Is IOTA dead?

[The Komodo Dragon]

Is Iota dead? Their devs are very scammy and put viruses on their open source code and there are many fishy things

it is also slow too and their network seems to be dead



IOTA's team is extremely unprofessional and their claims are pure hype. It is everyone's responsibility to counter misinformation wherever they encounter it, especially when a lot of people are being suckered in by it.

is iota dead?

https://twitter.com/KyleSamani/status/937886293803065345
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/6yzm9g/integrity_question_for_come_from_beyond_sergey/dmsxaa5/
https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1908194b

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.

[xroreg]

Is Iota dead? Their devs are very scammy and put viruses on their open source code and there are many fishy things
it is also slow too and their network seems to be dead

Where did you got this info?  Any proof?  Link?

I have some Iota. Your post sounds scary

[Humans]

Dead? They haven't even released their product yet and still sit at 12b mkt cap...

[sona12]

is this all real?

[dumplingsandsushi]

I'm sorry to say, but this has got to be one of the worst threads and posts I've seen in quite awhile.
Probably the best thing to do is to just not respond and let it die out but here I am anyways.

To me, when I see a bunch of new posts about lineage, then i see a newbie with very little forum activity come and post an iota fud thread with no actual evidence to back up claims, it seems obvious that there is a group that is trying to pump lineage right now. (btw, wtf is lineage?)

Or, if you are a conspiracy theorist, perhaps it is someone from iota who is trying to trigger massive sell outs of iota since the price has pumped so crazily the last week.
Maybe the evil scammer, heroin addict iota devs planned this whole iota pump and are now trying to destroy the price.

...look, iota is here to stay for at least another couple years.  It is way too big of a project to just fail.
Super long term, well, it is hard to say because the entire tech is still being developed.
Yes, it has had a lot of bumpy roads and yes, a lot of people seem to think it is mismanaged unprofessionally, but I personally support what it is trying to accomplish, not just iota itself but the entire internet of things concept is something I back.

[The Komodo Dragon]

IOTA is a distributed ledger technology. “Distributed” means that the ledger data are spread across numerous computers connected into a network. You, probably, know such phrase as “A system is more than the sum of its parts”. A system emerging from computers connected together possesses properties not seen in a single computer. IOTA as a system has such useful property: several computers may fail, but the others will keep working without problems. IOTA behaves as a single self-healing organism here. Unfortunately, self-healing stops at some point, for IOTA this happens after more than 1/3 of the computers fail. This is not unique to IOTA, other distributed ledger technologies (e.g. Bitcoin) have their threshold of collapse too.

These days IOTA is still small and this opens it to the following attack: an adversary joins IOTA with his computers which take more than 1/3 of IOTA’s body and then makes the computers fail thus triggering IOTA’s collapse. To counteract this attack we are running a set of computers called Coordinator which issues milestones published on IOTA’s tangle. Computers not belonging to an adversary rely on these milestones to detect faulty computers. In this setup IOTA can survive even if 99% of the computers fail.

IOTA is open-source software. In the world controlled by the state open-source software is protected with licenses, someone doing things not allowed by the license can be sued. Cryptocoin industry demonstrated to be very resistant to state regulations, this led to majority of the projects run in this industry to be oriented on scamming ordinary people. IOTA team welcomes attempts to use technology IOTA is based on. This helps IOTA because increases awareness and shows that Tangle is indeed a viable technology. Unfortunately, odds that copies of IOTA codebase will be used for good are very low. We can’t just watch an IOTA clone scamming people and ruining people lives and Tangle’s reputation. This is why a copy-protection mechanism was added from the very beginning.

To explain how the copy-protection works we should recall about existence of Coordinator. Coordinator acts as an ultimate oracle if any uncertainty about the current state of things in IOTA arise. Digital signatures are verified by every computer in IOTA network, if a signature passes the verification routine then it’s, PROBABLY, valid. To make sure that the signature is indeed valid the computer waits for the transaction containing the signature to be referenced by a milestone. This is a perfect place for placing the copy-protection mechanism. While everyone looks at signature verification routine the real verification happens in the routine updating milestones. This trick resembles a focus trick done by magicians on TV. It worked so perfectly, that Neha Narula’s team was fooled despite of me explaining the essence of the trick numerous times.

Now, when we know that all signatures must be endorsed by Coordinator before being accepted as valid, we can move to that part about Curl-P hashing function. Necessity to develop the function was justified. Trinary numeral system is getting off the ground now, today it’s mainly Artificial Neural Networks which already have specialized processing units in development. No doubt, that later we’ll see CPUs doing trinary computations. To avoid derailing my response I won’t be expanding this topic, IOTA blogposts contain all relevant information. Being the creator of Curl-P I knew its properties very well. I changed the number of rounds to allow practical collisions. With Coordinator IOTA’s security depends on one-wayness of Curl-P, without Coordinator the security depends on collision resistance. This is a very important part, it means that your phrase “the Iota development team deliberately introduced faults into the Iota codebase” is WRONG. IOTA is unaffected by collisions in Curl-P, scam-driven clones are.

To provide an answer to your “Are there any other deliberate defects in the Iota source code that have not been disclosed?” is not easy. I disagree with your choice of words (“defects”). If you put the same meaning as I do then my answer is: IOTA doesn’t nor didn’t have known defects. If you mean the copy-protection then my answer is: It’s not smart to answer this question, because in the case of the copy-protection being completely removed my honest answer won’t allow us to exploit uncertainty which may prevent scammers from cloning IOTA.

I think that you misunderstood the situation around Curl-P collisions, a lot of people did too and this is not surprising taking into account sensational tone of Neha Narula’s team blogpost where such boring issue as an intentionally added feature inflated to “The end is near” problem.

I kindly ask you to paraphrase your question extending it to the point where even my little English will allow to get it 100% correctly.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/6yzm9g/integrity_question_for_come_from_beyond_sergey/dmsxaa5/)

[AlexaSonda]

this is just a bad issue that wants to make iota price down. we know now that iota is in the top 10 popular position in cmc and this is proof that iota team is working hard on this project. microsoft also definitely give a statement and terminate its partnership if this iota as reported. but nothing is impossible, all can happen, we'll see.

[JavaLove]

IOTA is not dead, but they must to fix a lot of problems and bugs if they wants to keep the user trust in it.
Beside that, IOTA is close to the ATH range and pumped to it's current max.

[artmen007]

Yes, agree the IOTA a lot of problems. From wallet to the product. Many people talk about it. But I do not think that the draft which pumped 12 billion will Scam. He's got great potential and when these all problems will be solved, the price will make some more x

[shandi albert]

Dead? They haven't even released their product yet and still sit at 12b mkt cap...

Perhaps the source that gets less accurate can be wrong because someone can drop it through any writing form. All know this is a competition.

[udayantha11]

Why you say dead, its booming., sometimes today or tomorrow its going to be listed in bittrex. then again moon.

IOTA was .5$ now 4$ how increment there.

[vasoweee]

Probably it's just gossip. The world of Internet stuff is very potent and price reduction can be on hand.

[sylance]

I'm not an IOTA fan, in fact I don't even hold any of it but I'm watching it and will probably jump in during some pull back.  But... this post is obviously FUD from a new account.  His links are just to social posts; so not much to see here.

[mekar sari]

I'm not sure the coin in the top 10 will happen that way, it's just gossip for people who do not like this coin, IOTA is something extraordinary in the world of crypto, they managed to penetrate the top 10 position in a very close

[generalizethis]

The fud factory is in overtime--hope you are getting paid by the word and not on factual analysis.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7j81tq/fud_copy_pastas/

[TravelMug]

Is Iota dead? Their devs are very scammy and put viruses on their open source code and there are many fishy things

it is also slow too and their network seems to be dead

Also other projects like Lineage are trying to take over


IOTA's team is extremely unprofessional and their claims are pure hype. It is everyone's responsibility to counter misinformation wherever they encounter it, especially when a lot of people are being suckered in by it.

is iota dead?

https://twitter.com/KyleSamani/status/937886293803065345
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/6yzm9g/integrity_question_for_come_from_beyond_sergey/dmsxaa5/
https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1908194b

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.

Clearly FUD, IOTA has still the support of the community. Although there's speculation that they have partnered with Microsoft, then already confirmed that is not the case:

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/12/12/iota-partnership-microsoft-marketplace/

However, It still thinks that this coin has a bright future because Microsoft is not closing its door. They are still in the table talking, and once this is finalized, we will see that the price could go to the moon.

[bathrobehero]

IOTA is a distributed ledger technology. “Distributed” means that the ledger data are spread across numerous computers connected into a network. You, probably, know such phrase as “A system is more than the sum of its parts”. A system emerging from computers connected together possesses properties not seen in a single computer. IOTA as a system has such useful property: several computers may fail, but the others will keep working without problems. IOTA behaves as a single self-healing organism here. Unfortunately, self-healing stops at some point, for IOTA this happens after more than 1/3 of the computers fail. This is not unique to IOTA, other distributed ledger technologies (e.g. Bitcoin) have their threshold of collapse too.

These days IOTA is still small and this opens it to the following attack: an adversary joins IOTA with his computers which take more than 1/3 of IOTA’s body and then makes the computers fail thus triggering IOTA’s collapse. To counteract this attack we are running a set of computers called Coordinator which issues milestones published on IOTA’s tangle. Computers not belonging to an adversary rely on these milestones to detect faulty computers. In this setup IOTA can survive even if 99% of the computers fail.

IOTA is open-source software. In the world controlled by the state open-source software is protected with licenses, someone doing things not allowed by the license can be sued. Cryptocoin industry demonstrated to be very resistant to state regulations, this led to majority of the projects run in this industry to be oriented on scamming ordinary people. IOTA team welcomes attempts to use technology IOTA is based on. This helps IOTA because increases awareness and shows that Tangle is indeed a viable technology. Unfortunately, odds that copies of IOTA codebase will be used for good are very low. We can’t just watch an IOTA clone scamming people and ruining people lives and Tangle’s reputation. This is why a copy-protection mechanism was added from the very beginning.

To explain how the copy-protection works we should recall about existence of Coordinator. Coordinator acts as an ultimate oracle if any uncertainty about the current state of things in IOTA arise. Digital signatures are verified by every computer in IOTA network, if a signature passes the verification routine then it’s, PROBABLY, valid. To make sure that the signature is indeed valid the computer waits for the transaction containing the signature to be referenced by a milestone. This is a perfect place for placing the copy-protection mechanism. While everyone looks at signature verification routine the real verification happens in the routine updating milestones. This trick resembles a focus trick done by magicians on TV. It worked so perfectly, that Neha Narula’s team was fooled despite of me explaining the essence of the trick numerous times.

Now, when we know that all signatures must be endorsed by Coordinator before being accepted as valid, we can move to that part about Curl-P hashing function. Necessity to develop the function was justified. Trinary numeral system is getting off the ground now, today it’s mainly Artificial Neural Networks which already have specialized processing units in development. No doubt, that later we’ll see CPUs doing trinary computations. To avoid derailing my response I won’t be expanding this topic, IOTA blogposts contain all relevant information. Being the creator of Curl-P I knew its properties very well. I changed the number of rounds to allow practical collisions. With Coordinator IOTA’s security depends on one-wayness of Curl-P, without Coordinator the security depends on collision resistance. This is a very important part, it means that your phrase “the Iota development team deliberately introduced faults into the Iota codebase” is WRONG. IOTA is unaffected by collisions in Curl-P, scam-driven clones are.

To provide an answer to your “Are there any other deliberate defects in the Iota source code that have not been disclosed?” is not easy. I disagree with your choice of words (“defects”). If you put the same meaning as I do then my answer is: IOTA doesn’t nor didn’t have known defects. If you mean the copy-protection then my answer is: It’s not smart to answer this question, because in the case of the copy-protection being completely removed my honest answer won’t allow us to exploit uncertainty which may prevent scammers from cloning IOTA.

I think that you misunderstood the situation around Curl-P collisions, a lot of people did too and this is not surprising taking into account sensational tone of Neha Narula’s team blogpost where such boring issue as an intentionally added feature inflated to “The end is near” problem.

I kindly ask you to paraphrase your question extending it to the point where even my little English will allow to get it 100% correctly.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/6yzm9g/integrity_question_for_come_from_beyond_sergey/dmsxaa5/)

The existence of these Coordinators is the very definition why IOTA is centralized.

Of course it's easy to create a network when you have centralized supernodes deciding for the network and controlled by a few people. What a garbage.

Clearly FUD, IOTA has still the support of the community. Although there's speculation that they have partnered with Microsoft, then already confirmed that is not the case:

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/12/12/iota-partnership-microsoft-marketplace/

However, It still thinks that this coin has a bright future because Microsoft is not closing its door. They are still in the table talking, and once this is finalized, we will see that the price could go to the moon.

IOTA only really seem to have naive and rabid fans trying to pump it at every chance without understanding it or basic crypto fundamentals.

[gin113]

its not dead but lots of bad news and they handled the microsoft partnership poorly

[Blakscorpion]

Always FUD, never a single fact.
Always sentences with "it seems", "in my mind", or other statements like "This guy said that...." but never with a proof tweet or screenshot...

Please when you FUD, at least post a proof attached with it... It's not even funny anymore.
IOTA has a roadmap, a whitepaper, a huge marketcap. You fud the thing even before the first release.
Of course there will be issue with any coin that is in development, because currently the markets are 100% speculation. You will be able to make criticism when they will have released something. Right now it just sounds like a boy that is waiting for the toy and is afraid of it never coming...

[generalizethis]

The existence of these Coordinators is the very definition why IOTA is centralized.

Of course it's easy to create a network when you have centralized supernodes deciding for the network and controlled by a few people. What a garbage.

So mining hasn't become centralized? M'kay.

As for the coordinator, I have yet to find anyone to offer up a technical reason why it can't work once it reaches a critical mass. Do you have one? Or just bland cryptobasics generalizations? It seems that while blockchains get more centralized over time, Iota will become less so.

But  when did you start caring so much about decentralization? I seem to remember you thought it was secondary in regard to Monero's asic resistance--what changed?