Since posting FUD is so ridiculously low-effort in comparison to setting the record straight, I felt it necessary to put a log of copy-pastas together to balance the scales so its just as easy to answer the FUD as it was to generate it. So next time you hear someone say "IOTA is centralized" you no longer have to take an hour out of your day to set the record straight. You just copy-paste away and move on.
It's also worth mentioning IOTA devs are too damn busy working on the protocol and doing their job to answer FUD. So I felt a semblance of responsibility.
Here they are. These answers are too my understanding so if you see something that doesn't look right let me know!
"By using a ternary number system, the amount of devices and cycles can be reduced significantly. In contrast to two-state devices, multistate devices provide better radix economy with the option for further scaling"
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep36652
An IOTA seed is 81 characters long. There are more IOTA seed combinations than atoms in the universe. All the computers in the world combined would take millions of years just to find your randomly generated one that’s located somewhere between the 0th and the 2781st combination. The chance for someone to randomly generate the exact same seed as yours is 1 / (2781).
If you can’t fathom the number 27 ^ 81, this video should help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8YIdmwcubc
Proof of work done in IOTA is not like in bitcoin. Only a user’s device must do very minimal PoW to confirm two other transactions for it to be valid. The PoW is only there to guard against sybil attacks, a la Hashcash, and not as a consensus mechanism like in Bitcoin. Therefore, no miners and no fees are required. The network also becomes faster with more transactions, because the probability of your transactions being selected as a tip (confirmed by someone else) increases. Because of this, spamming the network is encouraged since they provide PoW for 2 other transactions and speed up the network.
All IOTAs that will ever exist were sold at the ICO in 2015. There was no % reserved for development. Devs had to buy in with their personal money. Community donated back 5% of all IOTA so the IOTA foundation could be setup.
Interestingly enough, IOTA is actually the only crypto that does not run into any problems with a currency cap and deflationaryism. Because there are zero fees, you will always be able to pay for something for exactly what it's worth using IOTA, no matter how small the value. If by chance in the future a single iota grows so large in value that it no longer allows someone to pay for something in fractions of a penny, the foundation would just add decimal points allowing for a tenth or a hundreth or a thousandth of an iota to be transacted with.
https://forum.helloiota.com/1191/Setting-Up-a-Full-Node-A-Comprehensive-Guide
Download official wallet here
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only use the sidebar generators to create your seed. Also generate it while not connected to the internet, preferably in an air gapped device that never has nor will connect to the internet. But, if you don’t trust generators at all you can also make your seed by drawing a 9x9 matrix on paper (81 char seed) and roll dice for the values in each cell.
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if you send from an address, trash that address and never use it again. You can receive to an address as many times as you want but once you send from it you gotta move to a new address. The desktop wallet does this automatically so no need to worry about doing it yourself 👍
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when a snapshot occurs, you have to download the latest wallet version and hit attach to tangle until your balance shows up. You won’t lose your iota if you don’t do this but people often post their balance is zero after a snapshot and all they have to do is hit attach to tangle a few times.
That’s it. That’s all there is to the wallet commotion. Really not that hard imo but with so many new users it appears we’re getting into situations where the blind is leading the blind.
In the wallet, go to edit node configuration > custom and type in this guys node. It’s very good. All the public nodes listed by default on the wallet are overused.
Or use one from the top of this list: www.iota.dance/nodes
This is why: https://blog.iota.org/the-transparency-compendium-26aa5bb8e260
Cybercrypt has been hired to review and audit it. IOTA is currently running SHA-3/KECCAK now until Curl is ready.
https://blog.iota.org/curl-disclosure-beyond-the-headline-1814048d08ef
Nick Johnson is an ethereum dev who is incentivized to see IOTA fail, see CFBs twitter responses here.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nicksdjohnson/status/912676954184323073?lang=en
And this
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/72lly0/comment/dnjk9f5?st=JB2VKUBB&sh=a2892548
When critiquers provide feedback that is ACTUALLY useful to the devs, then sure they'll be glad to hear it. So far not once has an outside dev brought up something that the IOTA devs found useful. Every single time it ends up being something that was already taken into consideration with the design and if the critiquer did an ounce of research they would know that. Thus you often find the IOTA devs dismissing their opinion as FUD and responding with hostility because all their critique is really doing is sending the message to their supporters that they are not supposed to like IOTA anymore.
Nick Johnson was a perfect example of this. The Ethereum community was co-existing peacefully with IOTA’s community (as they do with nearly all alt coins) until Nick wrote his infamous article. Then almost overnight Ethereum decided it didn’t like IOTA anymore and we’ve been dealing with that shit since. As of today, add LTC to that list with Charlie’s (even admitting) ignorant judgement of IOTA.
IOTA is more decentralized than any blockchain crypto that relies on 5 pools of miners, all largely based in China. Furthermore, coordinator isn’t a central server all transactions pass through, contrary to popular misconception. It is just normal actor who adds transactions to the tangle, which other nodes can use as milestones, if they wish. It’s a shepherd, you could say, which the herd can follow so they don’t go astray (following some malicious nodes or whatnot). The Monte Carlo Random Walk algorithm is what will create consensus in the herd when there is no shepherd any more. It will be comparable to every sheep calling out while also following the sound of the call of the rest of the herd. That way they can all tangle up together.
Referencing the coordinator is also optional.
Also, if you research and understand how IOTA intends to work without the coordinator, it’s easier to accept it for now as training wheels. I suggest reading pg 15 and on of the white paper analyzing in great depth how the network will defend different attack scenarios without a coordinator. For the past several months, IOTA foundation has been using St Petersburg college’s super computer to stress test IOTA and learn when they can turn the coordinator off. There will likely be a blog about the results soon.
This is another great read covering double spends on IOTA without a coordinator: www.tangleblog.com/2017/07/10/is-double-spending-possible-with-iota/
This too: http://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7eix4a/any_iota_guru_that_can_explain_what_this_guy_is/dq5ijrm
Also this correspondence with Vitalik and Come_from_Beyond https://twitter.com/DavidSonstebo/status/932510087301779456
At the end of the day, outstanding claims require outstanding evidence and folks approaching IOTA with a “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude is completely understandable. It’s all about your risk tolerance.
99% of these “but did they think about double spend attacks?” type questions could just be answered if people went and did their own research. Yes of course they thought about that. That’s like crypto101…
www.tangleblog.com/2017/07/10/is-double-spending-possible-with-iota/
That’s just the nature of this business. Everyone in these communities has money at stake and are extremely incentivized to keep only positive news at the top of the front page. There is nothing you're going to do about that on this subreddit or any crypto subreddit. It's just a reddit fact of life we have to deal with. Everyone has a downvote and everyone has an upvote. But what can be done is just simply answer the questions even if they are downvoted to hell. Yea most people wont' see the answers or discussion but that one person will. every little bit counts.
I will say that there are most certainly answers to nearly every FUD topic out there. Every single one. A lot of the posts I'm seeing as of late especially since the price spike are rehashed from months ago. They are often not answered not because there isn't an answer/explanation, but because regulars who have the answers simply don't see them (for the reason listed above). I can see how it's easy for this to be interpreted (especially by new users) as there not being an answer or "the FUDsters are on to something" but thats just not the case.
Masked authenticated messages exist right now so data can be transferred privately. Very important for businesses.
Centralized coin mixer is out that foundation runs. Logs are kept so they can collect data and improve it Folks can copy the coin mixer code and run it themselves. Goal is for mixer to be decentralized and ran by any node.
We believe so. For now this is all we know: https://twitter.com/iotatoken/status/894301083689943040
Yes they do
Worth clarifying that 0 iota data transactions are perfectly fine and are welcomed since they still provide pow for 2 other transactions and help secure the network. In the early stages, these types of transactions will probably be what give us the tps/pow needed to remove the coordinator and allow the network defend 34% attacks organically.
But... if someone does not want to sell or exchange their data for free (0 IOTA transaction), then Dominic is saying that the IOTA token must be used for that or any exchange in value on the network.
This is inherently healthy for the ecosystem since it provides a neutral and non-profit middle ground that all parties/companies can trust. If one company made their own token it wouldn’t be trusted since companies are incentivized by profits and nothing is stopping them from manipulating their token to make them more money. Thus, the IOTA foundation will not partner with anyone who refuses to take this option off the table.
Full nodes store, update and verify from the last snapshot, which happens roughly every month. Its on the roadmap to make snapshotting automatic and up to each full node’s discretion.
Perma-nodes would store the entire history of the tangle from the genesis. These are optional and would likely only be created by companies who wish to sell historical access of the tangle as a service or companies who heavily use the tangle for their own data and want to have quick, convenient access to their data’s history.
Swarm nodes are also in development which will ease the burden on full nodes. https://blog.iota.org/iota-development-roadmap-74741f37ed01
Nelson is fixing this:
https://medium.com/deviota/carriota-nelson-automatic-peer-discovery-for-iota-bdca9b8b8750
https://medium.com/deviota/carriota-nelson-in-a-nutshell-1ee5317d8f19
Microsoft is in fact real: see David's response here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7inys6/does_anyone_have_information_on_why_microsoft/dr05u5u/
All these partnerships are going to influence IOTA development!!
Microsoft has no influence on the development of IOTA. They either choose to use it or they don’t. Same goes for Bosch, Innogy, Fujitsu, Schneider electric and every other IOTA partner.
-Internet of things is one application of IOTA and considered by many to be the 4th industrial revolution. Go do some googling. IOTA having zero fees enables M2M for the first time in history. Also, if a crypto can do M2M it sure as shit can do M2P and P2P.
If you want lightning network, IOTA already released it. Called flash channels.
https://blog.iota.org/instant-feeless-flash-channels-88572d9a4385
It means that all the full nodes the community has been setting up are now going to properly play their role in contributing to the network. So far most of the network has been throttled through the 14 plus odd public nodes shown in the wallet. These nodes are very juicy targets for attackers. Now the network will be properly distributed amongst thousands of full nodes.
https://medium.com/deviota/carriota-nelson-automatic-peer-discovery-for-iota-bdca9b8b8750
We need to continue the progress on CarrIOTA, but I think, this small side-project is worth the time. It will (hopefully) increase the amount of full nodes and explode the size of the network in a short amount of time.
Also if you want to setup your own full node here’s a guide, the hardware requirements are very small.
https://forum.helloiota.com/1191/Setting-Up-a-Full-Node-A-Comprehensive-Guide
If a crypto can do M2M it sure as shit can do P2P. M2M is hard mode.
IOTA, through the data marketplace, will be the first crypto to surpass speculation and actually be used in the real world for something. From there, it will branch out into other use cases, such as P2P. Or maybe P2P use of IOTA will grow in parallel with M2M, because why not?
https://blog.iota.org/iota-data-marketplace-cb6be463ac7f
Might I add with its infinite scaling, IOTA is the ONLY crypto that has the capability to replace fiat at the moment.
It will release when it’s ready. Most folks are going to be transferring their iota to it so they are making damn sure it’s bullet proof. We don’t need a “parity” situation to happen to iota.
To Ppl complaining: welcome to investing in a project in its early stages, something typically reserved for wealthy individuals/organizations before ICO’s became a thing. With early investing comes much less hand holding and more responsibility on the user to know what they are doing. If you have a hard time accepting this responsibility, don’t invest and wait for the technology to get easier for you. How many people actually knew how to use and mine bitcoin in 2009 before it had all its gui infrastructure?
The wallet is a tiring issue for the regulars here. every spike in price leads to a wave of new investors complaining about the wallet and claiming it must immediately become “top priority” for the devs. But a minuscule amount of research and you would find the user-friendly update your looking for is right around the corner with UCL.
It’s worth noting IOTA is a tangle, the first of its kind. NOT a copy paste blockchain. As a result wallets for IOTA are the first of their kind and translating the tangle into a nice clean user-friendly blockchain experience for the masses is even more taxing.