For some reason, my comment objecting to someone calling it intentionally indecipherable is now at -4.
You wrote "It is a good paper. I could follow everything" -- would you agree with me that it's not purposefully written to be obfuscated and indecipherable?
Without criticizing you or the validity of your intention for posting the above comment, I can tell you that said comment comes across as extremely spammy.
Why?
In a heated space, such as critiques of certain cryptocurrencies often evolve to, certainly with lots of vested interests ($$$ that is), posting such a huge amount of text under the top-rated comment while adding little information, but basically pushing all other arguments below-the-fold is destined to evoke ones fishiness tastebuds.
Whether or not you intended to push critique out of view, it definitely calls for HN to introduce some sort of folding/auto-truncate feature.
You know, woodpanel, the reason I chose the structure I chose is because when I began to write it, I thought that I would be able to find that the whitepaper easily meets the criteria I selected beforehand for intentional indecipherability. In other words, I thought I would be able to show that it is just fishy.
For this reason, I decided to be very thorough in my review methodology, so that I wouldn't be accused of cherry-picking. After all, no paper is perfect. That's why I set up criteria beforehand. I had never read the paper.
As you can see, the paper actually (to my surprise) totally fails the intentional indecipherability criteria I picked.
The top-level comment in this case was totally unwarranted.
This is not the conclusion I expected to come to when I did the review. It would not be honest of me to hide my actual results.
(In addition to myself, you will notice that another person wrote "It is a good paper. I could follow everything".)
>would you agree with me that it's not purposefully written to be obfuscated and indecipherable?
Yes, but with one exception. It is possible to obfuscate by ommiting information. Assume there is a flaw in IOTA which is not in tangle-structre itself. One could obfuscate the flaw by writing an honest paper about tangle and refusing to talk about IOTA.
From the introduction:
"The concrete implementation of the iota protocol is not discussed."
I don't say (or think) there is an obfuscation. Just that my feeling was that I got too few information to judge about IOTA (or even tangle) from that paper.
You wrote "It is a good paper. I could follow everything" -- would you agree with me that it's not purposefully written to be obfuscated and indecipherable?