Thanks for the heads-up on Iota. But again, I see they screwed things up from the start:
They've definitely had their share of initial issues (that particular one you linked is really old news considering how new iota really is...), IOTA is very much ALPHA right now not even BETA... Not to turn this into an IOTA commercial, but they've addressed the "bug problem" pretty well with the "coordinator", (which is a bit of a centralized safety measure, that will be eliminated once the network is more mature). It has so far protected everyone from any software/network issues, and while they do have absolutely pathetic public relations at the moment, when something goes wrong they are on top of it right away. They do care a lot more about building business relationships for actual machine to machine economy use than catering to all the speculators right now.
Cryptocurrency CAN NOT operate this way, and get accepted by anyone other than risk-takers. I know that it's possible to "prove" computer code in the same way that you "prove" a mathematical statement. This, at minimum, is what's needed for crypto.
Completely agree. That is a major problem in the entire crypto space. The "coordinator" approach IOTA has taken is the first real attempt to buffer against that problem that I'm aware of, hopefully others will come up with better solutions. There is also the public "test-net" where things get ironed out, but that's probably not unique to iota.
On a side note, the IOTA network was recently under HEAVY attack (no doubt by unhappy competitors) for weeks and they actually had the fix for it within hours apparently, but let it run for a while to collect real world data on how the network would respond to attack. I like that, to me that says they care more about making it robust than catering to the whiners (which again they've made abundantly clear -- terrible PR). The neat thing about the way the network works is that the sort of attacks bitcoin or any of the hundred clones would crumble beneath, actually make the tangle
work faster. Previous "attacks" had the tangle moving at light speed for quite a while before the morons realized they were helping IOTA and stopped! It was hilarious.
But anyway sorry not trying to hijack and turn this into an IOTA promotion, I just thought that it was relevant to answer your concerns, since they are valid ones.
Let me add one more little point to the original discussion:
The almost cult-like belief that Bitcoin itself (and none other) must be the "main one", that it is the only one that can be "mainstream" that it will be around forever, etc etc is a huge hindrance to any sort of widespread crypto adoption. Even Litecoin, which is nothing but a bitcoin clone with a few numbers changed, has massively out performed bitcoin in every measurable way (except market price) for a long time now and continues to do so.
Bitcoin SUCKS anyone who has tried to actually use it instead of just buying and holding in coinbase knows this, unless they've lied to themselves to justify the bad buy they made at $19,500. It's slow, it's pretty well centralized in china (huge mining farms), the fees are just plain disgusting ($20 to send $100 REALLY??) (yes I understand why the fees are there and why they are that high, and those very reasons are my argument against bitcoin, and most of the ripoff blockchain type clones.) and once it's no longer profitable for miners to mine it, it's dead! That's it! These guys aren't mining because they care about the future of bitcoin, they have high powered money-crapping machines, and when they stop crapping money they're going to shut them off (or switch to another chain like bcash or whatever happens to be profitable at the time).
