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Disclaimer: I'm not IOTA's biggest fan, I broke their ternary hash function and one of the IOTA co-founders threatened to sue me after I disclosed the vulnerabi

Disclaimer: I'm not IOTA's biggest fan, I broke their ternary hash function and one of the IOTA co-founders threatened to sue me after I disclosed the vulnerability to them. See previous hn thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457120 Following on with your discussion of Ternary in networking networking switches, I think Balanced Ternary can be mathematically elegant way to represent numbers. We shouldn't completely dismiss it just because currently we have massive path dependencies on binary. However in the context of a highly ambitious project, such as IOTA, which is attempting to integrate with a large number of deployed systems that use binary, it is a mistake to switch to ternary. None of the existing tooling works, you have to write custom software for stuff that in binary have already been built and well tested. tl;dr Doing one impossible thing is hard enough, never try to do two impossible things at the same time.

moefh 7y ago
> Balanced Ternary can be mathematically elegant way to represent numbers When discussing ternary computation, I always see people talking about representation and storage. In these aspects, ternary can indeed be more elegant and efficient than binary. I never see any discussion about the complexity of the physical circuits, though. From the little I have seen (see [1]) it seems that using ternary circuits for computation will never be a good idea. Even though you'd need fewer wires to carry information, that advantage is more than cancelled by the increased complexity of the computation circuits themselves (those papers compare specifically binary and ternary adders and multipliers). [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.06841.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.06841.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.07299.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.07299.pdf

moefh 7y ago

> Balanced Ternary can be mathematically elegant way to represent numbers When discussing ternary computation, I always see people talking about representation and storage. In these aspects, ternary can indeed be more elegant and efficient than binary. I never see any discussion about the complexity of the physical circuits, though. From the little I have seen (see [1]) it seems that using ternary circuits for computation will never be a good idea. Even though you'd need fewer wires to carry information, that advantage is more than cancelled by the increased complexity of the computation circuits themselves (those papers compare specifically binary and ternary adders and multipliers). [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.06841.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.06841.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.07299.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.07299.pdf