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For those who haven't been following the previous episodes, IOTA is the cryptocurrency that uses ternary logic because it supposedly makes it more efficient (it

by simias 7y ago

For those who haven't been following the previous episodes, IOTA is the cryptocurrency that uses ternary logic because it supposedly makes it more efficient (it very much remains to be proven). The idea is to bring cryptocurrencies to embedded devices, which IMO like much of the cryptocurrency space is very much a solution in search of a problem. Didn't stop them from making a fortune with pre-mined coins during the cryptocurrency boom. I remember that a few years ago there was a lot of debate about whether IOTA was truly decentralized. Advocates were arguing basically that "it's not completely decentralized now but it will be soon". Well I guess we know were we're at right now.

imglorp 7y ago
Yeah the pre-mined coins were sketchy, and the ternary was dubious. I don't want the innovation to get lost in the bathwater though: the tangle datastructure was novel. Not an expert, but it was designed to allow for minimal proof of work while retaining some hashed auditability and tamper resistance. I think the key idea would be that you help hash several other blocks into transactions and then your transaction will get hashed by a few other workers. It didn't require heavy POW so it was more suitable for an embedded device to perform on the edge.
- zitterbewegung 7y ago
  I read the white paper about a Tangle a few years ago. The design doesn't make sense because it doesn't seem like the network would be able to reach some kind of consensus at all. Also, rolling your own POW and making claims about that POW isn't some trivial thing. Hashcash was created in 1997 which is eleven years before bitcoin. Rolling your own crypto system isn't just something where you can just make one up and use in a production environment.
- simias 7y ago
  Maybe it's the greatest thing since the invention of the Fourier transform but talk is cheap and it looks like despite being many years into development and having access to more cash than most startup would dream of they still haven't managed to make it work without a central node. Cryptocurrency startups sure seem to break things but they don't move very fast. I'll add it to the list of absolutely revolutionary blockchain technologies that are going to change the world [working implementation is left as an exercise for the reader].
- pshc 7y ago
  > 3 is closer to the universal optimum 2.71 than is 2. That is the absolute most simple elevator pitch for ternary. - iota co-founder Drivel like the above has long outed Iota as an absolute scam. The ternary business was some mixture of (a) bamboozling non-technical users, (b) distraction from its other failings, and (c) sheer delusion. Iota pushers hand-wave with slogans like "gets faster the more people use it" and "replace the central coordinator with voting (someday?)" but without actual security. Whereas PoW has a well-understood security model (see 51% attacks) Iota hopes you won't notice that basically nothing can be decided without the central coordinator. And then it gets worse. Iota-without-the-coordinator washes its hands of consistency. Individual nodes would have to pray they are connected to good actors, and then through some unexplained governance scheme, deduce the consensus state. In short: iota is unsuitable as any kind of distributed ledger.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    >> 3 is closer to the universal optimum 2.71 than is 2. That is the absolute most simple elevator pitch for ternary. >- iota co-founder lol they seriously say that? For those who aren't aware... You get e (2.71828...) as the optimal base when you're trying to minimize the product of a) the number of symbols you're using and b) the number of symbols needed to represent a number. Once there are other factors that are significant, it's no longer the optimum. And indeed, in the real world, you care about the difficulty of implementing base-x vs base-y logic in hardware, the installed ecosystem for computing in that base, etc, which (to put it mildly) heavily favors base-2, even for domains where one subproblem is more naturally expressed in trinary.
- schmichael 7y ago
  The tangle may be novel because it's useless for a distributed ledger: thus far IOTA has relied on a centralized coordinator. The tangle, like trits and many other IOTAisms, appear to be the perfect basis for a scam: too complicated for non-experts to fully understand yet just enough plausibility to sell it. Even if the creators were not conciously trying to create a scam, so far it has been indistinguishable from one. (I'm interested in a peer review of tangle as just searching for it only uncovers page upon page of marketing drivel.)
  - bawolff 7y ago
    I was also trying to find actual info. https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf is the closest i found. Its still a bit annoying and meandery but its much better than the rest of their marketing drivel.
- api 7y ago
  The tangle is a DAG (directed acyclic graph). A DAG is a viable data structure for a distributed database, but it has issues for a cryptocurrency where you want to maintain consensus on a single objective global ledger.
  - phire 7y ago
    There are a bunch of cryptocurrencies which use DAGs. All of them claiming to be 100% unique and innovative. I saw one which claimed it was "impossible to 51% because it's a DAG and both chains just end up on the network" No. That means either you don't have consistency (which means 51% attacks could be theoretically implemented with way less than 51% of the hash rate) or that the consensus of which transaction are valid can be 51%ed. Iota is even worse. Doesn't even try to have a distributed consensus, just uses a centralized validator.
  - bawolff 7y ago
    A DAG describes a wide variety of data structures and choices. Bitcoin is a DAG. Actually wouldn't any sort of structure that prevents double spending have to be a dag? In order to prevent double spending you need to put transactions in topological order (to know how much money the account has). If you can do that your data structure is a DAG.
    - api 7y ago
      A block chain is a special sub-type of DAG in which (1) there is only one edge from each node to a predecessor, and (2) there is only one canonical path through the DAG at any given time and there exists an objective set of rules for selecting this path. Usually nodes that are not part of this path are eventually forgotten in a block chain.
mtgx 7y ago
Aren't IOTA also the people arguing that cryptography professor Matthew Green was trolling them or making false accusations about their security? I think they've seen multiple hacks since then.
Nursie 7y ago
> uses ternary logic because it supposedly makes it more efficient (it very much remains to be proven) I think that's generous - using a java 32-bit integer to emulate a single 'trit' in your software stack is bound to be hysterically less efficient, and effectively rule out any embedded/IoT use. I know the stock answer to that was "we're working on ternary hardware too", but that just adds more questions - why are you redesigning the world from the ground up here? Are you going to rewrite entire embedded operating systems in ternary when you have this chip? How on earth is that going to help adoption by developers? > Didn't stop them from making a fortune with pre-mined coins during the cryptocurrency boom. Indeed, and there was some sort of spat a few weeks ago that likely saw at least one of the founders continue to fleece the community.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  If you talk to IOTA believers about these questions they will just spin you in circles. They will tell you that trinary computing/encryption is better, more secure, better for IOT, etc. If you ask what that even means and why it would be better, or even different from binary since it's just a different base of numbers, they will either do some sort of circular logic or just get angry. It's kind of mind blowing to have conversations with people who are heavily invested in something emotionally that falls apart with a single question. This doesn't even get into the inherent centralization or the fact that no one can actually explain how the decentralization will actually work. It isn't even comfortable realizing there are so many people like that out there.
  - brighton36 7y ago
    It's a religiosity. Beliefs trump facts. They start their comprehension with a conclusion, and work backward from there to justify their desire.
    - retrac 7y ago
      You've got the marketers who want to driv up the price and the cultists who have bought in and can't imagine anything but the price going in. Coherent conversation is rarely found in such an hysterical sell-sell-sell environment.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dontdoitpls 7y ago
I'm not sure these are real as much as these are put out by iota PR people. Reddit had a massive issue with iota astroturfing.
- api 7y ago
  To this day most IOTA comments on Reddit will get hit within an hour by rather obvious shills.

by simias 7y ago

imglorp 7y ago

Yeah the pre-mined coins were sketchy, and the ternary was dubious. I don't want the innovation to get lost in the bathwater though: the tangle datastructure was novel. Not an expert, but it was designed to allow for minimal proof of work while retaining some hashed auditability and tamper resistance. I think the key idea would be that you help hash several other blocks into transactions and then your transaction will get hashed by a few other workers. It didn't require heavy POW so it was more suitable for an embedded device to perform on the edge.

zitterbewegung 7y ago
I read the white paper about a Tangle a few years ago. The design doesn't make sense because it doesn't seem like the network would be able to reach some kind of consensus at all. Also, rolling your own POW and making claims about that POW isn't some trivial thing. Hashcash was created in 1997 which is eleven years before bitcoin. Rolling your own crypto system isn't just something where you can just make one up and use in a production environment.
simias 7y ago
Maybe it's the greatest thing since the invention of the Fourier transform but talk is cheap and it looks like despite being many years into development and having access to more cash than most startup would dream of they still haven't managed to make it work without a central node. Cryptocurrency startups sure seem to break things but they don't move very fast. I'll add it to the list of absolutely revolutionary blockchain technologies that are going to change the world [working implementation is left as an exercise for the reader].
pshc 7y ago
> 3 is closer to the universal optimum 2.71 than is 2. That is the absolute most simple elevator pitch for ternary. - iota co-founder Drivel like the above has long outed Iota as an absolute scam. The ternary business was some mixture of (a) bamboozling non-technical users, (b) distraction from its other failings, and (c) sheer delusion. Iota pushers hand-wave with slogans like "gets faster the more people use it" and "replace the central coordinator with voting (someday?)" but without actual security. Whereas PoW has a well-understood security model (see 51% attacks) Iota hopes you won't notice that basically nothing can be decided without the central coordinator. And then it gets worse. Iota-without-the-coordinator washes its hands of consistency. Individual nodes would have to pray they are connected to good actors, and then through some unexplained governance scheme, deduce the consensus state. In short: iota is unsuitable as any kind of distributed ledger.
- SilasX 7y ago
  >> 3 is closer to the universal optimum 2.71 than is 2. That is the absolute most simple elevator pitch for ternary. >- iota co-founder lol they seriously say that? For those who aren't aware... You get e (2.71828...) as the optimal base when you're trying to minimize the product of a) the number of symbols you're using and b) the number of symbols needed to represent a number. Once there are other factors that are significant, it's no longer the optimum. And indeed, in the real world, you care about the difficulty of implementing base-x vs base-y logic in hardware, the installed ecosystem for computing in that base, etc, which (to put it mildly) heavily favors base-2, even for domains where one subproblem is more naturally expressed in trinary.
schmichael 7y ago
The tangle may be novel because it's useless for a distributed ledger: thus far IOTA has relied on a centralized coordinator. The tangle, like trits and many other IOTAisms, appear to be the perfect basis for a scam: too complicated for non-experts to fully understand yet just enough plausibility to sell it. Even if the creators were not conciously trying to create a scam, so far it has been indistinguishable from one. (I'm interested in a peer review of tangle as just searching for it only uncovers page upon page of marketing drivel.)
- bawolff 7y ago
  I was also trying to find actual info. https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf is the closest i found. Its still a bit annoying and meandery but its much better than the rest of their marketing drivel.
api 7y ago
The tangle is a DAG (directed acyclic graph). A DAG is a viable data structure for a distributed database, but it has issues for a cryptocurrency where you want to maintain consensus on a single objective global ledger.
- phire 7y ago
  There are a bunch of cryptocurrencies which use DAGs. All of them claiming to be 100% unique and innovative. I saw one which claimed it was "impossible to 51% because it's a DAG and both chains just end up on the network" No. That means either you don't have consistency (which means 51% attacks could be theoretically implemented with way less than 51% of the hash rate) or that the consensus of which transaction are valid can be 51%ed. Iota is even worse. Doesn't even try to have a distributed consensus, just uses a centralized validator.
- bawolff 7y ago
  A DAG describes a wide variety of data structures and choices. Bitcoin is a DAG. Actually wouldn't any sort of structure that prevents double spending have to be a dag? In order to prevent double spending you need to put transactions in topological order (to know how much money the account has). If you can do that your data structure is a DAG.
  - api 7y ago
    A block chain is a special sub-type of DAG in which (1) there is only one edge from each node to a predecessor, and (2) there is only one canonical path through the DAG at any given time and there exists an objective set of rules for selecting this path. Usually nodes that are not part of this path are eventually forgotten in a block chain.

mtgx 7y ago

Aren't IOTA also the people arguing that cryptography professor Matthew Green was trolling them or making false accusations about their security? I think they've seen multiple hacks since then.

Nursie 7y ago

> uses ternary logic because it supposedly makes it more efficient (it very much remains to be proven) I think that's generous - using a java 32-bit integer to emulate a single 'trit' in your software stack is bound to be hysterically less efficient, and effectively rule out any embedded/IoT use. I know the stock answer to that was "we're working on ternary hardware too", but that just adds more questions - why are you redesigning the world from the ground up here? Are you going to rewrite entire embedded operating systems in ternary when you have this chip? How on earth is that going to help adoption by developers? > Didn't stop them from making a fortune with pre-mined coins during the cryptocurrency boom. Indeed, and there was some sort of spat a few weeks ago that likely saw at least one of the founders continue to fleece the community.

BubRoss 7y ago
If you talk to IOTA believers about these questions they will just spin you in circles. They will tell you that trinary computing/encryption is better, more secure, better for IOT, etc. If you ask what that even means and why it would be better, or even different from binary since it's just a different base of numbers, they will either do some sort of circular logic or just get angry. It's kind of mind blowing to have conversations with people who are heavily invested in something emotionally that falls apart with a single question. This doesn't even get into the inherent centralization or the fact that no one can actually explain how the decentralization will actually work. It isn't even comfortable realizing there are so many people like that out there.
- brighton36 7y ago
  It's a religiosity. Beliefs trump facts. They start their comprehension with a conclusion, and work backward from there to justify their desire.
  - retrac 7y ago
    You've got the marketers who want to driv up the price and the cultists who have bought in and can't imagine anything but the price going in. Coherent conversation is rarely found in such an hysterical sell-sell-sell environment.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dontdoitpls 7y ago

I'm not sure these are real as much as these are put out by iota PR people. Reddit had a massive issue with iota astroturfing.

api 7y ago
To this day most IOTA comments on Reddit will get hit within an hour by rather obvious shills.