What is IOTA?

 
IOTA is a new cryptocurrency token that is scalable, decentralized, modular. IOTA has no mining, no blocks, no difficulty no transaction fees and thus no transaction fees.

It's distributed ledger technology is is meant to function as the backbone of the 'Internet of Things' - you know smart devices.

With that in mind, IOTA aims to enable smart devices to "pay each other" via IOTA tokens, as there is no transaction fee or mining involved. IOTA also aims to store data on it's datachain, e.g. data of weatherstations. You have to keep in mind, that there's already a direct competitor for that: FACTOM, also a cryptocurrency company, but their blockchain is already in use and their clients growing daily. Their "products safeguard the most critical government, commercial, and non-profit systems".

For more info click here: Factom

Created in 2014, it's the first technology of its kind that is able to function as the lightweight distributed ledger with scalability, and claims to be quantum proof, meaning even quantum computers can't "hack" it. IOT also praised itself as a decentralization for all IoT devices, but after the ICO, they cleared out that the foundation has central servers and is not that decentral at all.

Another main point is that IOTA is not built on blockchain tech, but on TANGLE.

The whitepaper can be read here: Whitepaper

Use cases

Apart from microtransactions just as transactions, IOTA can be used as data transfer, on which the developers state: "IOTA gives you several options to do so, making it possible to establish secure and authenticated communication channels between devices. "

But why not use Ethereum, Dash, Bitshares or any other cryptocurrency for that?

The answer is simple:

For example, if I want to gather temperature data from a network of sensors that someone or a group of someones deploy, then either they can broadcast that data for free or charge for, but if they want to get paid then they need a whole infrastructure to support that: that is the IoTA network.
Then when whole ecosystems of different types of devices doing different things is available on a single platform like IoTA then we will get amazing emergent behavior that changes the way we interact with our environment.
IoTA has a chance of being at the center and enabling all that, and its token has a chance of being the medium of exchange for that economy.

The IOTA technology has many potentials and is a well engineered platform for our future world. Now that IOTA has recently partnered with F6S, "the world’s largest platform for founders, start-ups and accelerators, to bring the IOTA Ecosystem Fund to their vast network and community with over 2 Million start-ups and developers, with particular focus on Internet-of-Things." maybe we'll see it next year or maybe we'll need another couple of years, until it gets integrated in our smart world and adopted in mainstream-scale. Who knows. The future will (hopefully) be great.