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Comment by Buttes | Hacker News Reader

IOTA is amateur hour. The author implemented their own hashing algo, "curl", which is used all over the place in IOTA, until recently including signing transactions. Researchers were able to produce distinct transactions with colliding signatures [1].

Depending on whether you believe the author, either they did it intentionally for the implied purpose of attacking competing forks (as they claim), or unintentionally because they're incompetent. Neither situation sounds good to me.

IOTA also relies on a closed-source "coordinator" for consensus. They call it "training wheels". Who knows if their "tangle" will actually work in production. Crazy to me that people are pumping so much money into it w/o any due diligence.

[1] https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iot...

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Wow. I'm not a crypto expert, but the one thing I'm sure of is that no individual should ever create their own crypto algorithms. Of course, we're talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their Magic The Gathering code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised.

>Of course, we're talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their Magic The Gathering code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised.

Stop judging things by what they were, unless of course you think the aerospace industry is a space where 2 brothers can build a plane out of wood and push it off a cliff...

Or that the aerospace industry is the space that consists of whatever those 2 brothers were doing prior to pushing the wood off of the cliff.

Oh, I'm definitely judging it by the titanic failure it turned into: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox

I know very well what you are referring to, however Mt. Gox was one of the first exchanges, and it in no way is indicative of the industry now.

Bitcoin is very new, created in 2009, didn't see any real usage until 2010/2011, Mt. Gox blew up in early 2014, and now in 2017 most exchanges follow KYC laws, are built on real trading systems, and can't be compared to Mt. Gox any more than you can compare a Boeing 777 to the wood gliders that mankind first flew on.

My point was that the cryptocurrency world is enormously tolerant of clown-shoes levels of operation, ones where it's hard to tell whether the people are incompetent or just scammers.

Key differences between Mt Gox and the Wright Brothers are that a) the financial industry was well established in 2010, and b) the Wright Brothers were not offering commercial flights to a general audience on their wooden gliders.

The first means that Mt Gox was run by idiots who ignored all of the established best practices around running a financial company. (And was given money by same.) The second means that even if you were right, that Bitcoin was just too new to do well, then they were grossly negligent in offering services to the general public and managing hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

Of course, the incompetence at scale continued long after Mt Gox. E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

You may be right that there are now some adults running well-regulated businesses. But that doesn't mean the space isn't full of scam artists, Dunning Kruger goofs, and wide-eyed technoutopian marks. We only have to look at the latest ICO announcements to see that, at best, enthusiasm has run ahead of competence.

Mt. Gox was a massive fuck up, i'm not denying that. They had no business being in the space.

But at the same time nobody else was taking it seriously. Look back over the history of banks. Do you really think no "bank" ever lost significant amounts of money? Do you really think there aren't still scam artists and assholes trying to steal people's money? Just the other day my mother got called again by people asking for her social to "fix her credit", does that mean that the incompetence of the financial industry is still at an all time high?

Cryptocurrencies have a lot in common with traditional finance industries, but they are different enough that the previous systems don't work. It's very much the "wild west" right now (which i'll point out there were established "governments" at the time of the "wild west"). The space is still new, and if you are risk averse you should stay away from it, but painting the entire industry as idiots and children makes you look like the idiot.

We still have bank failures pretty regularly. But they're a small fraction of total volume, and the damage is contained thanks to regulation. Since 1933, every bank depositor in the US has had insured accounts. And the bank failures that happen are not of the "oops I losted your dollars" variety. E.g., the most recent one, the First National Bank of Edinburg, Texas, was just a pretty normal business failure. Nothing was stolen, the regulator arranged a merger, and no depositor money was lost.

It's true that Mt Gox might have lost some money even if they had been following known best practices. You're right that Bitcoin is new, and presents new risks. But they wouldn't have been driven out of business with hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. Money given to them by people who were just as credulous, just as believing that the old rules didn't apply.

Yes, there will always be fools and financial scammers. But the proportion and the scope in the cryptocurrency world is much, much larger. In the short reign of the *coins, there have already been enough disasters that somebody has managed to fill a book with them: https://www.amazon.com/Attack-50-Foot-Blockchain-Contracts-e...

And I'll note that I'm not saying the entire space is "idiots and children". Just that the tolerance for incompetence and scam artistry is much, much higher. Which, given that you defend it as being the "wild west", you apparently agree with.

The "never create your own crypto" meme is a destructive one. There are many cases where existing algo's will not fit the purpose and one needs to create a new one. Most often this is required in mediums where resources are constricted. From personal experience new-brew crypto was often unavoidable in broadcast conditional access systems. I'm not saying this to defend IOTA crypto, at all. I am saying it because HN is full of genuine crypto profs and experts repeating the no new algo meme and lynch mobbing anyone that disagrees.

Does HN prefer the never say never meme?

Sure. The common wisdom matches common situations. For people who aren't experts, I would much rather have that rule than not. Experts know when to break the rules.

Not to mention the whole ternary thing...

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