There is also the risk of the Coordinator double-spending through a partitioning attack by issuing different milestones to different users. As the risk stands, no IOTA transaction can currently be assumed safe until a longer time has passed (~20 minutes). Currently, transactions show up as confirmed in full nodes after a matter of seconds when they are in fact not safe at all.

I will make the prediction that IOTA will fail to disable the Coordinator in 2018. Even if it is made optional at some point, it won’t be safe — meaning it won’t really be optional at all (in fact, it will be just like Ripple’s provided UNL is “optional”).


by Eric Wall
Research Engineer in the cryptocurrency domain. I will give you the facts.