Discussion about IOTA's Weaknesses

An interesting discussion between me and Allen is taking place on the tangle slack regarding my first post: Enjoy

Ernest Allen 12:22 PM

oh I can give you a lot of arguments “against” iota, I am looking for weaknesses to try to make it stronger
where do I start:
12:22
it seems that there is little focus on the technology

many many people are reporting problems, bugs
and while there is an active community, I think fixing all this is not a top priority for the ? (yeah, for who?)
the foundation?
the foundation seem to be talkers with world domination plans. but who are the coders? they must be somewhere. I haven’t tracked them down yet, but I’m working on that
try to use the iota stuff!
the wallets are a mess
confirmations may take half an hour or several hours
many things are “promised”, few things delivered

12:24

is the MAM stuff working? or just more fancy talk?
the two iota founders look very immature to me
technically, assumptions like “all devices have similar computing power” are just plain wrong and dangerous
but if you dig deeper, you realize that most of the current implementation is based on wishful thinking
they “hope” it will all work out and be stable
and then they want to base the whole world economy on these kinds of “hopes”?
on page 25 it says the way to fight the large weight attack is to “limit the own weight of a transaction or set it to a constant value”
they are moving the critical points out of view, but not solving them

12:27

I wish the iota project would release much smaller bits of code, really thought through technically
implementation first, then the talk

there is no certainty at all that this whole concept will actually work, iota is an empiric study basically
how it scales - who knows
I also with they are laser focused on user experience, ease of use. because if you are not, it becomes more and more difficult to use and the foundation gets carried away talking to government and large corporations

I wish (typo)

the MIT folks killed the originally planned hash algorithm a few months back
if you want more arguments against iota you can look there
but I like how the iota foundation fought back there - they fixed the problem! that is the way to go

12:31

my next critical point is this whole trits/trytes thing
that looks like a serious mental detour
is that really thought through?
is this beneficial for later hardware, semiconductors? have they talked to actual semiconductor people? or is it just the result of some students imaginations going wild?
computing history has all sorts of failed interesting technologies, check the “transputer” for example
but there are reasons why they failed, and a big industry has been built on something else instead
so these guys want to declare an end to the era of “bits” and start the era of “trits”

wooow

is that related to the tangle?

do we have to solve all these problems at once? was there really a problem with bits and bytes before?
I am reading about a lot of problems of lost iota funds, just look in the forum
my feeling is iota is a big experiment
there will be hard-forks for sure
but it’s great, cool!

I will continue. my path is technology bottom-up, and focus on user experience

12:35

good luck with your article, high quality reporting is so important!

12:35

good luck!

Ernest Allen 12:57 PM

couple more critical thoughts:

12:57

david says he is one of the founders of Nxt?

(that’s what he said in the withthebest blockchain conf just yesterday)

first of all that would be interesting

Nxt is a failed cryptocurrency, I think

12:58

it’s open to 51% attacks

if you read about the history of Nxt, and now you see Iota, it will make you think

David is talking about the “CAP Theorem”

and how iota is based on “eventual consistency”

what does “eventual” mean?

if a 51% attack is successful, the foundation just declares which state is the “right one”?

they appear like some kids to me who ran into a few theories and formulas and think they have found the formula for the world

david says “blockchain forces omnistate”

but then he says “special relativity means no omnistate is possible”

I think iota is built on hope, a lot of hope

#proof-of-hope :)

hope this helps, enough from me. Good luck with your article and feel free to share, I’d love to read

these are all the critical thoughts btw, I have a lot of positive thoughts as well, this is why I am attracted to iota and continue to study and explore

1:04

what do you think about iota? please share as well. thanks!

1:04

actually we can have this discussion openly as well, I love critical thinking. all the good stuff comes from critical thinking...

elGreato 1:45 PM

Hello there!

I can't thank you enough for your thoughts. You've opened many doors for me now to investigate

1-bugs are not getting fixed in timely manner.

2-confirmation of transactions is not as claimed

3- vague image of the "foundation"

4- IOTA is built on hopes

5- Trits/Trytes replaces bits and bytes ?

6- Eventual consistency is not proved ?

7- Proof-of-hope (a very nice new term, will be my hashtag :smile: )