Looking at market cap, how are objectively hyped/trash coins like this higher than monero?
Monero doesn't use PR/shill armies to promote itself. That stuff works. Something sounds interesting and has a pretty logo, people buy it. Crypto game ain't fair.
Potential new users are clearly saying it's the lack of wallets holding them back from using Monero.
Once they come out everyone will be happy. In the meantime we just need to let the developers work in peace, and hope we keep gaining market traction in the meantime.
Its continuing popularity, and recent news surrounding its choice of hash function has caused me to think more deeply about why I find Iota alarming, and why that should matter.
One of the first things you learn on investigating Iota further is that it uses balanced ternary, a numeral system with 3 digits, -1, 0 and 1. The authors have various arguments as to why they made this decision, but they come down to two main ones:
Ternary processors are theoretically more efficient than binary processors.
Certain mathematical constructs are more cleanly represented in balanced ternary.
Unfortunately, neither of these are relevant in a practical system. Iota is by necessity built to run on existing hardware, which is exclusively binary, as are the communication networks it uses. As a result, all of its internal ternary notation has to be encapsulated in binary, resulting in significant storage and computational overhead. Math must either be performed on individual ‘trits’ or first converted from binary-wrapped-ternary encoding into the machine’s native number representation, and back again afterwards.
Likewise, the theoretical benefits of a balanced ternary notation, such as not needing a sign bit, are more than outweighed by the practical disadvantages, since every processor Iota will run on is already equipped to perform math on twos-complement numbers, but requires software emulation to operate on balanced ternary.
This combination of not invented here syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect has led to a situation where the authors of Iota have decided that their affection for the tidyness of balanced ternary must outweigh all practical considerations in system design, and leads to a system that is needlessly complex.
Iota disregards cryptographic best-practices
Iota’s novel choice of numeral system also requires them to reinvent basic operations such as cryptographic hashing. This violates rule 1 of cryptography: don’t roll your own crypto.
Iota is a bad actor in the open source community
Next, and in my mind most damningly, Sergey Ivancheglo, Iota’s cofounder, claims that the flaws in the Curl hash function were in fact deliberate; that they were inserted as ‘copy protection’, to prevent copycat projects, and to allow the Iota team to compromise those projects if they sprang up.
It honestly astounds me that anyone would think this justification redeems them; it’s an admission of hostile intent towards the open-source community, akin to publishing a recipe but leaving out a critical step, rendering the resulting dish poisonous to anyone who eats it.
it’s also very revealing of Iota’s attitude towards open source; they do not release code open source because they want to make it freely available to all and advance the state of the art, but rather because it serves their purposes in gaining adoption for their own deployment of that code.
If Iota wish to discourage copycats, they can license their code in a manner that prohibits the kinds of reuse they are unhappy with, or keep it closed source, as they have done with their centralised coordinator. That, of course, would lose them the approval of the open source community.
I’m unaware of any robust proof that Iota is secure against these sorts of 51% attacks.
Likewise, I’m unaware of any proofs that the tangle will always converge; that an attacker cannot force it to have an unbounded number of leading edges, or that the system remains secure
Monero doesn't use PR/shill armies to promote itself. That stuff works. Something sounds interesting and has a pretty logo, people buy it. Crypto game ain't fair.
Potential new users are clearly saying it's the lack of wallets holding them back from using Monero.
Once they come out everyone will be happy. In the meantime we just need to let the developers work in peace, and hope we keep gaining market traction in the meantime.
Its continuing popularity, and recent news surrounding its choice of hash function has caused me to think more deeply about why I find Iota alarming, and why that should matter.
One of the first things you learn on investigating Iota further is that it uses balanced ternary, a numeral system with 3 digits, -1, 0 and 1. The authors have various arguments as to why they made this decision, but they come down to two main ones:
Ternary processors are theoretically more efficient than binary processors.
Certain mathematical constructs are more cleanly represented in balanced ternary.
Unfortunately, neither of these are relevant in a practical system. Iota is by necessity built to run on existing hardware, which is exclusively binary, as are the communication networks it uses. As a result, all of its internal ternary notation has to be encapsulated in binary, resulting in significant storage and computational overhead. Math must either be performed on individual ‘trits’ or first converted from binary-wrapped-ternary encoding into the machine’s native number representation, and back again afterwards.
Likewise, the theoretical benefits of a balanced ternary notation, such as not needing a sign bit, are more than outweighed by the practical disadvantages, since every processor Iota will run on is already equipped to perform math on twos-complement numbers, but requires software emulation to operate on balanced ternary.
This combination of not invented here syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect has led to a situation where the authors of Iota have decided that their affection for the tidyness of balanced ternary must outweigh all practical considerations in system design, and leads to a system that is needlessly complex.
Iota disregards cryptographic best-practices
Iota’s novel choice of numeral system also requires them to reinvent basic operations such as cryptographic hashing. This violates rule 1 of cryptography: don’t roll your own crypto.
Iota is a bad actor in the open source community
Next, and in my mind most damningly, Sergey Ivancheglo, Iota’s cofounder, claims that the flaws in the Curl hash function were in fact deliberate; that they were inserted as ‘copy protection’, to prevent copycat projects, and to allow the Iota team to compromise those projects if they sprang up.
It honestly astounds me that anyone would think this justification redeems them; it’s an admission of hostile intent towards the open-source community, akin to publishing a recipe but leaving out a critical step, rendering the resulting dish poisonous to anyone who eats it.
it’s also very revealing of Iota’s attitude towards open source; they do not release code open source because they want to make it freely available to all and advance the state of the art, but rather because it serves their purposes in gaining adoption for their own deployment of that code.
If Iota wish to discourage copycats, they can license their code in a manner that prohibits the kinds of reuse they are unhappy with, or keep it closed source, as they have done with their centralised coordinator. That, of course, would lose them the approval of the open source community.
I’m unaware of any robust proof that Iota is secure against these sorts of 51% attacks.
Likewise, I’m unaware of any proofs that the tangle will always converge; that an attacker cannot force it to have an unbounded number of leading edges, or that the system remains secure
