[SamuelBRoberts]

'cause it's a joke currency. I mean it's better than bitconnect, which is a ponzi, but beyond that it's goofier than any of the others in the top 10.

There's a hilarious thread on Reddit which I will try to pull up when I have some more time, which consists of Vitalik Buterin the Money Skeleton absolutely dismantling the IOTA design, and one of their programmers trying to defend himself with shitty English and even shittier logic.

[semibaron]

You are talking about this https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/..._core_dev/

One should definitely read the two top comments. The first one, vbuterin, is Vitalik, the brain behind Ethereum and the second one, come_from_beyond, is the brain behind IOTA. After reading this, for me it's clear that Vitalik doesn't have a clue about the IOTA design.

Everyone should make up his own mind.

[SamuelBRoberts]

I spent some more time reading about IOTA, just to be sure I was giving it a fair shake. What I found is horrifying.

1.) The program seems to be doing all operations in ternary (Not binary) due to some nonsense about radixes. It's difficult to explain to someone with an engineering background how retarded this is. I'm struggling to come up with an analogy.
2.) Because they're doing this ternary crap, they can't use existing cryptographic libraries and have to create their own. Creating your own crypto, particularly for a billion dollar network, is possibly the stupidest thing you could do. Cryptographic libraries take YEARS to create, and require dozens of high level researchers banging on them repeatedly. Even then, screwups are common. There are no words to describe how reckless, stupid, and irresponsible it is to allow the amount of money that exists on the IOTA network to be protected by untested cryptographic functions.
3.) Because they decided to roll their own crypto, they were already caught with serious security flaws in their code. SERIOUS flaws, like "An attacker can spend all your money" and "An attacker can empty your balance". Again, completely irresponsible.
4.) Rather than own up to the fact that they'd fucked up, they said that they'd put these flaws in their code deliberately, to... keep people from forking their code? Again, and I hate to keep using this phrase, it's impossible to describe how stupid this is. 5.) No formal proof that this tangle shit works exists, or that it's not vulnerable to serious security flaws on a fundamental level. The excuses for this again, are mind-boggling. "We're working on a proof." "We'll get to it." "We can't hire any researchers to do it because they all have conflicts of interest." Without a formal proof, you have no idea if what they're proposing is even possible. That proof should've existed and been rock-fucking-solid before they even took a dime from anyone, let alone built a billion dollar network.
6.) The team itself is immature, prone to ad-hominem, profanity, weird digressions into politics, and paranoid delusions of grandeur. Look at the link above and watch the team lead tell VITALIK BUTERIN, of all people, that he doesn't know how to create a cryptocurrency. With Satoshi in hiding, Buterin is the planet's foremost expert on large scale cryptocurrency design. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, saying "You don't understand this" and "You don't know enough to comment" shows a level of arrogance that's simply staggering. IOTA's tech isn't that unique, and the issues Vitalik pointed out were mostly non-technological in nature anyway.

And this isn't even getting into the problems with their ridiculous specialized hardware or their centralized coordinator.

This thing deserves to have a 10 million dollar marketcap alongside minor hobbyist projects like BIS and SEM. Hell, Bismuth has a better use case and it's run by one dude on twitter.

I said above that this thing was better than bitconnect, the ponzi scheme. I take that back. This thing is a joke. At least Bitconnect pays out money before its inevitable collapse.

[JayJuanGee]

(10-24-2017 11:11 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

I spent some more time reading about IOTA, just to be sure I was giving it a fair shake. What I found is horrifying.

1.) The program seems to be doing all operations in ternary (Not binary) due to some nonsense about radixes. It's difficult to explain to someone with an engineering background how retarded this is. I'm struggling to come up with an analogy.
2.) Because they're doing this ternary crap, they can't use existing cryptographic libraries and have to create their own. Creating your own crypto, particularly for a billion dollar network, is possibly the stupidest thing you could do. Cryptographic libraries take YEARS to create, and require dozens of high level researchers banging on them repeatedly. Even then, screwups are common. There are no words to describe how reckless, stupid, and irresponsible it is to allow the amount of money that exists on the IOTA network to be protected by untested cryptographic functions.
3.) Because they decided to roll their own crypto, they were already caught with serious security flaws in their code. SERIOUS flaws, like "An attacker can spend all your money" and "An attacker can empty your balance". Again, completely irresponsible.
4.) Rather than own up to the fact that they'd fucked up, they said that they'd put these flaws in their code deliberately, to... keep people from forking their code? Again, and I hate to keep using this phrase, it's impossible to describe how stupid this is. 5.) No formal proof that this tangle shit works exists, or that it's not vulnerable to serious security flaws on a fundamental level. The excuses for this again, are mind-boggling. "We're working on a proof." "We'll get to it." "We can't hire any researchers to do it because they all have conflicts of interest." Without a formal proof, you have no idea if what they're proposing is even possible. That proof should've existed and been rock-fucking-solid before they even took a dime from anyone, let alone built a billion dollar network.
6.) The team itself is immature, prone to ad-hominem, profanity, weird digressions into politics, and paranoid delusions of grandeur. Look at the link above and watch the team lead tell VITALIK BUTERIN, of all people, that he doesn't know how to create a cryptocurrency. With Satoshi in hiding, Buterin is the planet's foremost expert on large scale cryptocurrency design. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, saying "You don't understand this" and "You don't know enough to comment" shows a level of arrogance that's simply staggering. IOTA's tech isn't that unique, and the issues Vitalik pointed out were mostly non-technological in nature anyway.

And this isn't even getting into the problems with their ridiculous specialized hardware or their centralized coordinator.

This thing deserves to have a 10 million dollar marketcap alongside minor hobbyist projects like BIS and SEM. Hell, Bismuth has a better use case and it's run by one dude on twitter.

I said above that this thing was better than bitconnect, the ponzi scheme. I take that back. This thing is a joke. At least Bitconnect pays out money before its inevitable collapse.

Hahahahahaha

Thanks for torturing yourself in reading some of the various IOTA materials for the benefits of the rest of us, in order that we don't have to sort through such crap.

I suppose a kind of self-sacrifice that you have done for us.

Further, SamR, your comments above seem almost too nice regarding what seems to be going on with IOTA and the supposed intentions of the developers, and it sounds like an outright and purposeful scam under the guise of a "legit" project, rather than an actual legit project that is at least attempting to straighten things out... they don't seem to be attempting the straightening of anything.... tangling themselves in the tangle, and hopefully not sucking too many RVFers into such messy smoke and mirrors.

[yaku]

A Q and A with the main guy at IOTA....according to him, IOTA is going into "hyperdrive" over the next few days.

[SamuelBRoberts]

I almost forgot the best part:

After it came out that they'd deliberately inserted security flaws into their billion-dollar network (Or rather, that's what they claimed. I think they just fucked up.) one of their users begged them to reveal whether there were any more "copy protection" flaws that could potentially disable the network or result in an attacker stealing funds.

They refused.

So it's safe to assume that there's more flaws in the code, and that any money you have stored could be stolen at any time.

Absolutely hilarious. Man, I knew there was something up with IOTA, but I didn't realize it was this bad.

[semibaron]

For those who are interested in the distribution, here is a recent analysis.

https://medium.com/@romansemko/iota-tang...b61a187388

[SamuelBRoberts]

(10-27-2017 01:59 PM)semibaron Wrote:  

For those who are interested in the distribution, here is a recent analysis.

https://medium.com/@romansemko/iota-tang...b61a187388

Does the growth in wallets he's talking about have anything to do with the fact that they somehow fucked up their network and caused many people to lose their funds, and the fix involves generating lots of new addresses until one works?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7...g_general/

[dasher]

how does that even happen?

Did the tangle just forget which addresses are supposed to have iotas?

[SamuelBRoberts]

(10-27-2017 10:18 PM)dasher Wrote:  

how does that even happen?

Did the tangle just forget which addresses are supposed to have iotas?

Perhaps nuking their own network was another form of "copy protection", to ensure that "scammers" couldn't fork the network?
Maybe they've upgraded the "feeless transactions" feature to the next level: "moneyless accounts"?

Or perhaps they're technically incompetent people with an excellent promo team and a knack for shiny buzzwords like "blockless blockchain", "feeless transactions", and "internet of things", and who parlayed that knack into a billion dollars?

I still want to know what happens when somebody does a formal proof, and shows that not only is it possible to nuke the tangle network, it's computationally cheap. What happens then? Does everybody's money just go up in a poof of smoke?

[semibaron]

SamuelBRoberts, please be so kind and stop posting crap all time long. Some hints regarding security issues in the software are valid concerns, but don't highlight every rumor/fud post from reddit or medium as the ultimate truth. Even more so when it just takes a look at the official IOTA channels to find an explanation/solution. At least then mention both sides of the argument.

Here is an explanation how to recover 0 balances and why it happened.
https://forum.helloiota.com/588/Help-My-...lance-v253

[SamuelBRoberts]

(10-28-2017 10:17 AM)semibaron Wrote:  

SamuelBRoberts, please be so kind and stop posting crap all time long. Some hints regarding security issues in the software are valid concerns, but don't highlight every rumor/fud post from reddit or medium as the ultimate truth. Even more so when it just takes a look at the official IOTA channels to find an explanation/solution. At least then mention both sides of the argument.

Here is an explanation how to recover 0 balances and why it happened.
https://forum.helloiota.com/588/Help-My-...lance-v253

That is an amazing, amazing link. Every time I think I've hit the bottom of IOTA's horribleness, I look into it further and find out that it's even worse than I thought. This is truly an astonishing piece of software.

So here's how people lost access to their money:
1.) The IOTA database is so poorly designed that it needs to be manually "pruned" from time to time to keep from getting too big. This is called taking a snapshot.
2.) When a snapshot is taken, any transactions in progress will be immediately canceled. So you could be sending your buddy rent money and it just won't get there because the system decided it was snapshot day.
3.) But snapshot taking also destroys the link between your wallet and your actual money that's stored on the database. So when a snapshot is taken, you can no longer access your money.
4.) You can get it back, though, by manually re-entering every address your wallet has ever used. For most people, you only need to manually re-enter 12-24 addresses to get your money back, but if you've been actually using the wallet, you may need to enter over 150. So be prepared to spend an afternoon blindly copy/pasting numbers if you want to see your cash again. Hope you weren't planning on doing anything with that money any time soon.

Oh, but it gets worse! (With IOTA it always gets worse.)
Some users might find that spending a whole afternoon copy/pasting 150 addresses wasn't enough to get their money back. This is because with IOTA, the creators can arbitrarily take your money at any time. I'm not clear if the creators simply deny you access to it, or if they physically move it into their control, but either way last week large amounts of the userbase suddenly found themselves with zero access to their cash. In the most recent case, there was a critical bug that could allow anyone who wanted to the ability to spend your money, so they decided it to "fix" the bug by taking the money. Now if you want it back you have to go fill out a form, and presumably you'll get it back.

Of course, how valuable your cryptocurrency is when the owners can press a button and instantly shut you off from your cash, well... that's something you'll have to decide.

semibaron, do you have any more links about IOTA? I've gotta admit this is becoming something of a mini-hobby of mine. I've been doing tech stuff all my life and I've never seen a project like this. Every time I think I've fully grasped how stupid it is, I look deeper and find out that I didn't really know anything at all.

Maybe some links about their plans for machine to machine micropayments? I haven't had time to look at those yet and I bet they're hilarious.

[Transsimian]

[semibaron]

You can say whatever you want against IOTA, but after the last 2 weeks with all the drama around BTC & Co I'm very happy that the underlying technology, the Tangle, doesn't allow for any bullshit such as hard forks or being kept hostage by mining cartels.

[SamuelBRoberts]

Yeah it just has a single, centralized point of failure, deliberately induced bugs and the ability for the creators to take your money any time they want it.


I'll stick with the slow transaction times, honestly.

[yaku]

I tried selling mine earlier but problems with the wallet stopped that plan.

I'm going to ride it out. Seems to be getting a lot of buzz lately.

[semibaron]

OKEx is going to list IOTA from 20th November onwards. Get ready for China Money!

https://twitter.com/OKEx_/status/929716829311836160

[semibaron]

Announcement of the IOTA Foundation & clarification about the Roadmap

https://youtu.be/yyaFbBWutu8?t=1h17m33s

[yaku]

Up to 93 cents now. Interesting stuff happening with it as well.

[yaku]

Up 40% today, ($1.15), getting listed on a major Korean exchange tomorrow, with some more big news coming soon.

[semibaron]

IOTA = Scam

Then all major companies collaborate with them



Introduction of the IOTA data marketplace. Check it out at https://data.iota.org/. Read the full story here.

[SamuelBRoberts]

I love it. Multiple paragraphs laying out in detail the problems with IOTA, and the response is "Oh yeah? Well they've partnered with Thondheim Kommune and the Enexis group!"

It's an idiot coin, built by idiots and sold to idiots. Doesn't mean you can't make money off it, because of course you can make money off of any coin in this ridiculous bull market. But it's an idiot coin.

[yaku]

I love how someone who clearly has no idea about the technology, or the research, or the people behind IOTA, will read a few critical paragraphs about the coin and automatically think he has complete knowledge about the technology, the research, and the people behind it.

[yaku]

Oh no, Fujitsu obviously doesn't read Samuel's posts. Tell them it's a scam coin, Samuel!

Quote:

“The possibilities of applications based on Blockchain and especially Tangle (“next generation Blockchain”) are immense. Providing public access to valuable data is one of the most pressing challenges within IOT. The Data Marketplace of the IOTA Foundation is one of the most innovative initiatives in this area. As one of the world’s largest IT companies, Fujitsu is strongly supportive by developing Blockchain and Tangle-based offerings and actively integrating them as scalable solutions into the ecosystems of our customers.”

Microsoft didn't either.

Quote:

Up-and-coming cryptocurrency startup IOTA has partnered with Microsoft, Fujitsu, and twenty more companies to launch the first publicly accessible data marketplace for the Internet of Things. What makes this undertaking especially intriguing is that the marketplace will be entirely powered by a distributed ledger.

The initiative, which will allow stakeholders to share and monetize their data in a secure way, aims to demonstrate a proof of concept for a tamper-proof data marketplace. Once uploaded to IOTA’s decentralized ledger, all data is distributed to countless nodes in order to ensure immutability.

[yaku]

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/11/...ocurrency/

Microsoft and IOTA launch first cryptocurrency market for the Internet of Things

Up-and-coming cryptocurrency startup IOTA has partnered with Microsoft, Fujitsu, and twenty more companies to launch the first publicly accessible data marketplace for the Internet of Things. What makes this undertaking especially intriguing is that the marketplace will be entirely powered by a distributed ledger.

The initiative, which will allow stakeholders to share and monetize their data in a secure way, aims to demonstrate a proof of concept for a tamper-proof data marketplace. Once uploaded to IOTA’s decentralized ledger, all data is distributed to countless nodes in order to ensure immutability.

IOTA is currently the ninth biggest cryptocurrency by market share on Coin Market Cap, boasting a market cap of $2.95 billion. What is notable is that IOTA uses an interesting new technique to distribute and decentralize its ledger. Unlike standard blockchain technology used by most companies, IOTA relies on a method it calls Tangle.

Compared to blockchain, IOTA co-founders Dominik Schiener and David Sønstebø claim Tangle offers free transactions and much better scaling opportunities.

Those curious to see how Tangle works in practice can check out this visual demo of how the network scales.

“We are very excited to announce the launch of our data marketplace,” said Sønstebø. “This will act as a catalyst for a whole new paradigm of research, artificial intelligence, and democratization of data.”

In addition to Microsoft and Fujitsu, a number of other high-profile companies – including Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Accenture, and PwC – will also participate in the demo.

“We are excited to partner with the IOTA Foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative,” said Microsoft blockchain specialist Omkar Naik.

“This next generation [sic] technology will accelerate the connected, intelligent world and go beyond blockchain that will foster innovation real world solutions, applications and pilots for our customers,” he continued.

The marketplace demo will run until January. IOTA has promised to release a series of blog posts and case studies to showcase the various ways in which companies and individuals can benefit from using its technology.

Ordinary netizens will also have a chance to sell their data on the marketplace by connecting their IoT devices to the IOTA ledger. This will enable them to cash in on various data like weather station statistics and more.