On top of that, all of his technical issues with IOTA turned out, by his own admission, to be using the network wrong. Not understanding that buying 1,000s worth of an obscure cryptocurrency is going to come with a heafty dose of RTFM is a fool's errand. Instead of realizing this, the denial in him turns this into "victim blaming."

that said - he's right about IOTA. If that type of use is what it takes to make everything work, it has a long way to go.

Using it wrong...would you not try using it exactly as described with $28,000 depending on it? He raised extremely valid points about labeling this 'user error' but the 'correct' use case seems pretty kludge to me and highlights the crypto's shortfalls.

The scary thing is that IOTA is considered a top 10 cryptocurrency.

The worst thing is that I can't find a useful alternative crypto currency that can be used stand alone (ie without converting to BTC) for e-commerce.

Only choices are BTC with its high fees and to some extent BCH.

Even Litecoin which is easy to use doesn't have many uses.

Dash, Monero and Zcash make bold claims but aren't particularly useful at the moment.

I was just researching currencies with fastest transfer time and verified that Ripple works fast and with low fee. Curious if you've taken a look at it for your use case? I bought a small amount recently but am mostly just curious about which of these thousands of coins are actually useful for practical purposes.

Forgot to mention Ripple which is an interesting case with its mission to "The world’s only enterprise blockchain solution for global payments".

However, searching for useful things to do with Ripple as an individual leads to nada. All the use cases are provisional.

All the top 20 google results are for how to buy Ripple itself(in order to speculate).

I've started and stopped mining various currencies since BTC in 2011. Each time I stop because I do not see meaningful progress in usability.

> The world’s only enterprise blockchain solution for global payments

Marketing speak there as all blockchains support global payments.

Have you looked into any other DAG tech, besides IOTA? ByteBall and Raiblocks are excellent, functional and mature examples in my opinion that lack IOTA's downsides (likely because they are intended primarily for p2p payments, not IOTA's intended use case as m2m first, p2p second).

In full disclosure, I own a little bit of both. I first stumbled upon them after being disappointed with IOTA, and they deliver on a lot of what my initial expectations of IOTA were. I just want to be able to buy coffee with my crypto and not wait an hour for confirmation times!

He may be biased, but you may be too. Are you a Java developer (or android)?

That said, I know some great software can be produced in Java, ElasticSearch been one on top of my mind.

If Security is the goal, nor CPP nor Java is great. Proven Haskell or Rust might be more of a valid option.

Different tools have different advantages and Java is as suitable as many others. IOTA needs to prove that protocol is sound, so it doesn't matter if it's in Java, Rust, Go, Python... This point makes the author much less credible in my eyes.

That said, I steer clear of IOTA too. Relevant search terms for me are "IOTA roll your own crypto", "IOTA ternary logic" and "IOTA hash collision". And their whitepaper is indecipherable. Red flags all over the place, IMHO it's a scam.

AFAIK Cardano (ADA), which is booming (passed IOTA and became the 6th largest coin this week), is implemented in Haskell.

A coin "booking" doesn't imply technical strength- that's the problem here.

*booming

What I don't get about Cardano is that it has almost NO use at all. The number of transactions per MINUTE can be counted using only your hands (every so often you may need to include your toes):

https://cardanoexplorer.com/

I'm having a really hard time reconciling that with the fact that it's got a market cap in the billions at this point...

Cardano is a cryptocurrency written in Haskell with the goal of conforming to "high assurance" standards. Looks pretty promising, but like all 3rd gen cryptocurrencies, it is still early days (seems more functional than IOTA though.. no pun intended)

I wonder if something like OCaml would be a good choice. It's a safe language with good performance plus it gives you an easier route to formally verify the important parts of it. Cross platform is going to be trickier though.

That's what Texas is supposed to use but it's wrapped up in lawsuits at the moment.

Tezos, not Texas, auto correct...

Hmm, interesting. I wasn't sure if they were only name dropping that formal verification was possible but they say their developers have backgrounds in it. People mention about making Ethereum more secure using formal verification for example but it's not something you can just do as an afterthought.