, and that your working solution was rejected because it took away their ability to manipulate the market. Turn it into an announcement of the new 'fixed' coin. It'd be a fun movie plot, but probably terribly boring to watch.
boreas 9y ago
As an aside, is there anyone else extremely disappointed with the quality of discussion over at /r/cryptocurrency? This conflict over IOTA has been unfolding for a long time and the guys on that subreddit defend it fanatically, accusing DCI of "FUD"ing IOTA. I am not sure if the subscriber base is technically illiterate or users that hold a given coin have a strong incentive to dismiss any criticism. As someone fascinated by the technology in the crypto space but very skeptical about the real-world usefulness of many of these projects, I wish I had a better forum to read beside the odd HN post.
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  I agree. It feels impossible to find a cryptocurrency forum that's not filled with shills. Someone should train an AI to detect shilling and use it in the comment ranking algorithm of a forum. Of course they'd probably release a whitepaper and do an ICO.
- logicfiction 9y ago
  > I am not sure if the subscriber base is technically illiterate or users that hold a given coin have a strong incentive to dismiss any criticism. Both of those are highly representative of the demographic that want to discuss such things on reddit. Others are often even moderated against from some of what I've seen and thus discouraged from discussion. I don't know about that specific sub-reddit, but it certainly happens in some. It's an important echo chamber for exuberant hype so people have a vested interest in protecting that in the mostly unregulated market.
- justboxing 9y ago
  > This conflict over IOTA has been unfolding for a long time and the guys on that subreddit defend it fanatically, accusing DCI of "FUD"ing IOTA It's not just IOTA. It's more or less any of the top 10 / 20 (by MarketCap) Crypto-currencies on the respective sub-reddits. It's especially bad on r/Ripple where anything critical of Ripple / XRP is instantly deleted by the mods in the name of F.U.D (Fear, Uncertainity, Doubt), and even a small +ve news is posted several times in a day, even trials of Ripple that doesn't even use XRP for the transactions. And then there was this self-proclaimed shill who described in great detail how he made tons of money shilling various coins on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7xkm0z/i_was_a_paid_cryptocurrency_shill_iam_here_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7xkm0z/i_wa... From what I've observed on r/Cryptocurrency and related coin subs on reddit over the past month or two, Reddit is being carefully manipulated by whales and scam coin creators to attract bag holders and manipulate the markets for a quick profit. And many of the mods engage in circle-jerk postings, maybe they are in on it too. Who knows.
thisisit 9y ago
Irrespective of whether IOTA has issues or not their constant hostility is surprising to say the least. If you run something in public domain there are going to be people coming after you. And people need to learn to adapt which IOTA is sorely lacking.
- tarken 9y ago
  unless you can frame the narrative as the 'world vs us'. it works for musk fans.
wbraun 9y ago
The amount of brigading by IOTA community also shows how toxic it is. Just look at the comments on the ieee article. Or the some of the tweets. They were also spamming the /r/MIT subreddit about the DCI. Just watching this all unfold is making me realize how toxic parts of the cryptocurrency community is and it's making me really sad.
- josephagoss 9y ago
  It's a wild west, we need a winter of sorts to destroy most of these projects. If IOTA isn't secure it should fall sooner than later. Hopefully what exists in several years time will be good technology, and hopefully the scams have gone away. I'd wager than marvels like Bitcoin and Ethereum will still be here.
- tarken 9y ago
  what did you expect? when the only topic is money, the mindset will trend towards greed.
- 908087 9y ago
  Over the past year the toxic portion has grown from "parts of" to "the majority of".
- poyu 9y ago
  Feels like those people defending the Solar Road Way...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Roritharr 9y ago
The crypto space to me is really frustrating. I've seen friends become something very close to scammers, I can't have interesting technical discussions about the topic without being called doomsayer and even when I pitch an idea what to use the Blockchain for, all I get is:"let's do an ICO and raise a shitton of money!" although that doesn't really make sense towards what I'm proposing. I feel like the nerd in class that hopes that the teacher (regulatory bodies) will pinch those bullies so we can get back to topic. I hate that feeling.
- tim333 9y ago
  Humans can be kind of money motivated. Such is life. For me one of the interesting things with crypto is whether you can use that for something positive in society.
  - jotto 9y ago
    ...the greatest conqueror in history, a conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, thereby turning people into ardent disciples. This conqueror is money. from Sapiens: https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html?id=FmyBAwAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html?id=FmyBAwA...
    - Donzo 9y ago
      +1 Definitely in my top ten list. The text is life-changing.
- josephagoss 9y ago
  A lot of my ideas for blockchain technology work a lot better using ETH for example, rather than yet another token. I think we'll need to wait a few months/years before the ICO craze dies down and we can get back to focusing on building tech on top of Bitcoin/Ethereum without the word ICO.
  - DennisP 9y ago
    My ideas tend to be the same. I don't see any reason not to go ahead and build them.
Legogris 9y ago
I appreciate how the example collision (page 18 in the email dump) uses the lyrics of "Push it to the limit" by David Hasselhoff. The number 9 seems to be appearing a lot both in the collision raw text and previously when they refer to the bleed. I guess it has something to do with the function being based on trinary logic - could there be another flaw there related to this? Also kind of amusing seeing the different sides of the IOTA team: Sergey is antagonistic and difficult to communicate while David tries to smooth things out and get everyone to play along nicely.
- sdenton4 9y ago
  My favorite part was the IOTA folks insisting that their 'higher level' protocol would fix all their rookie mistakes. (Yes! We intentionally built our castle on quicksand! But look how hard the walls are!) It's a great example of why you need to start from sound foundations.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    I mean that logic works for a lot of network stuff. Like you can have a nice fast torrent even though all the packets are UDP.
  - user5454 9y ago
    My favorite part is that they don't seem to understand the concept of hash collisions at all! ("ONE collision, nah that's nothing" [1]) and when JP Aumasson explains a possible attack the response is basically "Who would do such a thing?" [2] [1] https://twitter.com/c___f___b/status/967511451442302976 https://twitter.com/c___f___b/status/967511451442302976 [2] https://twitter.com/c___f___b/status/966315009071607809 https://twitter.com/c___f___b/status/966315009071607809
KasianFranks 9y ago
Get your pitchforks out on crypto. Wrong side of history you are on.
mbgaxyz 9y ago
IOTA co-founder, Sergey Ivancheglo aka Come-from-Beyond, has an open invitation for cryptographers to discuss this issue on his blog: "Intermediate summary of Heilman et al. claims about the security of a previous version of IOTA signature scheme" https://medium.com/@comefrombeyond/intermediate-summary-of-heilman-et-al-add87228efab https://medium.com/@comefrombeyond/intermediate-summary-of-h...
- TD-Linux 9y ago
  What is there even to discuss? The disclosures and email tell me everything I wanted to know.
  - mbgaxyz 9y ago
    Where is the code which exploits the supposed vulnerability in IOTA? After all, there are code samples available today which demonstrate the SPECTRE and MELTDOWN attacks.
    - espadrine 9y ago
      That is akin to this: “Hey, your house door is unlocked.” “What are you talking about? I left it unlocked on purpose, but it is safe, I wired the metal handle to the power plug, nobody bad can get in.” “What about the good ones?” “I installed a Coordinator™ that calls me when you ring, and I can open the door remotely.” “Wait, didn’t you make this house with the promise that everyone with the key could use it?” “… well, I don’t see you finding a vulnerability!”
    - DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
      discussing vulnerabilities is misleading since it's in this case not something you can put into a PoC. It's not code that's vulnerable¹. The whole argument is that the math is wrong but more correctly should be that the behavior of Curl has never been defined. You can't proof something doesn't behave the way it should when it was never defined what that behavior is in the first place. ¹ though there are several actual code vulns that have been dismissed by the IOTA team as "FUD" and even threatening researchers with litigation https://prizz.github.io/iota-transaction-spammer-webapp/ https://prizz.github.io/iota-transaction-spammer-webapp/
coinerone 9y ago
This is the dumbest article i ever read on HN news.
- sctb 9y ago
  Could you please comment civilly and substantively or not at all? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ola 9y ago
It still baffles me that the official response from the IOTA foundation is that the vulnerability was inserted intentionally as copy-protection. And even more baffling that their flagship partner Bosch does not seem to have problem with this practice.
- once_inc 9y ago
  I doubt that any of the decision makers at Bosch have enough theoretical knowledge to be able to form any sort of opinion about it.
  - user5454 9y ago
    Well, as IOTA targets embedded devices (I guess the reason Bosch is interested) they should have enough knowledge to form an opinion about transaction sizes: "transactions in IOTA are 10KB (in contrast, Bitcoin transactions are on average 600B)" [1] https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367 https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...
antonserious 9y ago
IOTA picked up lots of bad blood by far right alt-right wingers after their very left statements on twitter. Whole thing is shitfest really, in 90 out of 100 cases there's straight lies, FUD and representation about their project. Which make me only confident they will be the future.
stef25 9y ago
I'm baffled as to why an obviously intelligent bunch of people take to Twitter to discuss this.
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  To have an audience. They are using Twitter as a platform for a public debate in lieu of an alternative.
lolc 9y ago
> The researchers disclosed to IOTA that the hash function they were using, which was an in-house concotion called Curl, was broken. Classy. Not only do they keep their cryptocoin proprietary, they did use a proprietary hash function too. I wanted to predict the inevitable fall of the currency but realized that the enterprise might just turn into a bank. If they are the gatekeepers to every transaction, they are already sort of a bank. An unregulated bank. With their own bank notes.
- weavie 9y ago
  Is there any (valid) reason why someone would want to use their own hash function? Secure hash functions, as far as I am aware, are pretty established and widely available and really easy to use..
  - once_inc 9y ago
    No. There is no valid reason to do so.
    - DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
      if you understand the Math and agree that whatever you do needs to go through a proper peer review then why not. Saying "nobody may research the subject because you'll fail" is bad science. If you work in this space, know your Math, and don't rely on your invention to be put into production this year then why not study the problem space and innovate by following the established best practices!? Problems arise when someone thinks they should now turn this invention into a money-cow or label it "proprietary magic" (under the pretext of protecting IP/copyright).
      - akvadrako 9y ago
        > if you understand the Math and agree that whatever you do needs to go through a proper peer review then why not. Because crypto is really hard and you can't prove your new algorithm is secure. Only after being a popular high value target for years can you have much trust in your new hash. Even SHA2 might have flaws nobody knows about - that's the main purpose behind having SHA3 standardised - as a backup.¹ If you are not the designer of the algorithm it's even worse, because an exploit could be put in intentionally by proper choice of constants which are in some cases undetectable. [1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/152360/should-we-be-using-sha3-2017 https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/152360/should-w...
ubidubbiiui 9y ago
> I even unsure that putting "Hi, <name>" everywhere is suitable, I wish I took normal English classes instead of learning it by reading Java documentation. Java hello world in Russia: Hi, Ethan
ubidubbiiui 9y ago
After +1 hour reading things start to be surreal. IOTA team swapped their in-house hash algorithm "Curl" for their new in-house hash algorithm "Kerl" in https://github.com/iotaledger/iri/commit/539e413352a77b1db2042f46887e41d558f575e5 https://github.com/iotaledger/iri/commit/539e413352a77b1db20... , while at the same day blogging about it and claiming their new in-house hash algorithm is actually SHA-3: https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-updates-d12145e381eb https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-updates-d12145e381eb > "Therefore we have made the simple decision to temporarily switch Curl with Keccak (SHA-3) for cryptographic signing in IOTA."
swarnie_ 9y ago
Still holding @ 2.23 Dealing with and accepting loss is actually quite difficult....
granaldo 9y ago
Interesting that after much bad news on IOTA, the market is still pricing IOTA well https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/iota/usd https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/iota/usd market is ignorant, uninformed, or its all none total speculative
cyphunk 9y ago
Sergey appears to have attitude issues and the IOTA team have serious damage control issues, but the MIT team also, maybe wisely, appear obstructive at certain important points. In paticular the probability of attack in the wild seems a valid question that was never dealt with by the MIT team? (Disclosure: I'm not invested in IOTA one bit, nor is anyone I know) What I witnessed after reading through all those letters is a common clash I see over and over of two types of cryptanalysts: Those whose knowledge grew in resource expansive environments (internet/cpu space) and those whose knowledge grew in resource constrictive space (e.g. satellite broadcasting). In particular they clash on the idea that there can ever be a valid use case for a less-than perfect security schema, so-as-to provide certain desired resource benefits, while still being sufficiently secure for a specific use case. Cryptographers dance around who has perfect security at heart, never getting down to the issue: that they disagree on necessary trade-offs. By the time they do get to it, one will disengage entirely from conversation and assume the other is just stupid. That has happened here (both sides I think). It's a common outcome. (Disclosures: I worked as a software+hardware reverse engineer, not cryptographer, in the satellite TV space. So I'm not anything close to an authority on the topic but was around these debates often.)
- deleted 9y ago
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jaythvv 9y ago
Everything about this project is weird. I started looking into it since I do IoT stuff and there was so much hype. Then you find out about the curl issue. The unnecessary ternary. Read the white paper and all issues with tip selection was "solved" with hand waving. Then you find out it doesn't even have a client that works on a typical IoT device... Reading the email chain made it ultimately clear: these people have no idea what they're doing. They just threw a bunch of random ultra cool sounding tech together ("post-quantum crypto", of course) and started hyping, while the code never worked. Obvious scam.

212 points by charlysl 9y ago

IOTA has seemed questionable for quite a while, and I'd also urge people to stay away from it, but is it just me or is Green's conduct here pretty out of line? He says: > If you want a postcard summary of why you should avoid the Iota project — with your brains and your money — this conversation is it. but if you read the conversation he's referencing, he doesn't come off as reasonable in it either.

abhv 9y ago
I am a researcher in cryptography who just read the full email transcript posted at [1]. I found Ethan and Neha's email responses to be patient and sincere. In contrast, the IOTA team members Sergey and David have no idea what they are talking about. The IOTA constructions were broken, and instead of understanding that, they made bogus points and tried to attack the four DCI researchers in various ways. In that context, I think Green's tweet represented a bit of frustration at the way public rhetoric is being misused. [1] http://www.tangleblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/letters.pdf http://www.tangleblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/letters...
- josephagoss 9y ago
  It doesn't surprise me that IOTA followers are toxic considering the founders are toxic individuals. I find it interesting how IOTA founders are the complete opposite of Satoshi and Vitalik.
  - ndury 9y ago
    I am an avid follower of the current crypto space and I cannot grasp how unprofessional and immature the IOTA team handles their issues. It's almost as if 75% of the crypto space as of late is ran by children/teenagers/adults which cannot grasp the basic concepts of being civil to one another. This is all very unfortunate for the overall growth and perceptions of the crypto community as a whole
    - tarken 9y ago
      that's what happens to people when they feel like they're competing in a closing-off market. want to see a similar level of people clawing at each other's throats, being petty & antagonistic, competing for scraps? look no further than the music industry, especially the amateur scenes. more beef than an industrial cattle farm.

chadbennett 9y ago

I Abandoned IOTA months ago after looking at their Github issues page. https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues Great idea, just a little too early for massive adoption.

user5454 9y ago
Wow! Speaking of trust, unsigned installers [1]?!? [1] https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/1084 https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/issues/1084
StavrosK 9y ago
I abandoned it after hearing about the Curl debacle, and trying to abandon it (and selling all of my $100 worth of IOTA) just validated my decision. The wallet couldn't show the right balance unless I "reattached" a bunch of times, and, get this: In order to validate a monetary transaction, the wallet transmit zero-amount "validation" transactions that refer back to the original one, essentially validating itself. Such secure.

Alex3917 9y ago

Somehow I doubt kind of people buying IOTA are going to abandon it just because the core team is incompetent. And to be honest they may be right. Because crypto offers instant liquidity, unlike in venture the people who are going to make the most money aren't necessarily going to be the best at picking the winners.

arcticbull 9y ago

58 days ago I posted a bunch of evidence about why IOTA didn't make sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039802 I think Bruce Schneier's take was particularly prescient: "In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system secure is low." The question is, though, is this going to make a difference to the people playing? Very little about the crypto space makes any sense. It's in a lot of ways just a database but harder -- so much harder -- because the community insists nobody can be trusted. In reality there are very few situations in which you really can't trust one other entity.

wepple 9y ago
I’m beginning to feel that any type of gentle academic evidence of flaws in a given scheme or technology in the crypto currency space is blasted as “FUD”, so Here’s a though exercise: if all the cryptocurrency communities call out research as paid shilling FUD, are we morally obliged to exploit weaknesses and attempt to demonstrate flaws with actual real collateral damage?
- xbkingx 9y ago
  That's the world today - ignore facts that don't agree with your reconceived views and deny deny deny. The problem with exploiting vulnerabilities for personal gain is that you're hurting more innocent investors, too. It's kinda like carpet bombing, in that you'll accomplish your goal of killing the enemy, but you're taking a lot of other people with them because they have a spurious link. OTOH, maybe you can gain enough influence to make changes that would marginalize or punish the corrupt operators. A lot of these quasi-cryptos have a hidden layer to prevent this (Ripple, IOTA, etc.). Their coins are more like unregulated stock in the founder's company than a decentralized machine. I'm not sure if that makes them more or less susceptible to a single, strong outside force. They could simply delete your coins, but without knowing the exploit that's just temporary. You would have an actual target (other than 'the system'), which you could pressure (aka blackmail), but they could cash out immediately and walk away. If I was running a scamcoin (and a terrible person) I'd probably bring the exploit finder into the inner circle to gain positive media (with the associated price bump), wait for the first major act of the new person and then cash out, step down, and disclose the vulnerability. Spin it as the new person trying to cover up problems they caused or improperly addressing the original problem and preventing a good solution. To counter that, the exploit finder could condition their involvement on releasing the hidden layer's source as a matter of transparency, but really be working on a way to fork without the hidden layer or replace it with a democratized layer. Now you can claim the founders were greedy and didn't want to fix the exploit, and that your working solution was rejected because it took away their ability to manipulate the market. Turn it into an announcement of the new 'fixed' coin. It'd be a fun movie plot, but probably terribly boring to watch.

boreas 9y ago

As an aside, is there anyone else extremely disappointed with the quality of discussion over at /r/cryptocurrency? This conflict over IOTA has been unfolding for a long time and the guys on that subreddit defend it fanatically, accusing DCI of "FUD"ing IOTA. I am not sure if the subscriber base is technically illiterate or users that hold a given coin have a strong incentive to dismiss any criticism. As someone fascinated by the technology in the crypto space but very skeptical about the real-world usefulness of many of these projects, I wish I had a better forum to read beside the odd HN post.

tlrobinson 9y ago
I agree. It feels impossible to find a cryptocurrency forum that's not filled with shills. Someone should train an AI to detect shilling and use it in the comment ranking algorithm of a forum. Of course they'd probably release a whitepaper and do an ICO.
logicfiction 9y ago
> I am not sure if the subscriber base is technically illiterate or users that hold a given coin have a strong incentive to dismiss any criticism. Both of those are highly representative of the demographic that want to discuss such things on reddit. Others are often even moderated against from some of what I've seen and thus discouraged from discussion. I don't know about that specific sub-reddit, but it certainly happens in some. It's an important echo chamber for exuberant hype so people have a vested interest in protecting that in the mostly unregulated market.
justboxing 9y ago
> This conflict over IOTA has been unfolding for a long time and the guys on that subreddit defend it fanatically, accusing DCI of "FUD"ing IOTA It's not just IOTA. It's more or less any of the top 10 / 20 (by MarketCap) Crypto-currencies on the respective sub-reddits. It's especially bad on r/Ripple where anything critical of Ripple / XRP is instantly deleted by the mods in the name of F.U.D (Fear, Uncertainity, Doubt), and even a small +ve news is posted several times in a day, even trials of Ripple that doesn't even use XRP for the transactions. And then there was this self-proclaimed shill who described in great detail how he made tons of money shilling various coins on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7xkm0z/i_was_a_paid_cryptocurrency_shill_iam_here_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7xkm0z/i_wa... From what I've observed on r/Cryptocurrency and related coin subs on reddit over the past month or two, Reddit is being carefully manipulated by whales and scam coin creators to attract bag holders and manipulate the markets for a quick profit. And many of the mods engage in circle-jerk postings, maybe they are in on it too. Who knows.

thisisit 9y ago

Irrespective of whether IOTA has issues or not their constant hostility is surprising to say the least. If you run something in public domain there are going to be people coming after you. And people need to learn to adapt which IOTA is sorely lacking.

tarken 9y ago
unless you can frame the narrative as the 'world vs us'. it works for musk fans.

wbraun 9y ago

The amount of brigading by IOTA community also shows how toxic it is. Just look at the comments on the ieee article. Or the some of the tweets. They were also spamming the /r/MIT subreddit about the DCI. Just watching this all unfold is making me realize how toxic parts of the cryptocurrency community is and it's making me really sad.

josephagoss 9y ago
It's a wild west, we need a winter of sorts to destroy most of these projects. If IOTA isn't secure it should fall sooner than later. Hopefully what exists in several years time will be good technology, and hopefully the scams have gone away. I'd wager than marvels like Bitcoin and Ethereum will still be here.
tarken 9y ago
what did you expect? when the only topic is money, the mindset will trend towards greed.
908087 9y ago
Over the past year the toxic portion has grown from "parts of" to "the majority of".
poyu 9y ago
Feels like those people defending the Solar Road Way...

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Roritharr 9y ago

The crypto space to me is really frustrating. I've seen friends become something very close to scammers, I can't have interesting technical discussions about the topic without being called doomsayer and even when I pitch an idea what to use the Blockchain for, all I get is:"let's do an ICO and raise a shitton of money!" although that doesn't really make sense towards what I'm proposing. I feel like the nerd in class that hopes that the teacher (regulatory bodies) will pinch those bullies so we can get back to topic. I hate that feeling.

tim333 9y ago
Humans can be kind of money motivated. Such is life. For me one of the interesting things with crypto is whether you can use that for something positive in society.
- jotto 9y ago
  ...the greatest conqueror in history, a conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, thereby turning people into ardent disciples. This conqueror is money. from Sapiens: https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html?id=FmyBAwAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html?id=FmyBAwA...
  - Donzo 9y ago
    +1 Definitely in my top ten list. The text is life-changing.
josephagoss 9y ago
A lot of my ideas for blockchain technology work a lot better using ETH for example, rather than yet another token. I think we'll need to wait a few months/years before the ICO craze dies down and we can get back to focusing on building tech on top of Bitcoin/Ethereum without the word ICO.
- DennisP 9y ago
  My ideas tend to be the same. I don't see any reason not to go ahead and build them.

Legogris 9y ago

I appreciate how the example collision (page 18 in the email dump) uses the lyrics of "Push it to the limit" by David Hasselhoff. The number 9 seems to be appearing a lot both in the collision raw text and previously when they refer to the bleed. I guess it has something to do with the function being based on trinary logic - could there be another flaw there related to this? Also kind of amusing seeing the different sides of the IOTA team: Sergey is antagonistic and difficult to communicate while David tries to smooth things out and get everyone to play along nicely.

sdenton4 9y ago
My favorite part was the IOTA folks insisting that their 'higher level' protocol would fix all their rookie mistakes. (Yes! We intentionally built our castle on quicksand! But look how hard the walls are!) It's a great example of why you need to start from sound foundations.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  I mean that logic works for a lot of network stuff. Like you can have a nice fast torrent even though all the packets are UDP.
- user5454 9y ago
  My favorite part is that they don't seem to understand the concept of hash collisions at all! ("ONE collision, nah that's nothing" [1]) and when JP Aumasson explains a possible attack the response is basically "Who would do such a thing?" [2] [1] https://twitter.com/c___f___b/status/967511451442302976 https://twitter.com/c___f___b/status/967511451442302976 [2] https://twitter.com/c___f___b/status/966315009071607809 https://twitter.com/c___f___b/status/966315009071607809

KasianFranks 9y ago

Get your pitchforks out on crypto. Wrong side of history you are on.

mbgaxyz 9y ago

IOTA co-founder, Sergey Ivancheglo aka Come-from-Beyond, has an open invitation for cryptographers to discuss this issue on his blog: "Intermediate summary of Heilman et al. claims about the security of a previous version of IOTA signature scheme" https://medium.com/@comefrombeyond/intermediate-summary-of-heilman-et-al-add87228efab https://medium.com/@comefrombeyond/intermediate-summary-of-h...

TD-Linux 9y ago
What is there even to discuss? The disclosures and email tell me everything I wanted to know.
- mbgaxyz 9y ago
  Where is the code which exploits the supposed vulnerability in IOTA? After all, there are code samples available today which demonstrate the SPECTRE and MELTDOWN attacks.
  - espadrine 9y ago
    That is akin to this: “Hey, your house door is unlocked.” “What are you talking about? I left it unlocked on purpose, but it is safe, I wired the metal handle to the power plug, nobody bad can get in.” “What about the good ones?” “I installed a Coordinator™ that calls me when you ring, and I can open the door remotely.” “Wait, didn’t you make this house with the promise that everyone with the key could use it?” “… well, I don’t see you finding a vulnerability!”
  - DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
    discussing vulnerabilities is misleading since it's in this case not something you can put into a PoC. It's not code that's vulnerable¹. The whole argument is that the math is wrong but more correctly should be that the behavior of Curl has never been defined. You can't proof something doesn't behave the way it should when it was never defined what that behavior is in the first place. ¹ though there are several actual code vulns that have been dismissed by the IOTA team as "FUD" and even threatening researchers with litigation https://prizz.github.io/iota-transaction-spammer-webapp/ https://prizz.github.io/iota-transaction-spammer-webapp/

coinerone 9y ago

This is the dumbest article i ever read on HN news.

sctb 9y ago
Could you please comment civilly and substantively or not at all? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ola 9y ago

It still baffles me that the official response from the IOTA foundation is that the vulnerability was inserted intentionally as copy-protection. And even more baffling that their flagship partner Bosch does not seem to have problem with this practice.

once_inc 9y ago
I doubt that any of the decision makers at Bosch have enough theoretical knowledge to be able to form any sort of opinion about it.
- user5454 9y ago
  Well, as IOTA targets embedded devices (I guess the reason Bosch is interested) they should have enough knowledge to form an opinion about transaction sizes: "transactions in IOTA are 10KB (in contrast, Bitcoin transactions are on average 600B)" [1] https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367 https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...

antonserious 9y ago

IOTA picked up lots of bad blood by far right alt-right wingers after their very left statements on twitter. Whole thing is shitfest really, in 90 out of 100 cases there's straight lies, FUD and representation about their project. Which make me only confident they will be the future.

stef25 9y ago

I'm baffled as to why an obviously intelligent bunch of people take to Twitter to discuss this.

Freak_NL 9y ago
To have an audience. They are using Twitter as a platform for a public debate in lieu of an alternative.

lolc 9y ago

> The researchers disclosed to IOTA that the hash function they were using, which was an in-house concotion called Curl, was broken. Classy. Not only do they keep their cryptocoin proprietary, they did use a proprietary hash function too. I wanted to predict the inevitable fall of the currency but realized that the enterprise might just turn into a bank. If they are the gatekeepers to every transaction, they are already sort of a bank. An unregulated bank. With their own bank notes.

weavie 9y ago
Is there any (valid) reason why someone would want to use their own hash function? Secure hash functions, as far as I am aware, are pretty established and widely available and really easy to use..
- once_inc 9y ago
  No. There is no valid reason to do so.
  - DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
    if you understand the Math and agree that whatever you do needs to go through a proper peer review then why not. Saying "nobody may research the subject because you'll fail" is bad science. If you work in this space, know your Math, and don't rely on your invention to be put into production this year then why not study the problem space and innovate by following the established best practices!? Problems arise when someone thinks they should now turn this invention into a money-cow or label it "proprietary magic" (under the pretext of protecting IP/copyright).
    - akvadrako 9y ago
      > if you understand the Math and agree that whatever you do needs to go through a proper peer review then why not. Because crypto is really hard and you can't prove your new algorithm is secure. Only after being a popular high value target for years can you have much trust in your new hash. Even SHA2 might have flaws nobody knows about - that's the main purpose behind having SHA3 standardised - as a backup.¹ If you are not the designer of the algorithm it's even worse, because an exploit could be put in intentionally by proper choice of constants which are in some cases undetectable. [1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/152360/should-we-be-using-sha3-2017 https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/152360/should-w...

ubidubbiiui 9y ago

> I even unsure that putting "Hi, <name>" everywhere is suitable, I wish I took normal English classes instead of learning it by reading Java documentation. Java hello world in Russia: Hi, Ethan

ubidubbiiui 9y ago

After +1 hour reading things start to be surreal. IOTA team swapped their in-house hash algorithm "Curl" for their new in-house hash algorithm "Kerl" in https://github.com/iotaledger/iri/commit/539e413352a77b1db2042f46887e41d558f575e5 https://github.com/iotaledger/iri/commit/539e413352a77b1db20... , while at the same day blogging about it and claiming their new in-house hash algorithm is actually SHA-3: https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-updates-d12145e381eb https://blog.iota.org/upgrades-updates-d12145e381eb > "Therefore we have made the simple decision to temporarily switch Curl with Keccak (SHA-3) for cryptographic signing in IOTA."

swarnie_ 9y ago

Still holding @ 2.23 Dealing with and accepting loss is actually quite difficult....

granaldo 9y ago

Interesting that after much bad news on IOTA, the market is still pricing IOTA well https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/iota/usd https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/iota/usd market is ignorant, uninformed, or its all none total speculative

cyphunk 9y ago

Sergey appears to have attitude issues and the IOTA team have serious damage control issues, but the MIT team also, maybe wisely, appear obstructive at certain important points. In paticular the probability of attack in the wild seems a valid question that was never dealt with by the MIT team? (Disclosure: I'm not invested in IOTA one bit, nor is anyone I know) What I witnessed after reading through all those letters is a common clash I see over and over of two types of cryptanalysts: Those whose knowledge grew in resource expansive environments (internet/cpu space) and those whose knowledge grew in resource constrictive space (e.g. satellite broadcasting). In particular they clash on the idea that there can ever be a valid use case for a less-than perfect security schema, so-as-to provide certain desired resource benefits, while still being sufficiently secure for a specific use case. Cryptographers dance around who has perfect security at heart, never getting down to the issue: that they disagree on necessary trade-offs. By the time they do get to it, one will disengage entirely from conversation and assume the other is just stupid. That has happened here (both sides I think). It's a common outcome. (Disclosures: I worked as a software+hardware reverse engineer, not cryptographer, in the satellite TV space. So I'm not anything close to an authority on the topic but was around these debates often.)

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jaythvv 9y ago

Everything about this project is weird. I started looking into it since I do IoT stuff and there was so much hype. Then you find out about the curl issue. The unnecessary ternary. Read the white paper and all issues with tip selection was "solved" with hand waving. Then you find out it doesn't even have a client that works on a typical IoT device... Reading the email chain made it ultimately clear: these people have no idea what they're doing. They just threw a bunch of random ultra cool sounding tech together ("post-quantum crypto", of course) and started hyping, while the code never worked. Obvious scam.