IOTA — The Winner Takes it All

Following article is an in-depth look into IOTA and its Tangle resources available online, it sums this revolutionary tech up. “IOTA tangle is a quantum-secure Directed Acyclic Graph protocol, with no fees on transactions & no fixed limit on how many transactions can be confirmed per second in the network.”

“As the Internet-of-Things keep expanding, the need for interoperability and sharing of resources become a necessity. IOTA enables companies to explore new business-2-business models by making every technological resource a potential service to be traded on an open market in real time, with no fees.”

Endpoints of the Internet of Things (“IoT”) will grow at a 32.9% compound annual growth rate from 2015 through 2020, reaching an installed base of 20.4 billion units. In 2020, 6.5 billion “things” will ship, with 64% of them consumer applications. Total spending on endpoints and services will reach $3.4 trillion in 2020. (source)

IOTA is geared toward being the cryptocurrency of IoT.

The economy, in its simplest form, is a sum of transactions that make it up. If the IoT and the Machine Economy would live to fulfill its potential, the IOTA is positioned to win and to win big, beyond our wildest projections.

A Transactional Settlement for the Internet of Things

Ponder some of the IOTA key advantages over blockchain’s based coins like Bitcoin (IOTA is a “blockchain-less” token, based on its own invention, The Tangle. See: https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf):

1. IOTA has zero transactional fees

2. IOTA has no mining. All iotas were created in the Genesis transaction, after which all coins were distributed (IOTA Wiki states: "A crowdsale was held from November to December 2015 during which 100% of the token supply was issued. ... Every IOTA token in existence was generated in the genesis transaction.")

3. Therefore, there are no mining benefits and / or shenanigans. IOTA is a complete decentralized network and as such it would not attract mining farms that have enormous advantage & influence in the Bitcoin space for example

4. It’s quantum secure. Even supercomputers cannot break your public keys. To find out more, read the paragraph 4.3. of the White Paper, “Resistance to quantum computations” (p.24)

5. IOTA is not only a token / currency but a protocol and can be used for not only on IoT devices but for almost any other use, like ensuring data integrity in information sharing

6. The network becomes stronger when the number of transactions increases so no network congestion, like with Bitcoin or Ethereum, would happen with IOTA.

IOTA is capable of transacting even sub-cent values because there are no fees involved. A whole new worlds has been opened in front of our eyes.

The world of IOTA.

IOTA, an open-source distributed ledger protocol based on its its core invention “Tangle”.

Virtually No Transactional Limits

On April 29, 2017, Dominik Schiener, one of the IOTA co-founders, tweeted: “ We’ve been running stress-tests all week long. It’s starting to look really good, with a public release coming soon. 1000 TPS next.”

Ponder this for a moment:

On a small test-net network, 250 nodes in total, IOTA has already achieved a comparatively staggering 182.80 transactions per second. Bitcoin, on the other hand, at the time of writing had only 3.05 tx per second over its 7,868 nodes. No real real-world economy would be build on 3 or so tx per second or on the bitcoin’s sustained rate of 7 tps due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB. (VISA processes over 2,000 tps)

Overall, Dominik wrote, IOTA has so far facilitated more than 2.5m txs on the main network (with more than 30million on our respective testnets). This has enabled some $100m+ to be transacted, purely Peer to Peer without any transaction fees. < kindly please read this sentence again, $100m+ and no fees!

However, each project is as good as the people behind it. Let us take a closer look at the guys who created and are in charge of IOTA.

Development Team

Dr. Serguei Popov, Ph.D. (in math from the Moscow State University) works in the field of the Probability Theory. His main lines of research interest are: Markov chains with discrete time and countable state space, Random interlacements, Branching random walks, Markov processes in random environment, Random billiards, Percolation and fractal percolation, Interacting particle systems and Queueing networks.

Dr. Serguei Popov, Ph.D. (also “mthcl” on Bitcoin Talk and Nxt Forum)

Dr. Popov also wrote The tangle, IOTA original White Paper. Herein, in his intro, you can find an acorn of what would become the crypto’s mighty oak tree:

“The rise and success of Bitcoin during the last six years proved the value of blockchain technology. However, this technology also has a number of drawbacks, which prevent it to be used as a one and only global platform for cryptocurrencies. Among these drawbacks, an especially notable one is the impossibility of making micro-payments, which have increased importance for the rapidly developing Internet-of-Things industry. Specifically, in the currently available systems one must pay a fee for making a transaction; so, transferring a very small amount just makes no sense since one would have also to pay the fee which is many times larger.”

Colored Tangle picture from the IOTA Consensus Masterclass

IOTA Consensus Masterclass by Come-from-Beyond is the perfect place to start your understanding of the Tangle, should the White Paper prove to be a tad too difficult to fully grasp.

Sergey Ivancheglo

It’s also a perfect segue into introduction of another of IOTA Key Developers, Sergey Ivancheglo who goes, as you may have already guessed, under the nick Come-from-Beyond.

Sergey was the key developer of NXT and in 2013 he created the first Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. You can enjoy his sharp repartees on IOTA Slack.

Dominik Schiener and David Sønstebø are IOTAs bonne bouches whose wit and famous patience with trolls already made them legendary crypto personalities along with Come-from-Beyond. Let us start with Dominic.

Dominik Schiener, from Südtirol, Italy is now a Wahlberliner. He went to Shanghai for a Hackhaton and easily won with his Cargo Chain project.

Dominik Schiener, on the right

Dominik envisions a better world with the full empowerment of the individual in it. And he works hard to achieve this lofty goal. Along, he wins wherever he goes:

— aforementioned Hackhaton won and the GTEC Blockchain Challenge: 2nd Place for the same CargoChain project
—  he has also won the Südtirol Innovation Challenge organized by the Handelskammer Bozen (Business/Economic Chamber of Bozen)
— Won the Technology category at the Emirates National Bank of Dubai FinTech Challenge.

He’s also a deep thinker. Ponder what he writes in “Treatise on Identity: Problems with the Status Quo”:

"The sad truth is that we live in an era where identity theft and mass surveillance are part of our identity. We have lost access to our true identity, who we are is dictated by those who are supposed to serve us. Privacy today is a sacrifice you take to be able to use a product. Your personal information is a precious good that is weighed in Dollars or Euros and traded between companies to target you with new products and services you most likely don’t care about. The information that you publish once is forever engraved and shared between servers around the globe, waiting to be accessed by an intruder. On the other side of the coin, we have a situation where people don’t know who they are because they didn’t receive proper identification on birth or during their lifetime. The economic potential and the personal freedom of millions of people is being limited through this issue of lacking identification."

Such passion, as Dominik's, helps creating the better world.

David Sønstebø, another co-founder of IOTA, “the Crypto’s Rising Star,” is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for any kind of technology that can push human progress forward. He is heavily involved in Internet-of-Things, distributed ledger/blockchain/tangle technologies, Smart Cities, Digital identity, e-Governance and innovative hardware design.

Statements such as “As Internet-of-Things keep expanding the need for interoperability and sharing of resources become a necessity. IOTA enables companies to explore new business-2-business models by making every technological resource a potential service to be traded on an open market in real time, with no fees,” or “In this new autonomous Machine Economy IOTA will be the backbone. The Tangle ledger is able to settle transactions with zero fees so devices can trade exact amounts of resources on-demand, as well as store data from sensors and data-loggers securely and verified on the ledger,” taken from IOTA website showcase fascinating inner working of the David’s mighty mind.

David Sønstebø

“The development team behind Iota has established itself as being highly competent, trustworthy, and patient. They have been transparent throughout the development process and have a clear strategy to implement this technology. Therefore; to me at least, the Iota team is proving itself to be one that I can really trust to invest in.” (source, Reddit. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/6j7ctg/what_is_so_special_about_iota/djh4i72/)

The Magnificent Four, Sønstebø, Schiener, Ivancheglo and Popov are not alone. They are supported by both the IOTA Foundation and the blossoming IOTA community:

IOTA Foundation

There are remarkable girls and guys in the IOTA Foundation. Briefly, they are:

Per Lind, whose career includes working directly and indirectly with several of the largest brands in the world including Ford, Aston Martin, Mercedes Benz, SonyEricsson, Virgin Media and more.

Prof. Gideon Samid, Ph.D., PE, who obtained his degrees at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology where he learned his craft serving the state of Israel, working at the Pentagon, Exxon, NASA, Sac, Presearch etc., is a scientist and an engineer committed to render technology useful and helpful for society at large, all the while mindful of the lurking abuse avenues to be monitored. Believing that innovation is the modern ‘religion’, Gideon developed the Universal Theory of Innovation, and applied it to developing mathematical and networking products (e.g. digital money) that serve as a rational foundation for collaboration even among mutually apprehensive partners.

Carsten Stöcker, physicist with Ph.D. from University of Aachen is leading the Machine Economy/Blockchain Lighthouse in the innogy Innovation Hub. His ideas, often shared on his Medium pages are mind-blowing and well worthy of your time.

Dr. Navin Ramachandran MBBS BSc (Hons) MRCP FRCR is a practicing radiology consultant at University College London Hospital (UCLH), an honorary senior lecturer / healthcare data researcher at University College London Centre for Health Informatics & Multiprofessional Education (UCL CHIME), and a co-founder of OpenCancer and the Platform for Enhanced Analytics and Computational Healthcare (PEACH).

David A. Cohen is a Software Entrepreneur who works with CEOs, corporations, and startups to help them design and build world-class decentralized software systems. At Silicon Energy, he built the first web-based Distributed Energy Management platform and NOC used to create the first Virtual Power Plant. David then co-founded Infotility, and as CEO pioneered “the Grid Edge” and unlocked a multi-billion dollar SmartGrid market. He also developed the Auto-DR platform — now Open-ADR™ — the industry standard for automated demand response; and GridAgents TM the SmartGrid industry’s first intelligent agent-based software platform.

Regine Haschka Helmer started her career in the early 90’s, at I-D Media AG, one of the fastest growing digital consulting agency in Europe as the COO. She was the youngest woman in the managing board of a German public listed company. During this time she managed the company´s IPO and was responsible for setup and managing international subsidiaries in London and Vienna.

Jochen Renz was born and raised in Stuttgart, Germany, the birthplace of the car and home to world leading automotive players. Growing up, Joe expected to work for a local automotive company as an electronics engineer one day. Instead, he ended up working for an enterprise application startup that was later acquired by Computer Associates (CA Technologies).

As part of an international career that lead him to Geneva, Sydney, Frankfurt, New York, London and Chicago, Joe has held several international positions at Computer Associates (CA Technologies), including COO of European Operations.

John D. Halamka, MD, MS, (Advisor to IOTA) is the International Healthcare Innovation Professor at Harvard Medical School, Chief Information Officer of the Beth Israel Deaconess System, and a practicing emergency physician.

He strives to improve healthcare quality, safety, and efficiency for patients,
providers, and payers throughout the world using information technology.

John has been and is continuing to be involved in spearheading a myriad of modern eHealth practices. He has written 5 books, several hundred articles, and the popular and deeply fascinating Geekdoctor blog.

With the co-founders, the Foundation’s outstanding experts represent a human backbone of IOTA of an immense value.

IOTA “Shadow Developers”

Already 30+ people working on applications on top of IOTA in addition to a number of active projects with more than 15 x corporate partners.

Note Opportunity to join the Outlier Ventures Blockchain Programme IOTA Community and recall how Jamie Burke wrote that 99% of blockchain startups are bullshit. (Burke and Outlier are investors in IOTA; that was their first and thus far only investment in this space)

It’s not so difficult to imagine what these guys would work on.

Furthermore, the ‘IOTA Ecosystem Fund’, which was valued north of $2,000,000, is entirely dedicated towards fostering growth of IOTA through incentivizing participation in expanding and shaping the ecosystem.
IOTA Community

Sønstebø, Schiener, Ivancheglo and Popov are visionaries indeed but they alone, not even with the help of the remarkable experts gathered around the Foundation, would go far without overwhelming support of the community that believes in IOTA and its vision.

IOTA virtual piazza is IOTA Slack https://iotatangle.slack.com/. Feel free to join and participate in sometimes fascinating discussions.

At the time of writing IOTA Slack has 12,206 members!!, a number that is growing hourly.

IOTA at Present (“What’s so Special about IOTA”)

IOTA went public, on Bitfinex so far, on June 13, 2017. Currently it can be traded for USD, BTC and ETH there. At the time of writing, IOTA is ranked #8 on the CoinMarketCap, with the market cap around $1 billion (big “B”) dollars. This represents a stellar rise for still a lesser known, revolutionary technology poorly understood by many.

IOTA, at the core layer is a dedicated settlement protocol for transactions and also data transfers, this it does exceptionally well. As such, IOTA has been already working with some well-known names like Microsoft, Ubuntu, Innogy, Cisco, Bosch to name only the publicly announced IOTA real world projects.

Many more are in the pipeline.

What Makes IOTA so Special?

“IOTA tangle has been pen tested multiple times in the run up to the launch, and the results have always been positive. Also, during the first week a sustained attack was carried out by a bad actor and the result of this was simply a temporary improvement of the speed of the network.”

Use Cases. Implementation. Future.

David Sønstebø, in IOTA’s AMA said: “Even though IOTA very much started out with the exclusive focus on machine to machine payments and data integrity, the underlying protocol can of course be used for all sorts of distributed ledger settlements.”

Robots and Humans: A Peaceful Co-existence (??)

Sønstebø continued: “I believe that anywhere a decentralized payment system is required/warranted, IOTA will serve that role due to zero fees and no scaling limitations. So beyond the ‘Machine Economy’, I also see Pay Per Stream use cases for music, video and game streaming. BitTorrent seeder-incentive. Pay Per Article type access services. Direct Ad-payments or alternatively get rid of ads on the internet entirely and instead some Pay For Browsing model.

I truly see no limitation for new business models, when you remove fees you can create so many services that have been prohibited due to transactional cost.”

Even more importantly, answering “konstmicsh” question, “name 3 IOT devices where you think we will see m2m payments with Iota first,” Sønstebø answered:

1. Sensors selling data to data-centers for analytics (both in the cloud and increasingly in the fog)

2. Devices buying bandwidth in a Pay Per Byte model, rather than having to deal with the red tape mess of subscription models which doesn’t scale when it comes to billions of devices doing tons of micro-transactions, we are doing this with Canonical/Ubuntu and Lime Microsystems already

3. Photo-voltaic solar panels selling electricity to everything from cars to drones

4. Cars paying for parking and charging

5. Sensors buying storage, concluding with “these are the most obvious and already in the development ones.”

Think Gaming

As games are becoming more and more not just a boxed delivery, but a service, “digital add-ons give video game makers a billion-dollar boost,” The Seattle Times wrote, so now think of cents or sub-cents additions to any game that simply can’t be created and sold for pennies with all the fees either fiat payments or Bitcoin transactions would incur.

Sub-cents gaming add-ons add to billions

Think Space

Carsten Stöcker, a physicist with Ph.D. from University of Aachen who leads the Machine Economy/Blockchain Lighthouse in the innogy Innovation Hub writes: “… for the next revolution in commerce, governance and social interaction we need to look up — about 100 miles up, into the low Earth orbit. There, falling prices for communication and earth monitoring satellites, along with blockchain-enabled security, will make everything from broadband communication to crop monitoring available not just to technology elites, but to the most remote farm, village or machine.

“By democratizing access to space-based resources, we can create a more humane and just world.”

It is not difficult to imagine a tomorrow in which we’d be able to purchase an image of the Universe (or Earth, or our favorite star or planet) taken at the exact time of our child’s birth, our first kiss, you apply your own childhood’s dream and name it.

One thing is sure; all over the world the entrepreneurial spirits of those with true passion to build something new would be awaken to IoT and IOTA potential fairly soon.

Sharing Economy

Many people prefer using products and services to owning them. Thus a huge growth in the sharing economy is easily foreseen. Think of IOTA based APP unlocking a rental property or a bike, rented out and paid for, for only half an hour or so.

The possibilities are indeed endless.

Less Visible IOTA Developments

Jamie Burke, CEO & Investor at OutlierVentures.io (these guys are focused on the convergence thesis: where blockchain is foundational to Web 3.0 a more decentralised and automated future) lead a development that put a seven dollars figure investment into IOTA.

Note the key statement from them: “ Almost all the corporate partners we speak to in Industry 4.0 who have deep IIOT requirement say the economics of today’s leading public blockchains simply don’t stack up for large scale deployment. Over the last 6 months one player increasingly kept on coming up in conversation about how this might be solved… IOTA.”

IOTA has launched DLT Research & Innovation Network from Norway and has teamed up with leading Norwegian clusters, research and academic institutions to create a new DLT research and innovation network. Partners in this exciting new initiative are:

— Alpha Venturi, a Norwegian strategic innovation and venture launchpad specialised in Distributed Ledger Technologies
—  Oslo Medtech, a health innovation cluster aimed at enabling high quality care by developing and industrializing world class health solutions through our members and ecosystem, both for the Norwegian and global healthcare market
— Oslo Cancer Cluster8, an oncology research and industry cluster dedicated to improving the lives of cancer patients by accelerating the development of new cancer diagnostics and medicines
— NTNU Center for Cyber and Information Security (CCIS), a national center for research, education and competence development in cyber and information security. The center is hosted and operated by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and unites 25 public and private partners
— The Norwegian Centre for E-health Research* is tasked with contributing to a common national ICT solution for health and care services. The new research and assessment centre collects, produces and communicates knowledge required by the authorities to develop a knowledge-based policy on e-health.

Compare all those developments with rather comical blockchain scene, powered by pure speculation, ICO madness and empty talk and ask yourselves, who’s here to stay and thrive for years to come.

Hint: IOTA!

Current Crypto-Currencies Environment and IOTA

It’s fascinating to observe what’s going on on the crypto scene. Bitcoin, that was conceived to be a peer-to-peer electronic cash system is largely congested and currently serves as a dubious store of value. Ethereum, that was touted as a glorious “world computer,” “ a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference,” turned out to be a launchpad for bizarre ICOs, some of which are beyond ridiculous.

These grotesque developments are best seen in the Useless Ethereum Token example — it’s an ICO that “runs exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference,” i.e. it takes the money from the bozos that do not read or think.

The “Useless” crowdsale, at the time of publishing (July 22, 2017) has amassed $69,341.00 for its ingenious joker.

And yet, the people are sending the money out. The crypto scene in a nutshell — a rampant madness.

This guy’s good.

It’s fascinating indeed to observe how fast the crypto-currencies put the humanity’s mirror image on display. It’s insane and flaky, lousy and loud, basically a piss poor protoplasm poorly put together that, as those proverbial lemmings running off a cliff, is rushing toward self-destruction.

On July 7, 2017 there are 804 crypto-currencies listed, some bonkers like Teresa May coin (Teresa May has been the British Prime Minister at the time of writing) or outright Ponzi scheme fraud like the BitConnectCoin.

In this crazy environment IOTA looks like an island of sanity, and more importantly of REALNESS.

In a nutshell, IOTA is by far the most serious and the most advanced, revolutionary technology that resolves most of the problems plaguing Bitcoin in particular and the whole crytpo-currencies scene in general.

Comment on the Short-term Price Movement(s)

It’s irrelevant.

Ask yourself only one question: which project has innovation, real development, a fantastic team able to deliver, a great Net of support (developers, Foundation, Slack membership…) and will survive and thrive in the years to come?

Hint: IOTA!

Crypto niche / markets are well too often polluted by hype, shortsightedness and trading games; it’s still a relatively small market easily moved by short-selling or panic buying. Just think, a few days since David Sønstebø wrote this comment, (July 7th, 2017, 6:32 PM), IOTA MC (market cap) was at $544,896,337 while that pure Ponzi fraud, BitConnect Coin, was at about $377,023,133. What a sick joke.

A voice of reason in the midst of panic selling and cacophony of nonsense on July 7th, 2017

Crypto prices and MC (market cap) of many tokens are, mostly, indeed a gigantic joke reflecting poor judgement and, frankly, laziness. (many “investors” do not have a clue about fundamentals their “investment” posses or not)

When the dust settles — not in a day or two but in years to come — most of the coins would be dead for a long time already. Only a handful, real projects would survive and win.

It is quite possible IOTA would be that winner that “takes it all.”

Disclaimer:

While we firmly believe IOTA is by far the best project and therefore also the best investment in the crypto space nowadays, this is NOT a recommendation to buy.

Do your own due diligence and act accordingly. Risk only what you can afford to lose and never ever buy on margin or risk losing it all.

Moreover, we own IOTA and if its price goes up we would have a nice profit.