Re:Why I find IOTA alarming
by geofft on Monday January 29, 2018 @09:39AM
(#16257722)
0. I upvoted this response because it provides a legitimate answer to the question of "what's the other side" / "how can people possibly find IOTA a good idea." I hope others do too: it's relevant to the conversation, even if we disagree with the merits of the post.
1. Parts 1 and 2 were all fluff. Part 3 responds to the actual technical claims, and several paragraphs of fluff later, confirms the MIT claim that funds were transferred out of user accounts to an account controlled by the IOTA Foundation without user consent. (They had consent from some other network participants / the "community", and supposedly they had very good reasons for it.) I gave up by part 4, sorry.
Where I come from—which happens to be MIT, in fact—security protocols have a threat model, either stated or unstated, and a confused threat model is a legitimate criticism. One of the common unstated parts of the threat model of cryptocurrencies is that, unlike with a government-issued currency, the organization behind the currency should not be implicitly trusted and certainly should not be able to take your money for your own good. Is this part of the IOTA threat model? What exactly is required technically for this sort of transfer?
1. Parts 1 and 2 were all fluff. Part 3 responds to the actual technical claims, and several paragraphs of fluff later, confirms the MIT claim that funds were transferred out of user accounts to an account controlled by the IOTA Foundation without user consent. (They had consent from some other network participants / the "community", and supposedly they had very good reasons for it.) I gave up by part 4, sorry.
Where I come from—which happens to be MIT, in fact—security protocols have a threat model, either stated or unstated, and a confused threat model is a legitimate criticism. One of the common unstated parts of the threat model of cryptocurrencies is that, unlike with a government-issued currency, the organization behind the currency should not be implicitly trusted and certainly should not be able to take your money for your own good. Is this part of the IOTA threat model? What exactly is required technically for this sort of transfer?