Guys, can we stop the unproductive fighting? i mean, in the end we all care about our returns in fiat. Fucking cryptocurrencies aren't religion. The whole market is going up and the only difference among the projects is if you are going to make a 3x or 10x return over a period of time.
This thread has been started by me, because I think IOTA has a better risk:reward ration than other projects and I want fellow forum members to educate about the possibility. Then lets's go over the current pros, cons and controversies of IOTA again.
Controversies
IOTA has one master node and is centralized
In the current state, this is true. There is a master node, called Coordinator (Coo), which helps verify every transaction and issues milestones / timestamps. The source code is not public yet, but the foundation said to make it open source in December.
Let's remember how IOTA works. There aren't miners, blocks or a block issuing service as in traditional blockchains. Instead every user serves as a validator and verifies two previous transactions with every transaction made. If you aren't familiar yet with IOTA continue to read
here. Important to note, that PoW isn't artificial high nor does the difficulty adjust dynamically, so even a Raspberry Pie can do the required PoW within a couple of seconds. This however does open a door for a Sybill attack during the protocols infancy state (currently) as an malicious actor could introduce many cheap nodes and overtake the network. That's what the Coo protects against right now.
IOTA uses a ternary base, which is fucking stupid as all currently available hardware only handles binary code. Even more, they roll their own cryptography
IOTA is programmed using a ternary base and needs to be compiled to binary by a custom compiler written by the team. This causes performance loss and makes development more difficult. On the other hand, ternary code executed by ternary hardware has slightly better performance, and more importantly requires significantly less power consumption. This is critical for those resource restricted IoT devices. Consequently,
Curl, a new, lightweight and ternary based cryptography has been developed by the IOTA team.
The answer to this is
Jinn, a hardware project for
distributed computing. Jinn was actually already long in the works before the team decided to launch IOTA. A couple of days ago, CfB (the brain behind) stated that one Jinn will cost $0.99. It's speculated that Jinn will be manufactured by Bosch in their new
semiconductor fabric in Dresden.
Further explanations:
https://blog.iota.org/the-transparency-c...aa5bb8e260
Pros
Major exchanges still to list IOTA
IOTA is a top 10 coin with substantial daily trade volume. Such a major coin obviously is very attractive for any exchange to list. There are still a lot of major exchanges to list IOTA in the upcoming weeks and months. Bittrex, Bithumb, BitFlyer, Bitstamp and so on. The potential increase in demand speaks for itself.
IOTA data marketplace will increase demand for IOTA tokens
The IOTA foundation announced the
IOTA data marketplace in collaboration with many of the largest companies just a couple of days ago. Data on the market place can only be purchased with IOTA tokens, which in return will increase the demand for those. You know, a real world use case...
Building your own hardware is crazy? Maybe, but if it takes off than it really takes off
The general purpose CPU Jinn, which is build for distributed computing and the IoT, will have an ASIC for IOTA's PoW integrated. In case, Jinn really gains some traction, IOTA would be all over the place. To be fair, this is speculative, but RoI would be out of this world.
Inventor of PoS on the team
In late 2013, a mysterious guy named BCNext announced the first
PoS coin NXT. It has been
proved that CfB (again, the brain behind Jinn & IOTA) is BCNext.
Cons
Security holes in the source code
Yes, there has been at least one security hole in the Curl code, which was detected by the MIT. Worse, the IOTA foundation claimed that the security hole has been introduced on purpose and there might be even more.
The current wallet
The current desktop wallet sucks big time, no question about that. There is nothing more to say about it just that's nothing more than a Minimal Viable Product. Nevertheless, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The University College London (UCL) is about to build a complete new wallet from the scratch. Look it up
here and
here.
Ok, that's it. I hope my post clarified a couple of things and controversies around IOTA. As I said, I think IOTA is a superior investment in the crypto currency space and therefore one should have an eye on it. As always, make your own mind!