
IOTA: Cannot be used for IoT, loss of funds may occur - davidgerard
https://shitcoin.com/iota-cannot-be-used-for-iot-loss-of-funds-may-occur-e45b1ed9dd6b?ho1
======
andr
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
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-
hack...](https://www.ccn.com/a-number-of-iota-wallets-emptied-by-hackers-due-
to-online-seed-generators/)

~~~
gsich
That's not IOTAs fault.

~~~
bjl
It kind of is, since this functionality should've shipped with the wallet,
like it does with every other crypto.

~~~
generalizethis
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.

------
Tepix
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.

~~~
acejam
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
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.

------
abrkn
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.

~~~
justboxing
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/rebu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7we3x0/rebuff_for_andreas_brekkens_recent_fud_to_iota/)

Direct link: [https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-
cl...](https://medium.com/@ralf/andreas-brekken-proves-he-has-no-clue-about-
the-internet-of-things-823a0b03e0ea)

~~~
abrkn
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
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.

------
Asdfbla
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.

------
SippinLean
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_

------
blakenomad
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.

------
simias
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.

~~~
iuguy
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.

~~~
nuttycoin
How do you allow machine to machine payments in a trustless manner without
some sort of value transfer protocol? How do you make these transactions with
periodic internet connection? Are you saying IoT devices will not need to pay
each other?

~~~
iuguy
> How do you allow machine to machine payments in a trustless manner without
> some sort of value transfer protocol?

Can you explain to me why this is needed? I genuinely can't think of instances
where machines need to pay each other, let alone in a trustless manner vs a
centralized solution. People, sure. Machines, no. I'm not trying to be
difficult, I've spent weeks trying to think of a situation I've worked on
within the IoT space where the machines need to pay each other and haven't
been able to come up with one.

> How do you make these transactions with periodic internet connection?

Again, why would you make such transactions with periodic internet
connections? What is the size of the market for semi-connected IoT devices to
bill each other, as opposed to the organisations or people using them?

> Are you saying IoT devices will not need to pay each other?

I'm not saying that. I genuinely haven't been able to think of a situation
where a decentralized payment mechanism is necessary. I'll give you a quick
rundown of some of the things we can consider IoT that I've done security work
on over the past 15 years, and perhaps you can give me some use cases where
decentralized machine to machine payment is needed.

1\. Process control system for natural resource management - so there's pipes,
stuff going through the pipes and PLCs managing the flow.

2\. Home routers connected to the Internet with Wifi networks (Think Linksys
etc)

3\. The Sphero Spiderman kids toy (This was for a third-party, I didn't work
for Sphero on this).

4\. An Internet-capable TV running different apps like YouTube, Vimeo etc.

5\. An in-car location tracking device used to reduce car insurance payments
based on speed, areas driven in and types of road driven on.

I can kind of see some sort of situation where some of the above might have
payment integration useful, but none where it needs to happen on the device
itself. If you have any use cases for IOTA where a centralized alternative
won't beat it or doesn't already exist, I'd genuinely love to know. It's my
biggest stumbling block.

~~~
nuttycoin
Are you familiar with the term "fog computing?"

This is one of the main reasons for which IOTA was created. The term was
invented by Cisco and since then there has been a lot of effort to come up
with a solution.

How do you achieve fog computing with no means of transaction of value?
Devices will need to pay each other for resource sharing, be it computing
power, storage, data, or electricity. Your neighbors will not provide
resources to you if you cannot pay them.

The problem with centralized payment systems is that they are not
permissionless. If you hook your IoT device to your VISA card, your device
needs to establish a connection with VISA every time it needs to make a
payment, and you need your counterparty to accept payments from VISA. In
addition, a large percentage of IoT transactions will be microtransactions. A
centralized payment system will have to process insane amounts of transactions
whose value are << $.01. IOTA flash channels allow for the streaming of data
and payments in real time.

A unique property of IOTA is that it is partition-tolerant. Offline nodes can
form local subtangles and attach them to the main tangle once internet
connection is restored. This is impossible with a centralized payment system.

Finally, IOTA is just as much a data transmission protocol as it is a payment
protocol. Data transmission on the tangle helps data become more tamper-proof,
another important issue in the world of IoT.

------
testdeep
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
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
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.

------
arcaster
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...

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

~~~
iuguy
When you see someone mention Bosch, ask them what Bosch are actually using it
for. Not in, but for.

What is the utility that IOTA provides, that Bosch are deploying at
production, and where is this used?

You won't get a decent answer because as far as I can tell there isn't one.

~~~
izelkay
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7sxgx0/bosch_ama_janu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7sxgx0/bosch_ama_january_25th/)

~~~
iuguy
Ok, I'll split the question into 3 and make it clear that you didn't answer
it.

What is the utility that IOTA provides?

There's nothing in your link that talks about the utility that IOTA provides.
There's machine to machine payments, but that's not really utility because
currently machines don't pay each other, users do. There's no actual demand
for machines to pay each other. This isn't unsurprising because it's a new
technology and sometimes technology has to develop the demand.

What are Bosch are deploying at production?

The link you supplied has nothing being deployed at production. There's talk
of the XDK, but that's a developer kit, not a final product. If you go to the
XDK site and search for IOTA, iota or tangle you get no results. This is not
contingent with the importance that IOTA supporters place on the Bosch
relationship.

Where is this used?

According to the link you've posted, there are a number of Proof of Concepts,
but no actual deployments at production scale. It's not being used outside of
PoC at this stage.

The thing is, you could've just tried answering the question but posting an
AMA that doesn't answer it is frankly, shitty. If you believe it does answer
the above 3 questions, at least do the decent thread and link to the comments
with the answers.

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

------
nuttycoin
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
"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?

