IOTA hacked?!

Hola you money hungry little dicks,

I was asked about wtf is going on with IOTA by my main man olivernchalk so let me tell you lazy little fucks.

Firstly, no, IOTA was not hacked and no one lost any money so don't worry your pretty little heads about that.

IOTA has lost about half a billion dollars in market cap in the last few days, largely due to reports that the security blockchain had been compromised. Some nerds at MIT found that some nerds at IOTA had written their own hash function called curl*, which is a bad thing to do. The reason it is a bad thing to do is that it is proper fucking tricky to write a cryptographic hash function and it takes years of analysis to make sure you have not ballsed it up. Still, IOTA just knocked one up themselves and the MIT squad apparently managed to find collisions within a few minutes, which generally means your hash function is absolutely dogshit and people might be able to fuck around with your system e.g destroy/steal coins.

Sergey Ivancheglo, the big cheese at IOTA, reckons people would not be able to do this unless user's downloaded malicious software and that anyway, they knew about this shit and all of this was part of a design decision they made in which collisions some how are not a problem (???). He goes on to say that the authors are biased as they apparently have interests in competing technologies, that they used Curl incorrectly as they forgot to seed the RNG and generally tried to make the MIT team look like total cunts.

As I am not a cryptographer I can't really say who is right or wrong in this case, but it has made me (and clearly many, many other people) slightly nervous about both the technology and leadership behind IOTA.

If you want the sources then check out this article written by Neha Narula and this response from the boss man at IOTA.

*why are these people pick such trash tier names, it could've been called getSome, thePimpCup, crowGang, homicide, sugarShaneMosely or any number of other sweet names, but they chose curl-P. Idiots.