More doubts about IOTA

in #iota7 years ago

I am interested in IOTA, but as of now - I have more questions than answers. Right now I have doubts it can actually work.
I read the whitepaper and some blogs on it, however, most bloggers just blindly repeat what they read on IOTA blog.
IOTA is vulnerable to Sybil attack - at least in the beginning. The claim that there will be no fees - is IMO ridiculous - as people will mine the PoW on dedicated miners with GPU and then sell those services to those who want to transact for ... fees. If you really want to transact a lot - like millions of micro transactions per day - you will find it is more efficient to do the PoW on GPUs instead of runing it on some micro chip that is not dedicated to mining. Someone will do just that - the miner will collect transactions from others and then send them to the tangle and validate other transactions with GPUs. But wait - do you think the miner will pick the transactions he needs to validate randomly? No, he will pick his own transactions.
Now, let's assume the miner stumbles upon a transaction that was already "validated" by some other miner but the transaction is actually invalid. Do you think the miner will be motivated to declare this transaction as invalid? What if the evil miner will retaliate by declaring his transactions to be invalid? What if the evil miner is actually a lot more powerful than you? Probably, it is safer to just ignore this transaction and pick some other one.
So, there are a lot of issues with IOTA - we need answers.

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Indeed! Thank you for highlighting this. IOTA made a lot of claims, some of which I felt to be a bit ungrounded. I haven't quite been able to figure out why I felt this way and this helps point me in a direction!

Correct me if I'm wrong. But doesn't Iota work as anyone who uses the system then validates 2 other transactions? Thus negating the need for miners at all? This is what I was told, I may be completely wrong.

Yes, which means everybody should be a miner - as validating two other transactions requires to check for double spend and then do some PoW which will burn some electricity and cost resources. So, you do pay fees - but only with electricity. But since you can always pay to someone else to burn this electricity - you actually can transact just for fees.

Ah, I see what you mean. Relating 'energy' to fees. Though to me it seems almost negligible to the moderate user. I have sent several transactions with IOTA and it only takes but a minute to POW on my laptop in the background. I hardly notice it going on. Sure my CPU kicks up a bit, but that's about it. I see what you mean though, for someone making large amounts of transactions it would take a bit more computing power (i.e. electricity and fees) to conduct them.

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