In my last two posts I coverd my favorite altcoins (the first part is here and the second part here.), leaving the absoulte favorite for today - IOTA.
IOTA is the second big game changer in the crypto world. A revolutionary, new, next generation public distributed ledger that utilizes a novel invention called a Tangle at its core. The Tangle is a new data structure based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). As such it has no Blocks, no Chain, and also, no miners (so IOTA is more decentralized than any Blockchain). This means that each participant in the network that wants to make a transaction has to actively participate in the consensus of the network by approving 2 past transactions. This attestation on the validity of two past transactions ensures that the whole network achieves consensus on the current state of approved transactions, and it enables variety of unique features that are only seen in IOTA. You can download the Whitepaper here.
IOTA aims to be the public, permissionless backbone for the Internet of Things (IoT) that enables true interoperability between all devices. And that it’s due to IOTA’s scalability (which means that IOTA can achieve high transaction throughput thanks to parallelized validation of transactions with no limit as to the number of transactions that can be confirmed in a certain interval), quantum-immunity (because IT utilized a newly designed trinary hash function called Curl, which is quantum immune (Winternitz signatures), fast transactions and, probably the most important, IOTA has no transaction fees. No other cryptocurrency has these features.
And I hope you understand what this means. Basically, machines can trade with each other without human intervention. For example, if you program your refrigerator to order beer when you down to 3 bottles, now it can also pay for it (and delivery) by itself.
Or if you send your drone to record some area and at some point it realizes that, for some reason, it cannot finish the job (low battery) it can ask and pay some other drone in the area to finish the job and send collected data.
It ii very exciting and a bit scary at the same time.
From an investor/trader point of view, IOTA it still a great opportunity for both. Since the technology is so new, everything is going very slow. But it is going forward, that is the most important part. The team is fantastic and it’s growing on an almost weekly basis. There are already many businesses connected to IOTA (and many more coming)
And with the market cap of $1,316,602,345, IOTA is already one of the biggest players on the field. To be fair, there are some issues coming out from time to time, but that’s totally normal in an early stage of a completely new technology. The project is still in BETA.
IOTA came on the market on June the 13th 2017 and the price was $0,63 or 23524 Satoshis (0,00023524 BTC). In 2 months it rose slowly to 24475 Satoshis (0.00024475 BTC), but since Bitcoin was rising at the same time, the evaluation in dollars was $1,09. Then came the usual price correction and today IOTA is at 8798 Satoshis (0,00008798 BTC) or $0,49. And just 3 days ago you could buy it for $0,32.
But this is still a great price IMHO. I really believe in this project, it’s the major part of my portfolio and I see big things happening for IOTA in 2018. Not to mention 5 or 10 years for now.
I do trade it a little bit, but it is really a long term investment. Hopingly, an early retirement…
Until then, STAY SAFE AND HODL!
DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial advisor. All thoughts in this post are my personal opinion and not a financial advice. You should always do your own research before any investment.