tyKiwanuka, JollyGood, and Lauda: Thank you. OP was promptly updated with
flag #1392 against
iotatoken.
Ratimov: Thank you for the translation. I have linked to it in my
thread metadata post.
Laud Lauda: Credit where due!I appreciate Nullius breaking everything down here (and for starting the thread in the first place), as I wouldn't have read anything about this scam otherwise.
Thanks, but
Lauda deserves the credit for the initiative. When the story broke about the IOTA network “pause”, she asked me for my opinion due to my technical expertise and the fact that I have discussed IOTA’s failings before, as quoted above.
I am not easily shocked. I was
shocked that IOTA has a centralized kill switch; I did not know that, until they used it! How do ordinary investors stand a chance with them?
I thereupon decided that I needed to do more to warn people so that they don’t risk losing their money. Whereas that is always Lauda’s goal. It was easy, too easy for me to sit back in the Development & Technology forum two years ago and sneer at IOTA’s broken homebrew hash—then ignore IOTA, because
I would never risk
my money on it. Lauda has a more practical focus on helping others here.
Thank you, Lauda.
IOTA is the worst of all worldsI don't like the use of a centralized validator, and would not trust any coin that uses one.
I think there is a place for centralized technologies: Chaumian banks. It is a matter of trade-offs. Digicash had excellent privacy and fungibility, but was centralized; Bitcoin is decentralized, but lacks Digicash’s privacy and fungibility on the blockchain layer. (Lightning mostly solves this problem in a different way.) Centralized solutions also have high performance and low overhead, generally.
Whereas IOTA has
none of these advantages. It promises to be a Bitcoin-style cryptocurrency, but better than Bitcoin—
which it is not!In the practical terms which matter to the average user, I think that IOTA is really a Paypal-style solution, but with much higher overhead and, I think,
lower security than Paypal—
and it is a financially unstable altcoin which makes an even worse investment than government-issued fiat currency. Why would anybody want this? It combines the worst of all worlds!
Indeed, if I had an exclusive choice between IOTA and Paypal, the answer is easy: Paypal. I say that as a Bitcoin maximalist who holds almost all his own money in Bitcoin.
It appears they are
rolling back the IOTA blockchain to reverse the transactions involving the stolen coin. Etherum did something very similar in it's early days when a hacker exploited a flaw and drained coin out of the DAO, although it has something resembling consensus before doing this.
I also had that thought about Ethereum. The form that my thought took was, “This is
even worse than Ethereum—much worse.” The comparison is damning, whereas I myself have previously called Ethereum a...
...Bolt A Turing Complete VM Onto A Blockchain Security Nightmare With Centrally Controlled
Promise-Breaking Via “
Irregular State Change” Exploding Clown Car Cryptokitties Toy Coin...
...among many similar words of endearment in various other posts.
Ethereum rewrote the history of its blockchain with a hardfork; but it
had a blockchain, and even the top-down Vitalik Says So order took some time and effort to push through. By comparison, IOTA can also rewrite their transaction history with much less effort—and IOTA just recently demonstrated that the people who run it can shut the whole thing off with the push of a button!
Much, much worse. Anonymint called it out years ago at a design level, before that the true legend cryptohunter branded it a scam and predicted how it would go down Seems the training wheels were never removed.
No need to give the credit to yourselves lauda and nullius Laudas alt.
Well done though for noticing years later now that most of the damage is done.
- after the market start 
