- iota co-founder

Drivel like the above has long outed Iota as an absolute scam. The ternary business was some mixture of (a) bamboozling non-technical users, (b) distraction from its other failings, and (c) sheer delusion.

Iota pushers hand-wave with slogans like "gets faster the more people use it" and "replace the central coordinator with voting (someday?)" but without actual security. Whereas PoW has a well-understood security model (see 51% attacks) Iota hopes you won't notice that basically nothing can be decided without the central coordinator.

And then it gets worse. Iota-without-the-coordinator washes its hands of consistency. Individual nodes would have to pray they are connected to good actors, and then through some unexplained governance scheme, deduce the consensus state.

In short: iota is unsuitable as any kind of distributed ledger.

>- iota co-founder

lol they seriously say that? For those who aren't aware...

You get e (2.71828...) as the optimal base when you're trying to minimize the product of a) the number of symbols you're using and b) the number of symbols needed to represent a number.

Once there are other factors that are significant, it's no longer the optimum. And indeed, in the real world, you care about the difficulty of implementing base-x vs base-y logic in hardware, the installed ecosystem for computing in that base, etc, which (to put it mildly) heavily favors base-2, even for domains where one subproblem is more naturally expressed in trinary.

Also, rolling your own POW and making claims about that POW isn't some trivial thing. Hashcash was created in 1997 which is eleven years before bitcoin. Rolling your own crypto system isn't just something where you can just make one up and use in a production environment.

I'll add it to the list of absolutely revolutionary blockchain technologies that are going to change the world [working implementation is left as an exercise for the reader].

The tangle, like trits and many other IOTAisms, appear to be the perfect basis for a scam: too complicated for non-experts to fully understand yet just enough plausibility to sell it.

Even if the creators were not conciously trying to create a scam, so far it has been indistinguishable from one.

(I'm interested in a peer review of tangle as just searching for it only uncovers page upon page of marketing drivel.)

I saw one which claimed it was "impossible to 51% because it's a DAG and both chains just end up on the network"

No. That means either you don't have consistency (which means 51% attacks could be theoretically implemented with way less than 51% of the hash rate) or that the consensus of which transaction are valid can be 51%ed.

Iota is even worse. Doesn't even try to have a distributed consensus, just uses a centralized validator.

Actually wouldn't any sort of structure that prevents double spending have to be a dag? In order to prevent double spending you need to put transactions in topological order (to know how much money the account has). If you can do that your data structure is a DAG.