> IOTA is the only big cryptocurrency that seems extremely fishy to me.

BitConnect is in the top 20 market cap, doesn't get much fishier than that.

We try but there is an army of IOTA shills that drown us out.

Interesting... My first reaction to your post was "meh - surely he's exagerrating". But reading other replies to GP that were posted later made me reconsider. Very unconstructive replies, trying to bully the well articulated opinion... I have never seen anything like it on HN (though that's just my observation of course, maybe I was just lucky).

Do you think the people behind this are truly convinced of their cause or are they paid "web-fighters"?

I just don't know. I think some are paid and some are just IOTA holders with a great financial incentive to squash any valid criticism of IOTA. There really isn't much difference between the two groups when you think about it.

>the whitepaper is intentionally indecipherable

I decided to see whether this statement is justified.

  Before starting
  ---------------

I am about to read the whitepaper now, but before I do, I want to set up some standards for how I will judge that it is "intentionally indecipherable". First, I want to think of examples of intentionally indecipherable language.

I have these examples in mind:

1. We have many examples from marketing. If marketing just doesn't want to answer a question but does want to write a response to something.

2. There are examples of nonsense. I have in mind this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator This reads:

>The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated aluminite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented

This is intentionally indecipherable, yet seems quite serious. It's a good example to bear before us.

3. There are times that important technical facts are deeply obfuscated. While I don't have a specific example, I think if you think of white papers on deeply unpopular features, you will get a sense of what I mean.

4. Because you add the word "intentionally" we don't need to include crank science in this judgment. That relieves us of a HUGE burden, as we will be evaluating a white paper possibly outside of our experience, and it is very difficult to tell the difference between crank and real science, totally outside of our domain.

Okay, so the above are the standards I have in mind. How will I evaluate whether the white paper is "intentionally indecipherable"?

  "Intentionally indecipherable" criteria, selected before reading paper
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Does it use words that simply do not exist? For example, having zero Google results, and not being decipherable from their stems and construction of the word. Does the author offer definitions in these cases?

2. Does the author appear helpful at any point? For example, are there simplifications, or "other ways" to think about something offered? Do tricky points appear to receive careful attention?

3. Are there any clear jokes? Intentionally indecipherable writing does not contain clear jokes, because the author is "on edge", using all of their mental capacity to keep from accidentally communicating anything.

4. (a big one): Are multiple synonyms used for no reason? The intention of the indecipherable author is to keep from passing on any knowledge. If the author can use 4-5 syonnyms, that greatly reduces the chance that the reader accidentally looks up the word in question. On the other hand, landmark papers use the same terminology consistently, rather than reaching for synonyms: the author wants to convey something about concepts, and goes to great lengths to talk about it. Papers that are decipherable have high repetition of key words. Papers that are indecipherable have very low repetition (to keep from communicating.)

5. Are there vague references which are avoided being mentioned directly? This is common in marketing spin, but also in case of wanting to keep from communicating something. If something is included by reference without taking a parenthetical two words to explain what will be included there, this is another good indication of intentional indecipherability.

Okay, now I've set up the standards. Let me dive in and read the white paper!

  Reading the paper
  -----------------

I am using this link:

https://iota.readme.io/v1.2.0/docs/whitepaper

Oh, I forgot to add but clicking that link reminded me: if it seems that sentences are made more tricky by editing after the fact, i.e. if they are not a natural way to form a sentence but seem specially edited for greater complexity, that seems a good indication. (This will be criteria 6.)

The whitepaper is linked with the words:

> The IOTA Whitepaper which describes the main technology behind IOTA - the Tangle - is available to read online. It goes into greater detail about the structure as well as the security of the Tangle.

This seems extremely focused on imparting real information. It is written in an extremely accessible, simplified style (failing indecipherability criteria 1 & 2). It does not seem unnecessarily complicated (failing indecipherability criterion 6). It actively mentions something rather than alluding to it, by mentioning "the Tangle" within dashes -- failing indecipherability criterion 5. It seems to fail criterion 4 as "the Tangle" is already mentioned twice. This sentence is written in an extremely simplified style, containing no jargon at all. It does not seem to contain any joke or lightheartedness, though it is only two sentences.

On to the paper! I clicked "http://iotatoken.com/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf" to read the paper.

I did not need to read more than 2 pages to arrive at a judgment. My judgment based on the criteria selected beforehand, is that it is absolutely clear that the whitepaper is not intentionally indecipherable.

The author goes to extreme lengths to impart knowledge. The entirety of the Introduction goes to very carefully convey real knowledge. The author repeats himself again and again:

>The genesis transaction sent these tokens to several other “founder” addresses. Let us stress that all of the tokens were created in the genesis transaction. No tokens will be created in the future, and there will be no mining in the sense that miners receive monetary rewards “out of thin air”.

There is a measure of humor, such as the naming of the word "an iota". But the discussion is extremely serious, the author is extremely earnest. Not only does the author not use any made-up words, but goes to extreme lengths to enable the reader to read them.

See footnote 26, for example:

>This is a consequence of the so-called Large Deviation Principle. See the general book [13], and Proposition 5.2 in Section 8.5 of [14] for a simple and instructive derivation of the upper bound, and Section 1.9 of [5] for the (not so simple) derivation of the lower bound.

It is heart-breaking that the author goes to such incredible lengths to attempt to convey knowledge, they are doing everything physically possible, only to have someone who does not understand them fail to apply the principle of charity and claim that it was "intentionally indecipherable."

  Concusions
  ----------

My conclusions, with the above methodology.

1. We set out to judge whether your statement was justified when you stated the paper is "intentionnally indecipherable." It is absolutely not a justified claim. We thought carefully about judgment criteria before we ever opened the paper. The paper failed every crtiterion for "intentional indecipherability" that we could think of.

2. More to the point, I feel you should have started by applying the principle of charity. Rather than saying "I could not follow the paper" or "I found logical inconsistencies", you made the claim that it is intentionally indecipherable. This goes too far. It's, in fact, heartbreaking, when it is clear that the author put so much time and effort into making the presented work accessible. This included finding footnotes to instructional concepts that the author felt there was any chance would not be understood.

We can go farther. This claim that a lovingly crafted paper that was read, reread, and reread, with an acknowledgment section reading:

>The author thanks Bartosz Kusmierz, Cyril Gr¨unspan and Toru Kazama who pointed out several errors in earlier drafts, and James Brogan for his contributions towards making this paper more readable.

would be "intentionally indecipherable" shuts down science and progress.

On a personal level, it makes me question whether I would ever publish anything under my own name and for a wide audience, when no matter how much effort is put into it, even the best communities on the planet will have someone come forward and say that my careful work is "intentionally indecipherable."

So we have completely rejected your statement. It fails every criteria that I carefully set up to evaluate it. You should not make such statements in the future, about anything.

(Please note that when I started this comment, I was prepared to write the opposite opinion, and agree with you.)

-

[EDIT]

- I lightly added the above

- In addition, just to be clear I have absolutely no relationship with the project or white paper. I haven't evaluated it besides deciding whether it is intentionally indecipherable.

The author describes the database the nodes maintain, and the consensus algorithm in great detail (which is much much more complicated than the consensus algorithm of any blockchain in the industry), but does not say a word about scalability. You know: absolutely basic stuff, like are nodes full nodes? Is the history maintained in each node? How much storage a node needs? How fast a transaction is confirmed? No word about it in the whitepaper of a 10 billion project. I would not need it to be included if it were trivial. But it is not trivial. In interviews they claim that it is almost infinitely scalable. Followers spread the information that it is faster as there is more usage on the network. They say that millions of small embedded hardware nodes can participate and the network enables microtransactions, which requires incredible scalability. These are ridiculous claims, and it is incredible that there is nothing about it in the whitepaper, or any easily accessible document. They intentionally don't want to explain the technology in clear and structured fashion. Yes I did'nt spend a week of my time to try to understand the technology. Maybe a week would be enough to browse the source code and have answers to my questions. But I don't have that much time for IOTA. And yes, it is fishy, that no one tries to explain it in a way that experienced engineers could have a grasp of it.

Do you mind if a write a version of the comment you've just written (making it a bit less harsh) to the author of the white paper, and quote here any replies I receive?

(I also notice you list a contact in your HN profile, so I'm happy to include you on CC - but I think we should share any eventual response to your questions in this thread after we get it.)

Yes go for it. A well articulated communication on technical details of IOTA scalability is needed, and I think the whitepaper need to be upgraded with such information.

in case anyone is reading this thread later: per the above, I wrote the author a lightly edited version of nadam's question and a summary of this thread. He replied as below, offering to connect with people who know more. I asked nadam if he was interested but didn't receive a reply. So I didn't follow up except to say "thank you" and let the author now I've copied his comments into the thread.

Author's reply:

------

Hi,

thank you for reaching out to me, and for your interest in IOTA. You are right about the Tangle paper - I've put a lot of effort in it, and also tried not to overcomplicate it. But, well, it's "make things as simple as possible, but not simpler" thing - nothing comes for free, and so IOTA is really much more complicated than traditional cryptos, one simply cannot understand it without investing some effort first.

Regarding your questions: first of all, I'd like to stress that that paper is more about the Tangle - an idealized mathematical model, than about concrete details of IOTA's implementation. In view of this,

- are nodes full nodes?

In the paper it doesn't matter, there the nodes are just entities that sign the transactions and (more importantly) choose where these transactions will be attached.

- Is the history maintained in each node?

In principle, yes. Note, however, that the tip selection algorithm only uses the recent history of the system (that cumulative weight calculation only depends on this). This opens possibilities for periodic snapshotting: for the system to work, a node should know that recent history, and the account's balances before.

- How much storage does a node need?

- How fast is a transaction confirmed?

This depends too much on the concrete details of the implementation. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert there, I'm too much a "theory" guy. Should I connect you with someone more qualified?

Best regards,

I read the paper yesterday (except some parts of section 4). Some of the math was too much to understand for a quick read. It is a good paper. I could follow everything (despite late hour). My problem was that the paper only discusses tangle-technology and finishing it I still wondered how IOTA uses the tangle and how it works. Maybe I should read more about cryptocurrencies first. Or there should be a more general paper about IOTA.

For some reason, my comment objecting to someone calling it intentionally indecipherable is now at -4.

You wrote "It is a good paper. I could follow everything" -- would you agree with me that it's not purposefully written to be obfuscated and indecipherable?

Without criticizing you or the validity of your intention for posting the above comment, I can tell you that said comment comes across as extremely spammy.

Why? In a heated space, such as critiques of certain cryptocurrencies often evolve to, certainly with lots of vested interests ($$$ that is), posting such a huge amount of text under the top-rated comment while adding little information, but basically pushing all other arguments below-the-fold is destined to evoke ones fishiness tastebuds.

Whether or not you intended to push critique out of view, it definitely calls for HN to introduce some sort of folding/auto-truncate feature.

You know, woodpanel, the reason I chose the structure I chose is because when I began to write it, I thought that I would be able to find that the whitepaper easily meets the criteria I selected beforehand for intentional indecipherability. In other words, I thought I would be able to show that it is just fishy.

For this reason, I decided to be very thorough in my review methodology, so that I wouldn't be accused of cherry-picking. After all, no paper is perfect. That's why I set up criteria beforehand. I had never read the paper.

As you can see, the paper actually (to my surprise) totally fails the intentional indecipherability criteria I picked.

The top-level comment in this case was totally unwarranted.

This is not the conclusion I expected to come to when I did the review. It would not be honest of me to hide my actual results.

(In addition to myself, you will notice that another person wrote "It is a good paper. I could follow everything".)

You would be better off writing a blog post and linking by to it.

I don't think I would have read his thoughts if it had been a link to a blog post.

>would you agree with me that it's not purposefully written to be obfuscated and indecipherable? Yes, but with one exception. It is possible to obfuscate by ommiting information. Assume there is a flaw in IOTA which is not in tangle-structre itself. One could obfuscate the flaw by writing an honest paper about tangle and refusing to talk about IOTA. From the introduction: "The concrete implementation of the iota protocol is not discussed."

I don't say (or think) there is an obfuscation. Just that my feeling was that I got too few information to judge about IOTA (or even tangle) from that paper.

> I only read 2 pages.

So you are evaluating the quality of a 28 pages paper by reading only the introduction ?

Are you intentionally retarded ?

I didn't evaluate the quality of the paper. I only evaluated whether it's intentionally indecipherable.

I did glance through some more of the paper, though I did not read it carefully.

I didn't find anything that tripped any of my criteria, mentioned beforehand, for whether it's an intentionally indecipherable paper: did you see anything like that?

Please note that this is not an endorsement of the paper.

What is BCASH? Do you mean Bitcoin Cash?

Yes.

I read the first few pages of the IOTA whitepaper, including some of the math parts. I have basic undergrad math ability and although I'm not familiar with many of the concepts, most parts make sense to me and are quite thorough. It sounds like OP is trying to manipulate the market.

People who own a lot of crypto like OP generally aren't the kinds of people who would write articles for the public interest.

It sounds like OP sees an opportunity to bring the price down in order to get a better deal on their next purchase.

You don't think the concerns he listed about the instability of the network, current centralization of nodes, and the fact that one of the founders offered to buy his silence are legitimate complaints?

About centralization: IOTA is not any more centralised than Bitcoin where a very small number of people control most of the miners and exchanges.

The difference between IOTA and Bitcoin in that respect is that Bitcoin can only get worse whereas IOTA can only get better.

I don't believe that the founder of IOTA would buy OP's silence in such a blatant way. There are tons of people bashing IOTA all the time - The founder would go bankrupt if he tried to pay everyone off to buy their IOTA... And why would the founder want to acquire IOTA if it was in fact such a toxic asset as claimed by OP? It just doesn't add up.

The cult like behavior of crypto adherents is really off putting. You guys are going to be in for a hard fall when the wheels come off.

What was once friendly enthusiasm has become hard lines and jagged edges with organized shilling campaigns from all sides. It's quite off putting as someone who spends a lot of time in these communities. It's hard to even ask technical questions or address concerns without being named a "FUD'er", and I don't think it's changing anytime soon.