In a blog post too obviously spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt regarding Iota, writer Nick Johnson declares, among other things: "Iota is a bad actor in the open source community." Here is his justification:
Next, and in my mind most damningly, Sergey Ivancheglo, Iota’s cofounder, claims that the flaws in the Curl hash function were in fact deliberate; that they were inserted as ‘copy protection’, to prevent copycat projects, and to allow the Iota team to compromise those projects if they sprang up.
This seemed to be a rather intriguing piece of information -- one of those where the guy making the complaint doesn't understand what he's complaining about, and reveals he is himself completely wrong on the point which he is attempting to make. What he's describing here is not a flaw, not a defect, but obviously a planned, properly documented, and working feature. (Curious irony is that Johnson had already thrown Dunning-Kreuger into the conversation in indirect reference to Iota, so with that information, I'm not expecting a friendly reception to the inevitable moment when he stumbles upon my small observation here. But who knows, he seems reasonable in other threads.) So I followed the link -- which he had happily supplied -- and read the following description from his opponent:
These days IOTA is still small and this opens it to the following attack: an adversary joins IOTA with his computers which take more than 1/3 of IOTA’s body and then makes the computers fail thus triggering IOTA’s collapse. To counteract this attack we are running a set of computers called Coordinator which issues milestones published on IOTA’s tangle. Computers not belonging to an adversary rely on these milestones to detect faulty computers. In this setup IOTA can survive even if 99% of the computers fail. IOTA is open-source software. In the world controlled by the state open-source software is protected with licenses, someone doing things not allowed by the license can be sued. Cryptocoin industry demonstrated to be very resistant to state regulations, this led to majority of the projects run in this industry to be oriented on scamming ordinary people. IOTA team welcomes attempts to use technology IOTA is based on. This helps IOTA because increases awareness and shows that Tangle is indeed a viable technology. Unfortunately, odds that copies of IOTA codebase will be used for good are very low. We can’t just watch an IOTA clone scamming people and ruining people lives and Tangle’s reputation. This is why a copy-protection mechanism was added from the very beginning. To explain how the copy-protection works we should recall about existence of Coordinator. Coordinator acts as an ultimate oracle if any uncertainty about the current state of things in IOTA arise. Digital signatures are verified by every computer in IOTA network, if a signature passes the verification routine then it’s, PROBABLY, valid. To make sure that the signature is indeed valid the computer waits for the transaction containing the signature to be referenced by a milestone. This is a perfect place for placing the copy-protection mechanism. While everyone looks at signature verification routine the real verification happens in the routine updating milestones. This trick resembles a focus trick done by magicians on TV. It worked so perfectly, that Neha Narula’s team was fooled despite of me explaining the essence of the trick numerous times.
Brilliant. I fully agree with Sergey Ivancheglo's clever approach. I think his solution is elegant, humorous, clever, and a very good example of how open source innovators can protect themselves while also remaining transparent about much of their technical progress, a process from which competitors gain much by keeping private. He is demanding that people who copy him at least understand what they're doing well enough to do it right, which seems to be a perfectly reasonable expectation for an innovator to place upon people who use his ideas. The whole idea of license arises from this pressure, so he's being reasonable, and his demand is a good, principled one.
I already decided I like Iota for other reasons completely unrelated to this. But this cleverness just confirms a number of hunches about the integrity with which they're approaching their target (which is no less than to be the fabric which weaves the immense and mad tangle of the Internet of Things into a coherent Tangle of Qubics while also respecting a number of important principles required for holy grails like long-term stability, safety, and security -- and openness, a hard combination to get right on all points.)
Back in the day, one of the developers I worked with was using all spare capacity in our office rack servers to mine -- back when Bitcoin was worth pennies. He later went on to be one of the core developers for Bitcoin. Since those days, I have watched the whole blockchain adventure with consistent interest. But until now, I remained simply a researcher and evangelist of the innovative ideas, never investing any money toward it, in any way. Nothing seemed interesting enough, although it is all very interesting.
Iota is the first one that turns my head -- they're doing something enormous, thoughtful, and elegant, from what I've seen so far. The fact that they're using Balanced Ternary for all the right reasons perfectly corresponds with the brilliance of their approach in other areas, which I can use to measure them, since this is an area I know well. They're doing it right, and they have a bright future ahead of them before most others even realize what they're doing even though they're looking directly at them.
I reckon I'll be posting more about them in this space. There's so much crossover with things I've been studying for years.