> 3 is closer to the universal optimum 2.71 than is 2. That is the absolute most simple elevator pitch for ternary.
- iota co-founder
Drivel like the above has long outed Iota as an absolute scam. The ternary business was some mixture of (a) bamboozling non-technical users, (b) distraction from its other failings, and (c) sheer delusion.
Iota pushers hand-wave with slogans like "gets faster the more people use it" and "replace the central coordinator with voting (someday?)" but without actual security. Whereas PoW has a well-understood security model (see 51% attacks) Iota hopes you won't notice that basically nothing can be decided without the central coordinator.
And then it gets worse. Iota-without-the-coordinator washes its hands of consistency. Individual nodes would have to pray they are connected to good actors, and then through some unexplained governance scheme, deduce the consensus state.
In short: iota is unsuitable as any kind of distributed ledger.
>> 3 is closer to the universal optimum 2.71 than is 2. That is the absolute most simple elevator pitch for ternary.
>- iota co-founder
lol they seriously say that? For those who aren't aware...
You get e (2.71828...) as the optimal base when you're trying to minimize the product of a) the number of symbols you're using and b) the number of symbols needed to represent a number.
Once there are other factors that are significant, it's no longer the optimum. And indeed, in the real world, you care about the difficulty of implementing base-x vs base-y logic in hardware, the installed ecosystem for computing in that base, etc, which (to put it mildly) heavily favors base-2, even for domains where one subproblem is more naturally expressed in trinary.
- iota co-founder
Drivel like the above has long outed Iota as an absolute scam. The ternary business was some mixture of (a) bamboozling non-technical users, (b) distraction from its other failings, and (c) sheer delusion.
Iota pushers hand-wave with slogans like "gets faster the more people use it" and "replace the central coordinator with voting (someday?)" but without actual security. Whereas PoW has a well-understood security model (see 51% attacks) Iota hopes you won't notice that basically nothing can be decided without the central coordinator.
And then it gets worse. Iota-without-the-coordinator washes its hands of consistency. Individual nodes would have to pray they are connected to good actors, and then through some unexplained governance scheme, deduce the consensus state.
In short: iota is unsuitable as any kind of distributed ledger.