IOTA is built by a bunch of technical founders who know enough about blockchain to confuse a lot of non-experts into thinking they are really smart and credible.
But you will see very consistently in the cryptocurrency space that the experts refuse to endorse iota, and frequently say strongly negative things about it.
They are very effective at selling snake oil, but that's all their blockchain is. The tangle that they have designed is neither scalable nor secure. Every node still needs to verify every transaction, and because there is no mining it's trivial to double spend if you have a few machines that focus on cranking out as many transactions as possible.
If you understand enough about blockchains to find security flaws in an insecure system, all you need to do to believe me is learn more about iota. Their flaws are not subtle, there are many of them, and they are substantial.
If you are not expert enough to analyze the security properties of various blockchains, look for reviews of iota by other experts. You will not find any positive ones by people with significant standing. Not from the ethereum camp, not from the bitcoin camp, not from the academic camp.
This is not because of some iota vs. the world conspiracy. It's because iota is genuinely a terrible cryptocurrency.
I do not own IOTA - thought about it some months back but decided against it because I don't fancy doing trades on or supporting Bitfinex.
Another HN user swayed me away from Monero - which I owned a large part of as he told me about scaling issues.
But my question is to your advice about: look to other experts. As someone coming outside the crypto-universe it is kind of hard to distill who the real experts are - so any advice on how to distill/find credible sources of information in this space?
Do scaling issues really matter?! Bitcoin hasn't dealt with its scaling issues, and Monero is an extremely far way away from it in needing to deal with issues of scale.
Many of Bitcoin's scaling innovations could be applied to Monero as well.
The only reason misinformation can thrive in the first place is because people choose to believe what other people say, rather than slowly, but steadily, acquiring the relevant knowledge, until they can judge by themselves.
If people either a) didn’t show interest in something they don’t understand, or b) acquired the necessary level of knowledge to judge — by themselves — the validity of some concept, misinformation would be unable to survive.
This is a weird rule of thumb but I don’t trust anyone or any team in the cryptocurrency space who doesn’t have a technical background from a top university. When the noise is high, I need a better signal.
Many people in the crypto space are peddling their own agendas.
I've read the tangle paper. It seems as the node transaction weights grow, the double spend problem is solved (transaction nodes gain weight as others confirm). Arguably you could have bad actors confirming transactions but that is why the coordinator exists until there are enough transactions happening where a coordinated double-spend attack is not feasible.
Looking at tfha's post history, you can see he does not support POS as secure either and refers to the opinions of the bitcoin team. These are two red flags for me.
There are others that do not act in your best interest taking center stage in the crypto world.
There are many very well respected computer scientists in the iota foundation and I'm sure they are well aware of any issues the coin will have along the way.
Edit: Don't trust me either. Do your own research.
That's incorrect because of the assymetry between attackers and normal users. An attacker needs only generate as many transactions as the rest of the network combined, and indeed this isn't that expensive.
A single consumer machine can generate hundreds, if not thousands of transactions per second. A fleet of specialized machines costing less than 7 figures total can do millions, if not hundreds of millions, of transactions per second.
Sure, if you wait for a sufficiently large weight on top of your transaction, then you solve the double spend problem. But you need at the bare minimum that every transaction that happened at roughly the same time as yours to be included as an indirect child of your tips. If you do not understand that sentence, please try to, as it is the very reason that IOTA doesn't scale (and isn't fundamentally different from usual blockchains in any sense other than a somewhat contrived construction).
If I understand the issue you've pointed out correctly, this is why the coordinator currently exists. Once there are constantly running zero value transactions all around us (self driving cars, smart sensors, etc), then that becomes trivial.
IE the number of indirect children of your tip increases at a rate of roughly 2^n (less due to random tip selection). This leads to confirmation in an exponential fashion.
> It seems as the node transaction weights grow, the double spend problem is solved (transaction nodes gain weight as others confirm). Arguably you could have bad actors confirming transactions but that is why the coordinator exists until there are enough transactions happening where a coordinated double-spend attack is not feasible.
What is the fundamental assumption that makes the paper assert that this problem will be solved in the future?
Is the assumption that hashing power will be spread more evenly among nodes? And, if so, what is the basis for assuming this? It's certainly not what we see with Bitcoin.
Is the case that the IOTA security model breaks down if hashing power is unevenly distributed?
IOTA currently uses a masternode called the coordinator that verifies all transactions. The coordinator is a necessary feature until there's enough transactions to secure the tangle without out (millions per second?)
Precisely. Food for thought: IOTA nowadays is not only fully centralized currency (in any meaningful technical sense), but it also has a much higher market cap than Bitcoin had a few months ago. So, is the market really valuing decentralization as much as we think?
Is that a rhetorical question — majority of new money coming in is all spectualation, no actual faith in the product; how do you tell? They all convert back to fiat after convincing themselves they sold to a greater fool.
The point is that its questionable whether it will work in practice, or ever reach the level of adoption needed to be autonomous. Treating IOTA now as a potential payment system to rival bitcoin is hugely risky.
I agree that it's risky but a lot of people here are making it sound like the plague. There is inherent risk in all cryptos. IOTA being a totally new concept to crypto currency makes it a little more risky but that doesn't mean that it should be abandoned or destroyed. The vision and benefits of it are great! $0 transactions and no miners sucking up electricity! I just don't get the hate.
This type of sentence is often intellectually dangerous. It's the basic pattern for a false equivalence -- brushing the differences under the rug.
You are essentially saying that risk1 === risk2, without any justification.
The default position when comparing thing1 to thing2, in any complex domain, is that they are not exactly the same, and we should be very cautious when trying to generalize from one to the other.
Which is why I said that IOTA is more risky because it is a new concept. The justification is that to stand up "The Tangle", the Coordinator is necessary at this time. Nobody has been giving any other ideas than FUD.
Weirdly enough, they have multiple academic members in their team. Must be one of the only teams with such high requirements for academia. Also, please enlighten us with some of your findings or sources pointing out IOTA weaknesses so that they can be discussed here and can be conveyed to the dev team.
You've been using this account for a single purpose in addition to violating the guidelines by including personal attacks. We ban accounts like this, so could you please stop now?
But you will see very consistently in the cryptocurrency space that the experts refuse to endorse iota, and frequently say strongly negative things about it.
They are very effective at selling snake oil, but that's all their blockchain is. The tangle that they have designed is neither scalable nor secure. Every node still needs to verify every transaction, and because there is no mining it's trivial to double spend if you have a few machines that focus on cranking out as many transactions as possible.
If you understand enough about blockchains to find security flaws in an insecure system, all you need to do to believe me is learn more about iota. Their flaws are not subtle, there are many of them, and they are substantial.
If you are not expert enough to analyze the security properties of various blockchains, look for reviews of iota by other experts. You will not find any positive ones by people with significant standing. Not from the ethereum camp, not from the bitcoin camp, not from the academic camp.
This is not because of some iota vs. the world conspiracy. It's because iota is genuinely a terrible cryptocurrency.