Crypto Learning 1: Understanding IOTA.

Hello Steemians. In the small amount of time I have been involved with the crypto community I have learned so much. For this I am extremely grateful. However, I still struggle to grasp some of the ideas behind certain crypto developments. Therefore, I have decided to start posting about different Crypto’s wherein I try and evaluate the currencies as I read whitepapers watch videos and get more involved within the community. These posts will be my own opinion blended with that of my resources and I am extremely excited to continue my crypto education.

The first installment of this series of posts will look at IOTA.

IOTA immediately caught my attention as I am very interested in the internet of things concept. For those of you who do not know, the Internet of things refers to the communication between smart devices enabled by the internet, WIFI etc. ex. your fridge communicating with your computer when milk is running low so that the computer can purchase milk online.

IOTA also peaked my interest due to it not using blockchain technology. IOTA still uses decentralized distributed ledgers in a peer-to-peer network, but instead of using miners to authenticate transactions, it uses the issuer of the transaction to authenticate two previous transactions. They call this Tangle. The best explanation I found was from @boxminning explaining it as the difference between students handing in their work for the teacher to evaluate which can be time consuming (blockchain) vs the students evaluating each other’s work. Tangle therefore ensures that all users work to contribute to network security. Do not worry all of this happens in the background.

This allows for two major advantages of Tangle over blockchain the first is speed of transaction, the larger the network becomes the faster transactions become as there are more issuers and therefore more evaluators. The second advantage is since there are no miners there are no transaction fees, that is right using IOTA is free, the issuer therefore becomes the validator and the reward for validating transactions is the elimination of transaction fees. The elimination of fees makes it possible for micro-transactions to occur and this is a step in the right direction to ensure mass adoption in my opinion.

IOTA also have use cases other than the internet of things and this involves secure data transmission, e-voting for example. The main focus of IOTA is however, the internet of things and they are looking to bring a sharing economy into existence by providing everything as service wherein anything with a chip can be leased examples cars, drones, computing power and storage or any appliances. IOTA is looking to enable machine to machine communication and micro-transactions, meaning that machines will be able to communicate and to transact with each other on the IOTA network.

IOTA has a fixed supply and the total supply is and has always been in circulation.

After reading, watching videos and reading the whitepaper to gain a better understanding of the IOTA development I must say this is something that I personally love however this is only my opinion.