Iota is a newcomer into the top of the crypto market cap. I first learned about it from the twit of Joshua Scigala - founder of Vaultoro. So I went and read the white paper. I was sure there's a trick somewhere - you can't send transactions without fees, right? Cause who will secure the network?
First of all - not everything is rosy. Iota needs bootstrapping as mentioned in the twit by Dominik Schiener in order to avoid Sybil attacks. There are more questions - in order to transact - one needs to access Iota to get some other transactions to validate - who this will happen? Does it mean you need to run full validating node? Will you need to receive all transactions just in case to be able to transmit yours?
If the dev team will have control over the tangle for bootstrapping - when will they release this control? What will happen if they release the control too early? The white paper is full of math - I have some formal math education - but this was not enough. I 'll have to look more - but what is clear - there are a lot of assumptions and then mathematical calculations based on these assumptions. But those assumptions will not hold always - will the system be 100% failure proof or only 99.9%? Also, any consensus system is defined by incentives. Is Iota system of incentives sound? I am not that sure.
I bet there will be specialized nodes to validate the tangle that will do it efficiently and everybody else will pay fees to send transactions via those nodes. because - PoW is still proof of work - if you sent a million micro transactions - you will need to validate two million other transactions and that might result in heavy electricity bill especially if done on ineffective hardware.
I ll continue to look into Iota - in the meantime - feel free to refer me to resources with more information.
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