Blockchain Crisis - IOTA's Tangle to the rescue!

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BLOCKCHAIN PROBLEMS

I'm sure we can all agree that the cryptocurrency world has been facing quite a lot of issues lately. Just when the world has seen the potential of the blockchain technology and has taken a seat in the moving train, it seems like its crashing down.
Blockchain came with a lot of solutions to a lot of problems. However, it has its own problems.

Take Bitcoin for instance - the most popular cryptocurrency in existence today. One of the reasons why bitcoin came was to liberate the world from the shackles of transaction fees of banks and third parties in the course of sending money. And yes, it was able to solve this problem (at least during its early days). As at December 2016, transaction fee was about $0.20. Fast forward to December 2017, transaction fees are pretty monstrous. $40 is a starting point for fees if you really want to see your transaction complete within hours. These make it impossible to carry out micro-transactions. This means, you would be totally out of your mind to send $10 to someone and pay a fee times four that amount. Even if that friend is in another country, you'd rather go through Western Union and pay their fee. This poses a big problem to cryptocurrency usability as the bulk of transactions that average people do involve relatively small amount. It makes it impossible to use bitcoin for transactions in our day to day life.

Another problem that bitcoin came to solve was speed in transaction. Yes it did solve this initially. Well, not anymore! Bitcoin transactions take hours, sometimes days...Heck it takes weeks sometimes!(Haven't experienced month(s) before) due to the congestion of the network and the relatively small number of people validating these transactions. I for one, still have a particular transaction that has been pending for weeks now. I wanted to transfer a very small amount to another address but was too dogged so I cut down the transaction fee drastically. I would have double spent to push it through by now, but I'm just gonna leave it there as an experiment to see how long a low fee transaction can spend in the pool before being validated.

These and many more are the problems blockchain (bitcoin specifically) is facing. Someone might want to disagree with me for generalizing bitcoin's flaws as a problem with blockchain. Well, as an answer to that, I think we can both agree that any blockchain based coin subjected to what bitcoin is being subjected to, will run into the same or similar problems

Furthermore (although not a pressing issue at this time), quantum computers might be able to break through blockchain. Blockchain as we all know runs on advanced cryptographic algorithms. However, with the evolution of quantum computers, we might see an increased rate of orphaned blocks on the network.

With these flaws, its hard to tell the future of blockchain in the positive direction. Well, while we try to argue "for" or "against" blockchain, the revolution has taken place....

WELCOME TANGLE

Tangle is a revolutionary technology that is pioneered by the IOTA foundation. IOTA is a coin built and targeted for use in a relatively new innovative field called Internet of Things(IOT). It is aimed at facilitating data exchange between sensor-enabled devices connected on the Internet of things. Basically the internet of things is a network of connected smart devices which can communicate via the internet. IOTA makes it possible for these devices to carry out transactions between themselves.
IOTA is a decentralized system but it doesn't make use of blockchain. It uses tangle, which is a technology that solves most of the problems of a blockchain powered system.
The Tangle based network works in such a way that for every transaction a person carries out, he validates two others behind him. The mathematical concept which it run on is called Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG).

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Instead of straight blocks as in blockchain, the transactions pile up as tangles, each one having a connection to two older ones

Good thing is all of these happen behind the scene so you don't really need to buy a house full of supercomputers and electricity to use IOTA. The implication of this is Miners are eliminated from the system.

Because miners are totally absent, transaction fees are completely absent too... Yes you heard that right, No transaction fee!. With the elimination of transaction fees comes the the ability to carry out micro transactions.

That isn't all. It is super fast! You don't have to wait for hours or years to get a transaction done; It just happens. Infact, it even becomes faster with more transactions carried out. This is because older transactions get validated even faster.

Also, Tangle is built to be Quantum proof

IOTA is that new kid in the block, and it has seen a lot of advancement in ranking since its inception. One of the big things to have happened to the coin this year was the partnership with Microsoft. IOTA targets a prospectively big tech space in the future - IOT, and Microsoft has come into the scene to play a big role. Microsoft is not the only big guy in their league, they have other big partnerships with the likes of Cisco and Samsung. There is no doubt about the potential of this coin and the technology it is powered on. They call it the "3rd generation cryptocurrency". You should keep your heads up and also your investments for this coin.

Conclusion

Tangle is the future. Blockchain has reached its elastic limit and some people are beginning to loose faith in it, infact, many are becoming scared of its viability. The IOTA team has brought something more scintillating to keep the cryptocurrency train moving. Blockchain has paved the way for the cryptoworld, but I think its finally time to move on. Tangle will help to actualize the initial vision that birthed bitcoin and the blockchain technology.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the IOTA website is really crazy! Dope UI...They really are in the future

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