Whenever there is a Goliath in any space. with every new development there comes speculation on which of these new, supposedly superior tokens will become the new gold standard in cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is Goliath and now with IOTA rising to 6th place on coinmarketcap.com with ~$3 Billion in market capitalization, more and more people are starting to look to IOTA to play David.
Bitcoin revolutionized the entire concept of transaction by implementing a decentralized, peer to peer, Blockchain network that enabled users to make transactions while only incurring minimal fees. This allowed a diverse demographic of users to utilize Bitcoin either as a store of value or in everyday transactions. While Bitcoin was revolutionary, the token itself was not the driving factor in the strength of Bitcoin as a currency, only the concept of a decentralized Blockchain. Although the Bitcoin network continues to be dominant in cryptocurrency and digital assets today, there is no ignoring the problems that Bitcoin has had. Back on August 1st, Bitcoin Cash was created as a hard-fork in an attempt to implement an alternate solution to what the original Bitcoin Blockchain championed. There is much contention as to whether or not increasing block size or implementing Segwit would ease peoples minds but the thing that became obvious from the ordeal that lasted a year and a half is that Bitcoin is by no means perfect and it is starting to run into issues.
Similar to how revolutionary the decentralized Blockchain was, the Tangle - which IOTA implements - may be the successor to the Blockchain. The Tangle is a directed-acyclic-graph wherein each transaction is connected to two other nodes in an acyclic manner. In layman's terms, this is a completely different structure from the Blockchain and is capable of facilitating transactions in real time without the use of a miner's processing power to confirm each instance or transaction. In almost every aspect, IOTA seems to be superior to Bitcoin. IOTA features free, quick, secure transactions whereas Bitcoin transactions have a miner fee attached and are slow to confirm.
In addition to those advantages, one of the reasons why people are heralding IOTA as the next generation in cryptocurrency is the fact that it features a Quantum-Resistant algorithm. This means that regardless of the emergence of Quantum Computing, this network would be safe from attack, meaning that the entire system wouldn't have to rely on a hastily implemented fix when Quantum Computers inevitably become more accessible.
Since IOTA was listed on various exchanges only a couple of months ago, it has risen to a high position in an incredibly short period of time and is clearly a cryptocurrency to keep your eyes on. Time will tell if IOTA will be a Bitcoin killer but as we can see with its continued valuation, naysayers may have their work cut out for them.
