Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, this article reminded me I should sell what little IOTA I have, so I tried to. Here's what happened:

I launched my wallet and saw a zero balance and zero transactions. I looked around and heard from some friends that I need to convert my funds or something, because there was a "snapshot" yesterday.

I clicked the "re-attach" button and waited for a few minutes. It failed, so I did it again and again and again. After half an hour and five times or so, it succeeded and I could see my balance.

I tried to send funds, the wallet said "sending" for around ten minutes, and then it finally said "success". I waited for the funds to confirm (there were three transactions, two of which were zero for some reasons), but 70 minutes later it still hadn't.

A friend told me I should "re-attach" the transaction and "promote" it. Apparently, "promoting" sends five transactions that reference yours, to confirm it. I imagine the transactions are zero-fund transactions that just spam the network to self-confirm your own one. Who confirms the confirmers?

This is absolutely insane and I can't believe this thing ever got traction. It feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks. It doesn't even work right! Did any of the people who bought these coins try to ever use them for anything?

No offense but your comment is unintentionally humorous because you're asking all these sane questions blaming the mindless people who bought into IOTA, but you happen to be one of them as you describe yourself.

> This is absolutely insane and I can't believe this thing ever got traction.

It got traction because people--including yourself--bought into it without thinking much.

> It feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks. It doesn't even work right! Did any of the people who bought these coins try to ever use them for anything?

Yeah, like yourself. You never actually tried to use the coins for anything until this point when you are now finally trying to "cash out".

> You never actually tried to use the coins for anything until this point when you are now finally trying to "cash out".

An alternate (and correct) interpretation is that I bought IOTA as I thought I may end up using it in my IoT projects. I didn't (probably because nobody working for IOTA actually cares about IoT), and now I want to sell them for a more useful currency.

Not everyone wants coins for speculation, but you're forgiven for thinking otherwise.

The other possibility (not just you and IOTA, but for others) is that a lot of coins have free offerings at their launch to get things off the ground. Stellar is an example.

So yeah, just because someone owns coins doesn't mean they are/were mindless speculators.

Oh, true, they did give out some coins (me included).

Yet another possibility (which is how... a friend of mine... uses coins) is buying weed from the dark web. That's a big use case right now.

I bought my first legal weed in California yesterday and it was a very interesting experience. I don't usually smoke but I wanted to see what the store was like. It was strictly cash only. They had several ATM's installed in the building. Security was tight for this reason. It's hard to process that it's now legal.

Is it completely legal now? Do you no longer even need a prescription?

It is completely legal now and I didn't need a prescription card. They asked me if I had a prescription card, for what reason I don't know, because I've never had one and they don't require it anymore. I think perhaps medical clients get discounts or special deals?

Probably asked so they don’t charge some kind tax or something...

There are explanations and reasons for everything, but it doesn't matter much if you are disappointed with your experience and want to sell. It seems to me you have run out of patience / have lost your faith that IOTA will ever get where they want to get.

To be honest, I don't think anybody's personal user experience has been much of a concern to the IOTA project up until now. The new wallets might change that, so you might want to hold on to your coins until then.

They promise to solve all of the issues that you mention: - Automatic node selection rather than the limited amount of nodes currently listed in the wallet software. - Automatic re-attaching and promoting transactions. - Address re-use detection.

Automatic and distributed snapshotting of the network is also on the roadmap, this would address your zero balance issue.

But like I said, if you have run out of patience and you have your eyes on other projects that do deliver what you are looking for, then by all means...

I hope the new wallets fix everything, but, in my opinion, having to promote transactions is a terrible hack and the new wallets don't seem to fix that (they just make it automatic).

Combine that with the hand-waving of the vulnerabilities by the community, and it's not a good sign. However, I'm not really interested in speculating about the price (I've never bought more than $100ish worth of any cryptocurrency), it's just that I don't see IOTA being a useful currency for me to play with.

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