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by raitucarp 3056 days ago
I just copy paste from CfB's response, in case you missed it:

Thank you. This article was useful for me, it showed what details of IOTA haven’t been highlighted yet. Below I list incorrect things from the article, if you find time it would be great if you paid more attention to them and shared your thoughts:

“IOTA has no limit on transactions and therefore, it has no limit on bandwidth requirements or disk space.” — In the future the majority of the nodes will be swarm nodes forming clusters and using Swarm Intelligence. A swarm can process more transactions than a single full node.

“This means, if you run a full IOTA node, anyone on the IOTA network can write data to your hard drive with just a small, extremely low cost proof-of-work.” — IOTA was created for the Internet-of-Things with network-bound PoW in mind, the current state of things is temporary.

“Over time, the IOTA transaction set size can grow unbounded, leaving only storage farms with the resources required to host the data.” — This is incorrect even for Bitcoin because of pruning techniques.

“My past experience working at companies that develop hardware products tells me this does not make sense in any other way but a marketing bullet.” — While this thing is likely correct I decided to list it here. IOTA team has experience working at companies developing hardware products too. Even more, I bet your smartphone contains a chip developed by one of our advisors.

“IOTA claims their Ternary-based Proof-of-Work function will work with IOT because it uses minimal power, but I contend that any power usage more significant than signing a transaction is too much because there is another alternative approach.” — As I already said, IOTA will be using network-bound PoW, which will be consuming less energy than required for a transaction signing.

“Contacting a central server run by the company that built the IOT device, announcing the need to submit a transaction at which point the centralized server will submit the transaction on the device’s behalf.” — You described the Internet, not the IoT. Please, refer to “Connectivity” section of https://iot.ieee.org/newsletter/march-2017/three-major-chall..., it explains why you are very wrong.

“In the case of IOTA the client software design intends to kick nodes off the network that do not participate enough, so being even just a passive listener is not an option.” — And again you talk about the Internet, not about the IoT. Googling for reasons of not using IP(v4/v6) should show you the mistake.

I don’t mention insignificant mistakes in your reasoning, all those seem to be caused by the lack of information about IOTA. This is an issue that the IOTA team is working on.

4 comments

This is a very.. immature and amateurish response at best, purposely deceptive at worst.

OP talks about what IOTA _is_. The response is: "You are wrong because we _hope that IOTA will be different in the future_". How does this response make any sense at all?

"Swarm Intelligence" - Okay, I stopped there. Can't throw something like that out without a link or commentary.

Getting a decentralized swarm to implement transaction processing is highly non-trivial, especially when (as the OP highlights) incentives are delicate and the entire system must be extremely secure.

Especially true since parallelizing the processing of transactions is orders of magnitude easier than parallelizing STORAGE of transactions in decentralized systems- he's deflecting the criticism towards an easier problem.
... which is the opposite of what a good engineer does. A good engineer focuses first on the hardest aspects of the problem, and tends to guide discussion there.
They perform 'tip selection' using a random walk. Given the nature of the Tangle Tips as a nebulous cloud, could there be any better way?

And you can't enforce tip selection.

As simias notes in another post on this thread, most of IOTA's "response" is about things which are not there yet. "In the future", "current state of things is temporary", "IOTA will be", etc.
It's a shame this comment got parked in the bottom of the page, it just shows on how the article is right; IOTA is immature technology that hopes to be better one day (maybe with all fingers crossed)