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Comment by EpicButterz | Hacker News Reader

The tangle is live right now with real transactions going on. If it's so insecure, why don't you go take as many IOTA as you please?

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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?)

Right, it's the training wheels until enough nodes are added to the tangle. What are they supposed to do instead?

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.

> There is inherent risk in all cryptos.

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.

Clearly a JS Dev "===" :D

Hah! Nice catch. I noticed that after as well. I've certainly written a few lines of javascript in my day.

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.

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.

Stealing IOTA would be a severe felony and probably an international crime.

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