5 ms·

Tangle data-structure – The lesser known blockchain alternative

40 points by cvs268 5y ago

jamal-kumar 5y ago
Programming for this made me feel like I wanted to die inside. This was some years ago, maybe the client libraries got better somehow, no idea. I think being friendly to programmers is a pretty good way to actually get things flowing with blockchains. You mess that up from the get go and it's just no fun for anyone
- dnautics 5y ago
  did they fix the whole "rolled their own ternary crypto algorithm to be `quantum-proof`" nonsense?
  - jchonphoenix 5y ago
    Trinary. The paper said trinary ;-).
  - jamal-kumar 5y ago
    Great question! Yeah I don't think so haha it's fundamental to how it works
  - meowkit 5y ago
    Fixed - not quite, but yes, they no longer are using the winternitz one time signatures, and have deprecated the use of trinary compute logic.
s_tec 5y ago
The tangle fails to to the one thing a blockchain needs to do - prevent double-spends. Rather than give up their failed experiment once they realized it didn't work, the IOTA project instead set up centralized "coordinator" nodes to prevent double-spends, since their tangle data structure was useless. Now, there are ways to build graph-like data structures that do prevent double-spends correctly. I believe both Hedera and Nano (formerly called RaiBlocks) have working solutions, for example. The key is that not just anybody can create a block (or a graph node), as IOTA does. If anybody can create a node at any time, what prevents them from sending out contradicting messages? Instead, working solutions always involve putting some sort of asset at risk (such as currency or energy), so that if the block producer decides to make a contradicting statement, they pay a steep price. This ensures that there is a financial incentive to always work towards consensus.
pavlov 5y ago
Iota is a prime example of how blockchain projects like to cosplay as computer science by putting together a mishmash of random concepts and pretending to be solving everything while not actually solving anything meaningful. There was a time in 2017 when all you needed for a successful ICO was a flashy landing page with countdown timers and a 5-page "whitepaper" of gibberish set in Computer Modern. Maybe those days are back, with altcoins riding the hype wave again.
- thepasswordis 5y ago
  >Maybe those days are back, with altcoins riding the hype wave again. For perhaps the most egregious example of this, look at the "Cardano" project. It does nothing, without any apparent plans to even change that. Even their hello world example doesn't run. And yet it is the #4 ranked cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $44 BILLION dollars. All of it appears to have stemmed from their founders doing these creepy aspirational youtube live streams. If you're still investing in cryptocurrencies at this point, seriously look at that project and tell me that this space is reasonable. This is the 4th most popular project behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether (an obvious fraud).
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I always assumed that market cap is mostly related to speculation rather than real world usefulness.
  - rodiger 5y ago
    I mean everything they've launched works. Yes they don't have smart contracts live yet, but they do have sound tech[0] and some cool partnerships[1]. I'm no Cardano shill and would never buy at the current prices, but if I believed they had what it takes (which is more than just sound tech) to siphon off much of the Ethereum crowd and bring in more nation-state level projects in the coming years then the valuation isn't that crazy. Again, I don't have such lofty assumptions and will be waiting for smart contracts before I consider investing, but to say it does nothing is patently false- and if my time horizon were in the multiples of years then I'd probably consider inclusion in the large pool I'd spread my play-money across. Is it worth $44B right now? Obviously not, but investment is a bet on the future, not current performance- and I've been wrong a lot. [0] https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ [1] https://www.coindesk.com/from-paper-to-cardano-blockchain-iohk-in-ethiopia https://www.coindesk.com/from-paper-to-cardano-blockchain-io...
mgerullis 5y ago
Isn’t that the blockchain that just stopped working for a few days a while back?
epF8fY 5y ago
There are a lot of negative comments on this thread. I think a lot of the criticism is valid, but also somewhat out of date. I've followed this project for quite some time and it's true that the original version of IOTA in 2017 was deeply flawed, used some questionable (to say the least) design decisions like winternitz one time signatures and trinary. Some of the founders acted in really ugly ways online when people identified the many real problems with the protocol. But in the last year or so the project has made a lot of interesting developments, redesigned the protocol to remove the 'exotic' design decisions, parted ways with some of the controversial founders and developed into a more mature research project. To solve the issue of double spends, they developed a consensus protocol called Fast Probabilistic Consensus, a leaderless voting protocol, that draws on the "voter models" introduced in the 70s by Holley and Liggett and Clifford and Sudbury. The research has been published and peer reviewed, and is implemented in a test-net which is open source and currently running without a central coordinator. The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10895 https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10895 and the testnet codebase is here https://github.com/iotaledger/goshimmer https://github.com/iotaledger/goshimmer And without going too far down the rabbit hole, it seems in the more recent versions of the decentralized test net, the FPC works alongside a kind of consensus which might be described as "Nakamoto Consensus on the DAG" where writing ledger updates is the same as voting on conflicting transactions, so that the behavior of updating the ledger also communicates node opinions on a given conflict set without additional message overhead. I can understand why there is a lot of distrust of this project - there were many bad decisions in the past, and bad communication on top. But, in my personal opinion, if you dig a bit deeper into the research they are doing there is some very interesting stuff going on.

40 points by cvs268 5y ago

Programming for this made me feel like I wanted to die inside. This was some years ago, maybe the client libraries got better somehow, no idea. I think being friendly to programmers is a pretty good way to actually get things flowing with blockchains. You mess that up from the get go and it's just no fun for anyone

dnautics 5y ago
did they fix the whole "rolled their own ternary crypto algorithm to be `quantum-proof`" nonsense?
- jchonphoenix 5y ago
  Trinary. The paper said trinary ;-).
- jamal-kumar 5y ago
  Great question! Yeah I don't think so haha it's fundamental to how it works
- meowkit 5y ago
  Fixed - not quite, but yes, they no longer are using the winternitz one time signatures, and have deprecated the use of trinary compute logic.

s_tec 5y ago

The tangle fails to to the one thing a blockchain needs to do - prevent double-spends. Rather than give up their failed experiment once they realized it didn't work, the IOTA project instead set up centralized "coordinator" nodes to prevent double-spends, since their tangle data structure was useless. Now, there are ways to build graph-like data structures that do prevent double-spends correctly. I believe both Hedera and Nano (formerly called RaiBlocks) have working solutions, for example. The key is that not just anybody can create a block (or a graph node), as IOTA does. If anybody can create a node at any time, what prevents them from sending out contradicting messages? Instead, working solutions always involve putting some sort of asset at risk (such as currency or energy), so that if the block producer decides to make a contradicting statement, they pay a steep price. This ensures that there is a financial incentive to always work towards consensus.

pavlov 5y ago

Iota is a prime example of how blockchain projects like to cosplay as computer science by putting together a mishmash of random concepts and pretending to be solving everything while not actually solving anything meaningful. There was a time in 2017 when all you needed for a successful ICO was a flashy landing page with countdown timers and a 5-page "whitepaper" of gibberish set in Computer Modern. Maybe those days are back, with altcoins riding the hype wave again.

thepasswordis 5y ago
>Maybe those days are back, with altcoins riding the hype wave again. For perhaps the most egregious example of this, look at the "Cardano" project. It does nothing, without any apparent plans to even change that. Even their hello world example doesn't run. And yet it is the #4 ranked cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $44 BILLION dollars. All of it appears to have stemmed from their founders doing these creepy aspirational youtube live streams. If you're still investing in cryptocurrencies at this point, seriously look at that project and tell me that this space is reasonable. This is the 4th most popular project behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether (an obvious fraud).
- Zababa 5y ago
  I always assumed that market cap is mostly related to speculation rather than real world usefulness.
- rodiger 5y ago
  I mean everything they've launched works. Yes they don't have smart contracts live yet, but they do have sound tech[0] and some cool partnerships[1]. I'm no Cardano shill and would never buy at the current prices, but if I believed they had what it takes (which is more than just sound tech) to siphon off much of the Ethereum crowd and bring in more nation-state level projects in the coming years then the valuation isn't that crazy. Again, I don't have such lofty assumptions and will be waiting for smart contracts before I consider investing, but to say it does nothing is patently false- and if my time horizon were in the multiples of years then I'd probably consider inclusion in the large pool I'd spread my play-money across. Is it worth $44B right now? Obviously not, but investment is a bet on the future, not current performance- and I've been wrong a lot. [0] https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ [1] https://www.coindesk.com/from-paper-to-cardano-blockchain-iohk-in-ethiopia https://www.coindesk.com/from-paper-to-cardano-blockchain-io...

mgerullis 5y ago

Isn’t that the blockchain that just stopped working for a few days a while back?

epF8fY 5y ago

There are a lot of negative comments on this thread. I think a lot of the criticism is valid, but also somewhat out of date. I've followed this project for quite some time and it's true that the original version of IOTA in 2017 was deeply flawed, used some questionable (to say the least) design decisions like winternitz one time signatures and trinary. Some of the founders acted in really ugly ways online when people identified the many real problems with the protocol. But in the last year or so the project has made a lot of interesting developments, redesigned the protocol to remove the 'exotic' design decisions, parted ways with some of the controversial founders and developed into a more mature research project. To solve the issue of double spends, they developed a consensus protocol called Fast Probabilistic Consensus, a leaderless voting protocol, that draws on the "voter models" introduced in the 70s by Holley and Liggett and Clifford and Sudbury. The research has been published and peer reviewed, and is implemented in a test-net which is open source and currently running without a central coordinator. The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10895 https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10895 and the testnet codebase is here https://github.com/iotaledger/goshimmer https://github.com/iotaledger/goshimmer And without going too far down the rabbit hole, it seems in the more recent versions of the decentralized test net, the FPC works alongside a kind of consensus which might be described as "Nakamoto Consensus on the DAG" where writing ledger updates is the same as voting on conflicting transactions, so that the behavior of updating the ledger also communicates node opinions on a given conflict set without additional message overhead. I can understand why there is a lot of distrust of this project - there were many bad decisions in the past, and bad communication on top. But, in my personal opinion, if you dig a bit deeper into the research they are doing there is some very interesting stuff going on.