Quite a Storm Intensifies

Our recent article titled, Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA: A Biased Hit Piece, created quite a stir. Even the Bitcoin’s High Priest, esteemed presence in our Hall of Fame, Andreas Antonopoulos, reacted uncharacteristically succinctly:

Dr. Narula’s “responsible disclosure” reads, verbatim:

Interest Disclosure: Ethan Heilman is involved in cryptocurrency work with the Paragon Foundation and Commonwealth Crypto Inc. Madars Virza is a Science Advisor at the Zcash company.

Notable is absence of her own and Thaddeus Dryja conflicts. Full disclosure should have read, as published in pastebin:

Uncanny Conflicted Researchers and Journalists

Ethan Heilman – Ethan notes he’s affiliated with The Paragon Foundation (see below) and founder of Commonwealth Crypto Inc. TumbleBit contributor, a proposed second-layer solution for Bitcoin designed to assist scaling and anonymity/fungibility, also requires a “trivial” fee to do so.

The Paragon Foundation a.k.a. DAGLabs

DAG Labs, formerly Paragon Foundation, is presently developing their own Directed Acyclic Graph, a direct competitor to IOTA.
DAGLabs’ solution relies on tech they call SPECTRE.
DAGLabs is in the middle of acquiring Series A funding.

REFERENCE:
https://www.daglabs.com/
https://medium.com/@avivzohar/the-spectre-protocol-7dbbebb707b5

Neha Narula – Digital Currency Initiative – MIT, proponent of industry-backed university projects. DCI – MIT is actively contributing to Lightning Network development as a scaling solution for Bitcoin using Directed Graph with “trivial” fees involved – a direct competitor to IOTA and its feeless Directed Acyclic Graph solution. Neha recruiting Lightning developers at Amy Castor’s meetup below.

REFERENCE:
https://github.com/mit-dci/lit

View post on imgur.com

Tadge Dryja – Lightning Network co-founder, additional work creating a smart contract solution for Bitcoin.
Tadge presenting Directed Graph with Lightning Network below.

REFERENCE:

Madars Virza – Co-creator of Zerocash and current Zcash Science Adviser. Zcash science advisers dropped a vulnerability report this year, one hour before a planned Monero hard fork, successfully refuted by Ricardo Spagni and co. See below, weaponized academia in action.

REFERENCE:
https://getmonero.org/2017/04/19/an-unofficial-response-to-an-empirical-analysis-of-linkability.html
https://monerolink.com/
https://z.cash/team.html

Amy Castor – who propagated MIT’s malicious report / attack in the Forbes, is a writer for CoinDesk, Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group (DCG) owned cryptocurrency blog. DCG is staked in Zcash, among other investments (see below). Castor is also the organizer and host of a regular Cambridge blockchain meetup at MIT where 3 of her 4 guest speakers to date include none other than Neha Narula, Tadge Dryja, and Ethan Heilman, members of Neha’s DCI – MIT group.

REFERENCE:

Neha featured at Castor’s meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Blockchain/events/240576842/
Tadge featured at Castor’s meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Blockchain/events/241987509/
Ethan featured at Castor’s meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Blockchain/events/242587154/

Amy’s also written an extensive feature on how to acquire Zcash.

REFERENCE:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/zcash-has-launched-here-s-how-to-get-some-1477670989/

Castor’s latest tweet aims to further perpetuate her dubious intentions behind such a campaign; using an anonymous anecdotal source which fails to provide any evidence, additionally failing to acknowledge the high plausibility that any Slack user may simply impersonate another user by changing usernames with minimal effort.

REFERENCE:

Apparently, IOTA began selling coins on their slack channel. https://t.co/FPe6yR50nw

— Amy Castor (@girlandgrowl) September 12, 2017

DCG ownership and crypto-investments include: Zcash, Ripple, Rootstock, and etc.

REFERENCE:

Portfolio

Matt Green – Co-creator of Zerocash with Madars Virza and current science adviser for Zcash alongside Virza. Matt involved himself initially in this tweet.

REFERENCE:

This paragraph is literally the most bonkers thing I've read all week. What are these people smoking. pic.twitter.com/eZkJ2iied5

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 12, 2017

https://z.cash/team.html

Meltem Demirors – Director at DCG: recently involved herself by tweeting this ominous message.

REFERENCE:

if you invest in crypto, please read this analysis of @iotatoken and it's flaws by @neha – kind of scary https://t.co/tbKTQiUyvI

— Meltem Demirors (@Melt_Dem) September 7, 2017

Who We Are

Be critical when reviewing literature and be aware of author involvements, supporting colleagues, and their respect for ethical practice and reporting.

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It must bear repeating:

IOTA Founders Reactions

Curl disclosure, beyond the headline by David Sønstebø, co-founder of IOTA.
Tech response by Sergey Ivancheglo, co-founder of IOTA.
Integrity question for Sergey Ivancheglo and the rest of the Iota team on Reddit.

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Rajiv Shah article “IOTA Vulnerability” over at Steemit is worth perusing.

What Dr. Nerula and her team of kindergarten-like researchers (references in the Rajiv’s above article) have displayed in a glaring, vast intellectual dishonesty that indeed reeks to havens. A total disgrace for all of them and for the #MIT that provides them with such needed authority, their phony research so painfully lacked.