Quote from: The Komodo Dragon on December 13, 2017, 02:18:30 AM

IOTA is a distributed ledger technology. Distributed means that the ledger data are spread across numerous computers connected into a network. You, probably, know such phrase as A system is more than the sum of its parts. A system emerging from computers connected together possesses properties not seen in a single computer. IOTA as a system has such useful property: several computers may fail, but the others will keep working without problems. IOTA behaves as a single self-healing organism here. Unfortunately, self-healing stops at some point, for IOTA this happens after more than 1/3 of the computers fail. This is not unique to IOTA, other distributed ledger technologies (e.g. Bitcoin) have their threshold of collapse too.

These days IOTA is still small and this opens it to the following attack: an adversary joins IOTA with his computers which take more than 1/3 of IOTAs body and then makes the computers fail thus triggering IOTAs collapse. To counteract this attack we are running a set of computers called Coordinator which issues milestones published on IOTAs tangle. Computers not belonging to an adversary rely on these milestones to detect faulty computers. In this setup IOTA can survive even if 99% of the computers fail.

IOTA is open-source software. In the world controlled by the state open-source software is protected with licenses, someone doing things not allowed by the license can be sued. Cryptocoin industry demonstrated to be very resistant to state regulations, this led to majority of the projects run in this industry to be oriented on scamming ordinary people. IOTA team welcomes attempts to use technology IOTA is based on. This helps IOTA because increases awareness and shows that Tangle is indeed a viable technology. Unfortunately, odds that copies of IOTA codebase will be used for good are very low. We cant just watch an IOTA clone scamming people and ruining people lives and Tangles reputation. This is why a copy-protection mechanism was added from the very beginning.

To explain how the copy-protection works we should recall about existence of Coordinator. Coordinator acts as an ultimate oracle if any uncertainty about the current state of things in IOTA arise. Digital signatures are verified by every computer in IOTA network, if a signature passes the verification routine then its, PROBABLY, valid. To make sure that the signature is indeed valid the computer waits for the transaction containing the signature to be referenced by a milestone. This is a perfect place for placing the copy-protection mechanism. While everyone looks at signature verification routine the real verification happens in the routine updating milestones. This trick resembles a focus trick done by magicians on TV. It worked so perfectly, that Neha Narulas team was fooled despite of me explaining the essence of the trick numerous times.

Now, when we know that all signatures must be endorsed by Coordinator before being accepted as valid, we can move to that part about Curl-P hashing function. Necessity to develop the function was justified. Trinary numeral system is getting off the ground now, today its mainly Artificial Neural Networks which already have specialized processing units in development. No doubt, that later well see CPUs doing trinary computations. To avoid derailing my response I wont be expanding this topic, IOTA blogposts contain all relevant information. Being the creator of Curl-P I knew its properties very well. I changed the number of rounds to allow practical collisions. With Coordinator IOTAs security depends on one-wayness of Curl-P, without Coordinator the security depends on collision resistance. This is a very important part, it means that your phrase the Iota development team deliberately introduced faults into the Iota codebase is WRONG. IOTA is unaffected by collisions in Curl-P, scam-driven clones are.

To provide an answer to your Are there any other deliberate defects in the Iota source code that have not been disclosed? is not easy. I disagree with your choice of words (defects). If you put the same meaning as I do then my answer is: IOTA doesnt nor didnt have known defects. If you mean the copy-protection then my answer is: Its not smart to answer this question, because in the case of the copy-protection being completely removed my honest answer wont allow us to exploit uncertainty which may prevent scammers from cloning IOTA.

I think that you misunderstood the situation around Curl-P collisions, a lot of people did too and this is not surprising taking into account sensational tone of Neha Narulas team blogpost where such boring issue as an intentionally added feature inflated to The end is near problem.

I kindly ask you to paraphrase your question extending it to the point where even my little English will allow to get it 100% correctly.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/6yzm9g/integrity_question_for_come_from_beyond_sergey/dmsxaa5/)

The existence of these Coordinators is the very definition why IOTA is centralized.

Of course it's easy to create a network when you have centralized supernodes deciding for the network and controlled by a few people. What a garbage.

Quote from: TravelMug on December 13, 2017, 05:24:47 AM

Clearly FUD, IOTA has still the support of the community. Although there's speculation that they have partnered with Microsoft, then already confirmed that is not the case:

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/12/12/iota-partnership-microsoft-marketplace/

However, It still thinks that this coin has a bright future because Microsoft is not closing its door. They are still in the table talking, and once this is finalized, we will see that the price could go to the moon.

IOTA only really seem to have naive and rabid fans trying to pump it at every chance without understanding it or basic crypto fundamentals.