IOTA News

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So I’m thinking about making some tutorials when it comes to IOTA. I’m wondering what you guys prefer so I made this poll: http://www.strawpoll.me/16291257

Thank you for all the answers :)

(I originally tweeted this rant)

‏In my many discussions with many different people about IOTA, ternary is I think the most controversial aspect of the tech. Many people consider it genuine lunacy, a sign that IOTA is just a scam cryptocurrency. And I'll be honest with you: when I first encountered ternary in IOTA, I went "What the f*** is this sh**? Numerology?"

Let's talk about the history of computers. After WWII, the Soviet Union had its technological golden age in the 1950s: first satellite, Sputnik, first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, etc. The Soviet Union was a hot spot of technological innovation (and it scared the hell out of the West before the West caught up and the East lost its edge). Out of Moscow State University came Setun. A ternary Soviet technological masterpiece.

In the West IBM was shipping hard drives the size of dinner tables and in the East Soviet geniuses like Sergei Sobolev and Nikolay Brusentsov were saying ternary was the best basis for computer technological development. Why?

To answer why, we need to consider the phrase "radix economy." What is that? Simply put: which number system best accomplishes the goal of representing numbers and manipulating them with the most ease, the most economically. And the answer is... base e.

e? e is the natural logarithm. Without turning this rant into a math lesson about why, e is 2.718(...). If you are able to write computer circuitry based on the natural log as a number system, go claim your Fields Medal in Math and Nobel Prize in Physics. For the rest of us mortals, we can note that binary, base 2, is pretty close to the ideal number system based on e, but ternary, base 3 is closer.

Meaning what? Meaning, given an equal input of energy, a ternary computer will be faster than a binary computer at the same task. Or, a ternary computer will perform a task in the same time as a binary computer but use less energy. That archaic Soviet tech was not nonsense! However, ternary is more costly to design and to think about. Binary is just simpler. Thus ternary faded and Setun is in a museum.

There are a lot of side topics here. Like balanced ternary.

"Perhaps the prettiest number system of all," writes Donald E. Knuth in The Art of Computer Programming, "is the balanced ternary notation."

https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/105Sp10/addcomments/Hayes_ThirdBase.htm

(Balanced ternary is #IOTA btw.) And you might say "the gain over binary is too tiny to warrant a completely new tech." Except the gains compound in some designs (like Neural Networks): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7966166/

Ternary is very important for AI and Neural Networks. And so: it is 2018. Technological evolution marches on.

There is no magic rule that says once we chose binary we can never go to ternary: sunk cost fallacy.

As we think about technological evolution, or even natural evolution, we note it is never a straight line. It is always a convoluted mess. What was once discarded can come to the fore again. Two steps forward, one step back. The West eclipsed the Soviets in tech as the Cold War progressed, but the Soviets still had some surprises. It is a fool who believes his adversary has no tricks up their sleeves and the West was scared and put into cold sweats many times by exotic Soviet tech advances.

Such as with supercavitating torpedoes: the Russian empire was always historically landlocked and always had difficulty gaining ports, but here the Soviets made a massive leap in naval military technology that took the West totally by surprise. For those of us who marvel at the history of technology, the Soviet Union is a treasure trove of exotic alternative realities. Like... Star Wars Hoth Walker-style mining equipment!

Again, only a fool concludes that certain realities of technology are fixed and never changing. Technological evolution has no rules. Ternary in IOTA is indeed a huge, mindblowing stab at up-ending decades of assumptions. It either turns you off on IOTA ...or seduces you.

That's what happened to me: ternary in IOTA seduced me. I genuinely believe ternary is going to gain a head of steam as people realize the efficiency gains, especially in AI research, making the best Neural Networks. IOTA is only a first glimmer I think in that regard.

Nikolay Brusentsov, original pioneer of ternary computing, died in 2014, age 99. I can only hope some whisper of rumors of what became Jinn and IOTA reached his ears before he passed.

And that was only 4 years ago.

And I think in another short 4 years, everyone is going to be talking about ternary and IOTA, big impact in AI and IoT.

/end rant

He added several "bugs" in NXT and successfully managed to make MIT/DCI work on a IOTA forge-signature "chaff bug"

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611872/why-adding-bugs-to-software-can-make-it-safer/

IOTA ahead of its time. This is just becoming a standard technique to make software safer as well.

Check my post history for the post. Made it this morning. It is no longer on the sub. I sorted by new and by hot and it doesn’t come up anywhere. IOTA withdrawals have been suspended for weeks, with them only being available on a slim chance. For the past week, they have been suspended 24/7. Binance has yet to provide any answers or information about it. I made a post in the sub this morning, and it appears that it has been deleted by the mods. We deserve answers, not censorship!!!

As we all know, Heilman is just a gradute student studying cryptography. Neha has no cryptographic background and expertise. She is not even supposed/qualified to be involved in this cryptographic argument.

Being with such low academic credentials and such unconvincing arguments, these two persons could unproportionally create the bad reputation on IOTA and the team such as anti and not collaborating with academic researchers in some crypto media and public relationship.

I have been wondering how it could happen to IOTA and there must be some lessons we can learn from it. For instance, what is the right and efficient PR strategy for IOTA to deal this kind incidents in the very beginning? Fighting back, Ignoring it, explaining it but not fighting back, or something else? It is also bring up the issue how we should cultivate the relationship with the crypto media. The bottom line is that those media such as coindesk, cointelegraph and CCN are still the major gateways to bridge the crypto space with the outside.