IOTA: Is it worth one iota?

What is IOTA

IOTA seemingly comes out of nowhere and appears at #7 on coinmarketcap.com with a valuation of $1.6 billion-dollars. Let’s drive into this technology and see if it’s worth investing in.

Contrary to what I have seen others say, IOTA is not a direct competitor to Ethereum. IOTA is similar to Lightning Network or Raiden, these protocols allow for great scalability and micro-transactions. IOTA operates on the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) model similar to the ByteBall model, which IOTA calls the Tangle. Here is a visual of a DAG:

Advantages of the IOTA network

• No fee transactions, which makes micropayment possible
• Removes miners, everybody contributes to the network
• Unlimited transaction rate, each person that sends a transaction is supposed to process a transaction, which theoretically means unlimited scalability.
• Un-forkable, the network can’t split into new separate networks like ETH and ETC.

Disadvantages of the IOTA network

• Can’t do smart contracts
• The promise of free transactions is highly theoretical and node pools with heavy weights in the DAG could force transactions through themselves and charge fees. This issue has yet to be addressed by the development team.
• An attacker doesn't have to outpower the entire honest computational power of the network, but just the honest computational power of the network actively making transactions at any given time.

Is IOTA worth the Price?

IOTA is still in the testnet phase and has a long way to go till its live and battle tested. While they do have a promising roadmap and active development team, the $1.6 billion-dollar market cap is so far ahead of itself that I am not going to touch it. I will, however keep it on my watch list and hopefully find a time when I feel IOTA is undervalued for what it’s about to deliver.

In other news: August 1 launch of Iconomi has been confirmed see my review here: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@wolfofcrypto/iconomi-the-sleeping-giant

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