IOTA rolled their own crypto. As they were warned by many in and out of the crypto (in both senses of the word) communities at the time, it was susceptible to attack. MIT Media Lab wrote a responsible disclosure report on a vulnerability. IOTA kept pushing back the publication date, based on a mixture of amateur cryptography arguments and nitpicking over disclosure issues. MIT Media Lab finally published, well after the originally agreed deadline, after realizing IOTA was not serious about improving the code further and was using the time to attempt to improve their appearance in the disclosure report's narrative. IOTA got upset, as this publication exposed them with their pants down. They've now threatened the involved academics with legal action. (There is, of course, no actionable basis for such.)

It is interesting if you find cryptocurrencies interesting, as it shows how "well" run many are - and IOTA is by no means an outlier here. The foundations are simply not lousy with cryptography, programming and economics experts who are solely interested in best practices.

>MIT Media Lab wrote a responsible disclosure report

Pardon my ignorance but I am confused with engagement of MIT Media lab in this. Was it volunteer or there was some formal engagement between IOTA foundation and MIT Media lab?

Basically they are claiming one of the core primitives to make IOTA work as a secure cryptocurrency is fundamentally flawed. Haven't read enough but if this is what it sounds like, it means IOTA needs a major rework.

I mean what did you expect from a weird shitcoin that uses trinary arithmetic (really?) for no good reason.

edit: letter #11 says "shit's fucked, yo".

Actually, Iota already had the rework you are demanding, months ago.

You should start reading at #76. It is a fast read.

Because IOTA is rekt, it has been for some time, and this is just what you should expect from people who try to roll their own cryptography, then get defensive when a notable real cryptographer points out flaws.

Agreed. FD: I've 'shorted' IOTA in any way possible, mostly through altcoins which may actually deliver on IOTAs promises. As soon as I heard they were using ternary as some kind of competitive advantage, I lost all faith in them.

Totally. And not to sound holier than thou, I'm guilty of "unnecessary re-implementation" possibly more than most. I use my own window manager, have written my own high performance disk archival compression, wrote my own (super)multichannel (>8) lossless audio format, am working on my own large sequence data (think: DNA) native clustering algorithm....

But for the love of god man, /never invent your own crypto/

Also, honest question: Anyone know of any exchange or means to take a short position on IOTA? I only did so though "never buying any".

Friendly reminder that iota's cryptographic weaknesses are immaterial, because it's not actually a decentralized currency - there's the coordinator, a server run by the iota team that controls transactions. The entire value of it today is speculation - if a demonstration of the complete incompetence and dishonesty of the team, exposed by a researchers at a world renowned institution that laymen are familiar with wouldn't make the price drop to zero, what hope is there that the crash will happen before you have to close your short position? And if crypto currencies crash, what is the likelihood that whatever exchange you placed your bet on is still solvent?

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Be content to eat popcorn and wait.

somehow they claim ternery is easier to implement in hardware when it's strictly false in every way.

I have a vague memory of once upon a time reading a paper alleging that if you could start everything over again from the beginning, that somehow ternary was more efficient than binary for a digital architecture, something having to do with power usage. But other than that it just sounds like nonsense.

Love to see that paper; seems like nonsense to me. If someone came up with a more optimized transistor architecture than CMOS I'd love to have a look at it.

Oh! I remembered more details about it if it helps. It has to do with e being the "most efficient" numbering base. The reason e is the "most efficient" has to do with wanting to minimize both the size of the alphabet of symbols as well as the number of digits in an average computation. If you allow for a non-integer base, and a non-integer number of digits, the optimum base is e. e rounds to 3. ;-)

Now, full disclosure, I'm not entirely sure I believe in this, I'm just citing sources but check these out:

http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmS... https://hackaday.com/2016/12/16/building-the-first-ternary-m...

Also, Don Knuth likes balanced ternary, and, well, I guess that counts for something.

(again, personally I have no idea if I think it's nonsense or not)

Yeah, it's complete bullocks. Rest assured, if anything was better than binary for _logic_ then it would already have taken over the world. Binary have a lot of wonderful properties (not least noise immunity) and deserves a lot of credit for the success of modern technology. Note, the ENIAC wasn't binary! It was based on decimal.

However there are places where we look beyond binary; most notably in storage where data density is job one. The vast majority of FLASH is using MLC (4-values) or TLC (8-values) which need heroic circuits to recover the data. But note, these are 2^2 and 2^3, still binary based.

It is not "complete bollocks",it just not as efficient as it appears to be. The reason for the (supposedly) higher efficiency of ternary logic is so called Radix Economy (wikipedia has an article). Properly implemented ternary (with a split power supply - positive, negative and ground) would have the same noise immunity as binary.

"It is not "complete bollocks",it just not as efficient as it appears to be."

That's a contradictory statement. If it was as efficient as claimed it wouldn't be bollocks. But it isn't, thus, bollocks.

"(with a split power supply - positive, negative and ground) would have the same noise immunity as binary."

[citation needed]

I'm not a EE, but my understanding from EE friends is that isn't true.

> Properly implemented ternary (with a split power supply - positive, negative and ground) would have the same noise immunity as binary.

Only if you increase the supply voltage such that: V+tern - GNDtern == V+bin - GNDbin == GNDtern - V-tern