Ninelives of IOTA

Dear reader,

You may already be aware of my Ninelives series which explores 9 reasons why something is great, this is my 10th post in the Ninelives series (links to others below). The series is called Ninelives because cats are said to have 9 lives due to their amazing ability to survive. IOTA has been surviving and is another up and coming third generation cryptocurrency project. Let's find out 9 reasons why.

1. Internet of Things Application: IOTA aims to be the ledger for everything. It focuses on machine to machine interactions. It allows a toaster to communicate with a coffee machine. Or it can enable two self driving cars to provide eachother with data. Or cats with embeded microchips may be able to chat with other cats using IOTA😸

2. Not a blockchain: IOTA isn't a blockchain but has the best features of a decentralized ledger. Most cryptocurrencies are blockchains, they add a new block of data and miners or stakeholders verify it. The more transactions on a blockchain the harder it becomes to verify them, increasing both cost and transaction times. IOTA uses nodes or a Tangle, basically you don't verify the previous transaction, you verify any two transactions. There is no chain and there are no miners.

3. Tangle: AKA. Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), each transaction forms a new block to be verified by itself. Before a transaction verifies itself, it has to verify two random previous transactions, this creates some sort of jumbled mess of a chain called a tangle.

4. Free: The user is the validator, so if you use IOTA, you don't have to pay for gas or transactions. Instead you must validate two transactions instead of expending gas or having miners do it for you, this makes IOTA free to use. IOTA creates a self-sustainable demand based economy.

5. Scalability: The more people or things which use IOTA, the faster it becomes as each user verifies two transactions and this causes the project to accelerate. IOTA's scalability is said to be infinite, no other well-known crypto-currency project has this feature.

6. Decentralized: IOTA is open sourced, completely free and it's non-profit. The fact that users are validators makes it even more decentralized as there can be no powerful pool of miners or stakeholders that can exercise dominance.

7. MIOTA: One million IOTA, since IOTA aims to be the ledger of everything, there must be a large number of tokens. There are 2,779,530,283 MIOTA, each representing a million IOTA, so there are almost 2.8 Quadrillion IOTA outstanding. One Million IOTA is worth just under $1.00 and no more IOTA can be created. You can buy it on Binance, but it is highly speculative. My refferal link to sign up for Binance is here

8. Internet of Everything: IOTA creates an environment for the Internet of Everything, by allowing anything to use the internet to communicate.The Internet of Everything is seen as the future of big data and inter-connectivity, it's society 2.0 where everything can be connected to each other using IOTA. Imagine a future with trillions of sensors on things and IOTA connecting them all.

9. Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM): This enables communication over IOTA to be encrypted and readable only by parties which have permission to read the data. It provides security to the network, it's comlicated and is very technical, more information can be found here

Bye for Meow 😺 mRrrrrrrrrr....