Did IOTA plagiarize NKN's consensus model in the Coordicide?

IOTA lately announced a new scalable and fully-decentralized distributed ledger technology known as Coordicide. This will eliminate IOTA’s centralized Coordinator. The Coordinator is accountable for managing transactions and defense on the IOTA blockchain. It was created to prevent attacks against IOTA’s Tangle system.

According to the Twitter user Lucian, IOTA has partially copied another lesser-recognized project identified as a New Kind of Network (NKN) without giving them any credit. IOTA Coordicide is implementing Cellular Automata methodology.

Lucian tweeted:

Did $IOTA plagiarize $NKN's 'Cellular Automata' consensus model in their new #coordicide whitepaper? They should give credit where credit is due. https://t.co/vgrEdt9gXx

— Anton Lucian (@Lucian_crypto) May 30, 2019

According to Lucian, IOTA team is not the first one to apply the Celluar Automata methodology. New Kind of Network (NKN) published a comprehensive, mathematically-compact whitepaper on the subject way back in the month of March 2018.

What is NKN?

According to the whitepaper, NKN (New Kind of Network) is a highly scalable, self-evolving and selfincentivized blockchain network foundation. NKN directs the network decentralization and self-evolution by including Cellular Automata (CA) methodology for both dynamism and performance. NKN tokenizes system connectivity and data communication function by Proof of Work.

The Evidence

Lucian further explained that IOTA is clearly not the first to implement the concept of Cellular Automata to the cryptocurrency space. NKN’s CA-based method (called ‘MOCA’) has been running since last year, currently flourishing more than 10,000 TestNet nodes and set for MainNet launch in June 2019. However, somehow IOTA has dubiously ignored this. CA is not just a lesser portion of NKN’s project: the idea is fundamental to its underlying technology. Lucian said that If you just google “cellular automata consensus” then NKN’s technical posts appear first or second.

NKN’s co-founder, Yilun Zhang said that why IOTA’s description of Cellular Automata totally lacked any references of NKN or its advisor Stephen Wolfram. He tweeted:

I was wondering why our whitepaper on Cellular Automata consensus (Feb 2018) https://t.co/LWHIuyqZ3A, our implementation (open sourced Jun 2018) https://t.co/FOusDT1ySt, pioneering CA researcher @stephen_wolfram (our advisor) do not appear on #IOTA #coordicide whitepaper ref 🙂

— Yilun Zhang (@YilunZhang4) May 30, 2019

IOTA’s Reply

Hans Moog, IOTA’s engineer responded in a blog post. He said that this was not done on purpose and the IOTA team will correct these faults.

It is clear that we did not research the previous work of this part deep enough. Previously we referred to this approach as a mechanism that works “like firing neurons that only activate when enough neighbors have differing opinions, creating a chain reaction of opinions until the whole network agrees.

He further said that the IOTA people were informed about NKN’s consensus model yesterday after seeing a comment of the people behind NKN on twitter and they will modify the paper and reference their work.

Disclaimer: This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any cryptocurrency. It is not a recommendation to trade. The crypto market is full of surprises and overhyped assets. Do your research before buying anything. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose.

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