IOTA Review: Beginners guide
IOTA: Internet-of-things spending application
Industry type:Machine-to-machine economic technology.
What is IOTA?
IOTA is a revolutionary new data transfer application for devices in the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is the ever-growing world of physical items connected to the internet with an estimated 4 billion connections by the year 2020. IOTA’s mission is to utilise its innovative Tangle network, a non-blockchain based open-source distributed ledger, that will fund the upcoming 4th industrial revolution in a machine-to-machine economy.
What gives it value?:
- The Tangle, its main innovation.
- The network becomes faster as it scales.
- No transaction fees.
- Machine-to-machine quantum transactions.
- Is quantum resistant.
Interesting Technology:
- The Tangle is a 3rd-generation distributed ledger based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Dags are data structures used to model a wide variety of problems, DAGs is seen as a possible competitor to blockchain because it can have greater decentralisation and smaller block sizes, yet there is no need for miners. Another way to think of a DAG is like a non-circular spider web that is built in one direction (as shown in the image below.). For a device on the Tangle to make a transaction, it must first approve two previous transactions, so as every device from a drone to a fridge is validating twice as many transactions as it wants to make, the network grows the faster it becomes.
- The Tangle is made for the world in 2020 where over 40 billion devices will be communicating with each other through the internet. The IOTA cryptocurrency (MIOTA) is designed for machines to communicate with each other through data transactions down to the incremental point of nano payments.
Notable team:
- David Sønstebø is a Norwegian serial-entrepreneur, tech enthusiast, and the co-founder of IOTA. Sønstebø is the CEO of Stealth, a company developing stealth technology for the internet-of-all-things.
- Prof. Serguei Popov is a professor at the UNICAMP University of Brazil, the co-founder of IOTA, and the author of the IOTA whitepaper.
- Dominik Schiener is an Italian serial-entrepreneur and co-founder of IOTA. Schiener is interested in the advancement of new Governance solutions that more efficient and transparent systems.
Notable partnerships:
- The International Transportation Innovation Centre (ITIC) has partnered with IOTA to build a global network of AI-based sustainable mobility services in smart city environments.
- Canonical, the company behind open-source software UBUNTU, are collaborating with IOTA on how to fix the problem of billing machines for bandwidth on the telecommunications market.
- IOTA joined the TrustedIoTAllience, an open-source software foundation that supports the creation of a secure, scalable, interoperable, and trusted internet of things ecosystem.
Review: The Good.
- It’s distributed ledger is currently significantly different to the other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and platforms on the market.
- It seeks to make developments and solve key problems in a predicted technological revolution that may change the world as we know it forever.
- It has the potential to increase in size and speed simultaneously whilst maintaining secure zero-fee transactions.
- It has a long list of worldwide partnerships and a big team working on its development.
- Quantum resistant.
Review: The Bad.
- It is still in its early development phase with many elements to master before reaching its full potential.
- In order for it to become the bread and butter of the machine-economy, it will need to be adopted on a global scale across many industries and technologies, which cannot be guaranteed as a premeditated success.
Future Roadmap:
- An Identity of Things philosophical framework and identification technology is in development to change how we interact and classify machines.
- Swarm Client is a sharding technique in development that will allow multiple devices to split a node between them.
- A privacy layer designed to mask meta and privacy information on the Tangle network is in development.
CONCLUSION:
In my opinion, IOTA is distinctly different from other blockchain based platforms and cryptocurrencies due to the flexible magnificence of the Tangle network. If it’s network can scale to the global demand of a new machine-to-machine world whilst simultaneously growing in speed with zero-transaction fees and is resistant to quantum computer attacks, then it could possibly be one of the greatest inventions in an entire generation. However, IOTA is still in development, needing a finished working network and mass adoption to accomplish its astonishing potential. Good ideas don’t always work in the real world.
IOTA Price:
The current IOTA price, market cap and charts.
Local exchanges:
Coinspot: www.coinspot.com.au
Overseas exchanges:
CoinBase: www.coinbase.com
BitFinex: www.bitfinex.com
Binance: www.binance.com
Where to store this crypto:
Desktop wallet: https://iotasupport.com/gui-download.shtml
Mobile wallet: https://trinity.iota.org/
Similar coins:
Byteball Bytes (GBYTE) – Another DAG cryptocurrency.
IOTA (ADA) – A 3rd-gen network with a big team and big dreams.
Ethereum (ETH) – A revolutionary cryptocurrency platform.
Bitcoin (BTC) – The world’s first decentralised cryptocurrency.
Further information:
Litecoin Whitepaper: https://iota.readme.io/docs/whitepaper
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/
Website: https://www.iota.org/