Hello everyone. In this post I want to show you simple overview of IOTA.
What is IOTA?
IOTA is 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. It is different from Blockchain. As such it has no Blocks, no Chain and also no Miners.
The major difference that is worth mentioning (apart from the DAG vs. Blockchain) is how IOTA achieves consensus and how transactions are made. As mentioned previously, there are no miners. What this means is 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.
IOTA is the missing puzzle piece for the Machine Economy to fully emerge and reach its desired potential. Hence the name of the crypto currency (IOT-Internet Of Things)A.
IOTA transactions TANGLE is below in the figure 1.
On this picture blocks are transactions. Leftmost blocks are new transactions. Each arrow is a confirmation. How can you see there is two outgoing arrows from each blocks.
Figure 1 - The TANGLE
IOTA main features that are uniquely enabled due to its architecture:
- Scalability: 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
- No Transaction Fees: IOTA has no transaction fees.
- Decentralization: IOTA has no miners. Every participant in the network that is making a transaction, actively participates in the consensus. As such, IOTA is more decentralized than any Blockchain. (Now IOTA is in beta version and there is Coordinator, that serves the net, but in future it will be fully decentralized)
- Quantum-immunity>: IOTA utilized a newly designed trinary hash function called Curl, which is quantum immune (Winternitz signatures)
IOTA released 2,779,530,283,000,000 (~2.8 quadrillions) iotas. It is sold by MIOTA (million iota) is stock exchanges. MIOTA current price is shown in the figure 2.
Figure 2 - MIOTA price on 1 January 2017
Conclusion
IOTA is blockchain 3.0 (Blockchain 2.0 is Etherium) that is serves the Machine Economy (Iot). It’s huge advantages are zero transactions and endless scalability. It has a huge perspectives and can to improve our life.
Used sources
1- https://iota.readme.io/docs/what-is-iota
2- https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/iota/