I've been reading up on IOTA and finally made my first investment into it a few days ago. It seem like it's still in early development, but the possibilities of this coin seem tremendous! The only thing that concerns me is the coordinator and if/when IOTA will be able to function without it. The ability to quickly send money or info with no fees is groundbreaking, I hope IOTA goes places!
If there is a vulnerability, wouldn't someone exploit the hell out of it right now? Let's say, if IOTA still functions as it is now over a month, is the concern about an alleged bug to be taken serious or are hackers then considered lazy?
In the end, I expect just that happening: IOTA happily existing ever after, just like a Honey Badger not caring about the intensive debates between humans. It is binary as far as I am concerned. Either there is a problem or not. If not, the FUD will wane away over time. If the FUD is reality, the devs need to take action (if not already done so; I read something in this direction).
As someone who doesn't hold any IOTA I'd like to say I 100% trust CfB's explanation of the Curl-P flaw as copy protection against scammers. When CfB wrote NXT he intentionally introduced flaws to do the same for that system. Eventually, he held a contest to allow the community to find and reveal those flaws. It was a great way to get members of the community to understand the code and what NXT was doing while protecting NXT in the early days from rip-off artists. Of course he'd do the same to protect IOTA.
I understand the logic behind it, but I also see why developers would be upset. If you claim that it is open source, but you booby trap it, then that could come of as dishonest or malicious. I think if he was transparent about it then it wouldn't have been as much of an issue. I'm not a coder (yet) so I don;t understand the ramifications of what he actually did, but I feel like having purposely flawed code would be frustrating if you're trying to contribute to the project and it isn't working because of an intentional flaw that was never disclosed. Like others have said, BTC is completely open source, and despite many copycats and competitors it is still thriving. I think with how established IOTA is now (one of the largest market cap coins) they might not have to worry about copycats as much.
