Thread by @vibes_exe

currently reading all about a scam and/or mass delusion that sits at the intersection of "better blockchain" tech, internet of things, and ternary computing, so... extremely my shit

this kind of shit is perfectly designed to cause a 67 year old wendy's franchisee to lose all their money and it's *fascinating*

this whole thing hinges around what they call a "tangle" instead of a blockchain, which is aptly named, i assure you. basically instead of one single chain of PoWs like you have in a blockchain, which everyone agrees on, you have a DAG where each txn references 2 others

the "proof-of-work" that secures the tangle isn't from massive numbers of processors competing to win a one-way hash war, but instead on the assumption that once the network has large number of "honest nodes" an attacker would need to outpace them in bandwidth instead of FLOPS

i'll admit this is a very interesting twist on the blockchain tech of the last decade, but i'm not so sure it makes any sense when their target market is internet of things, which is 1) probably never going to happen and 2) going to really upset upset assumptions about bandwidth

then there are the claims of scalability, which as far as this dummy is concerned, they have not solved. they point out the bottleneck blockchains have in the blocks and miners, which is true and is a real problem for blockchain based networks

but as I see it, their DAG can only remain as a single, distributed ledger if each node has near-complete and near-immediate knowledge of the entire tangle. doesn't seem that scalable to me!

anyway, this thing is called IOTA, which is a very cute name. this is where the interesting and halfway grounded ideas end in this saga. onward!

so naturally, as with all things of this nature in late capitalism, the IOTA people have formed a "Foundation" to... well basically to control their supposedly decentralized network. but more importantly to form Partnerships™️ with Business™️ and Industry™️

one important thing the Foundation also did was to handle the creation of the genesis txn, the first txn on the network that creates all the tokens (they avoid the word coin for obvious reasons). who received all these tokens? why, the initial investors of course!

feeling very decentralized now arent we? it gets better. since they don't really have a proof-of-work scheme, the Foundation has implemented a series of hacks on top of the basic design that attempt to shore up the security of the fledgling network, centrally controlled of course

this is all temporary, of course, and in no way should be of concern to anyone, least of all, potential investors and developer partners. and what about these so-called partners? what small-time firms and venture capital types have they managed to con so far?

well you will be hard pressed to find much in the way of press releases on their website for most of these announcements, for some reason, but their die-hard fans on the subreddit are only too eager to provide a list of organizations with even the most tenuous link to IOTA

Volkswagen, Jaguar Land Rover, Bosch (who bought a large amount of the IOTA currency supposedly) and even... the City of Austin Department of Transportation...?

the city is hoping that IOTA's distributed ledger technology will enable "machine to machine economies" and uh... allow buses to.. uh, seamlessly transact with your digital identity so you can move on to your Bird scooter in a frictionless, seamless way, without friction or seams

anyway, i'm sure this will someday be a whole section in the Theranos/Fyrefest style documentary that will hopefully be made on IOTA

so, i hear you ask, where does this ternary computing thing come in? i'm glad you remembered that, it's how i stumbled upon this whole scheme myself!

quick computing lesson: as i'm sure you know, pretty much every digital computer uses binary to represent numbers with physical, electrical components. the tiny tiny switch of the transistor is either on or off, some voltage or no voltage, two options, two states, two digits.

a binary number can easily be converted to a familiar base 10 number (0 thru 9) and if you have a place to store these numbers and something that can do math to them and make decisions based on the outcomes of that math, you have a computer.

well there isn't anything about computing that says it has to be binary. what if you had 3 voltages instead, say 0v, 5v, 10v or perhaps -5v, 0v, +5v? three options, three states, three digits. that way you could represent the same numbers with fewer switches in your computer

actually, it turns out that three-digit number systems, or ternary, are the most efficient in these terms. so if you were a spunky distributed ledger Foundation™️ and you intended to target low power, tiny devices for your platform, you might be having some bright ideas about now

you might have noticed one of the directors of the Foundation™️ was not like the others. on the "About the Team" page for the group at the helm of the supposedly multi-billion dollar market cap cryptocurrency, he was identified by a screen name in addition to his real name

I'll let him introduce himself via his personal website

CFB is quite a character. For one, his website seems to claim that he is married to Russian pop star Nyusha and that her real name is Kamila Ivancheglo (it's not and he's not)

CFB is what you might call the technological visionary of the group, it seems. he has been riding this cryptocurrency train for a while now and has something of a following on the bitcointalk forums and other similar places, which has rubbed off on IOTA too

it seems that CFB has been involved in the formation of a lot of the underlying IOTA tech for quite some time but has only recently officially joined them. you see, he has been working primarily only Something Else the last few years

CFB and others from the Foundation™️ have been trying to develop a ternary microprocessor for a while now, and by golly they're close! honest! nevermind that no one has ever done it before, this plucky cryptocash startup will be the ones to do it!

it's not totally crazy, ternary processors have been made before. the Soviets built them, but they were the kind of thing that was built one at a time, literally handwinding turns of copper around ferrite cores.

a few speculative patents have been filed, and there are some hand-wavey ideas about FPGAs being maybe sorta capable of doing native ternary computing, but no one knows of a working microprocessor that actually physically implements ternary logic and doesn't emulate it in binary

this is fine though, the Foundation™️ has been working very hard on what they call their Jinn processor for a good number of years and have fired two (2) contractors for not delivering the goods so surely they must be close by now

around two years ago a single image of something that definitely is a chip started to circulate. could this be Jinn? is it here? does it work?

hard to say, but i'm gonna go out on a limb and guess the answer is "no" lol. CFB and other IOTA board members say trust them, and please keep investing since their funding keeps evaporating 'cause they accept investments mainly in other cryptocurrencies which keep crashing

For CFB, this isn't just all about distributed ledger bullshit, but of course, also AI! wouldn't want to limit yourself to only one pool of crackpot investors, would you? he has, as recently as 2 weeks ago, released an "introduction" to his idea
medium.com/@comefrombeyon…

̶A̶s̶g̶a̶r̶d̶ Aigarth hinges on not only the successful deployment of his mesh network of ternary devices to run on, but also the development of something he calls "helix logic gates." truly visionary stuff

anyway. its late and i should go to bed, but thanks for joining me on this journey of discovery. IOTA, like blockchain, has some neat ideas, but overall it seems like it doesn't really work as intended

I'll leave you with a few interesting links to some of CFB's, IOTA's, and Jinn's histories, both by true believers, more or less

medium.com/@iotasuppoter/…

helloiota.com/origins-of-jin…

and finally, if you really wanna melt your brain, please enjoy this joint presentation by the City of Austin and IOTA that is so light on details it will make your head spin!