Executive summary: Ivan on Tech interviews David Sønstebø

This is my summary of the brandnew 1.5 hour livestreamed interview between Ivan and David.

Start:
David dropped out of college with 16 because you can learn everything online now. Was really into AI around 2006 for a long time. He was interested in the change tech can have on society. Got into DLT in 2012 after realizing that it's potential is much bigger than efficient financial transactions
Raised 550k for iota. Bitcoin crashed right away after it so they couldn't liquidate all the raised funds. Comparison to today's crazy market where a website gets a million funding.
In order to be on exchanges they wanted an MVP not just tokens.

The coordinator is nessecary because of the threat of a 51% attack. It may go away early 2019. First slowly decreasing into a dPOS with less centralization. It's impossible to undo the change once it is fully away so they have to be careful (not sure if I got that right???)

The coordinator has been shut off twice to prove that it works without it.

It is a ternary system. Because the Euler constant is 2.71 and this is closer to 3 than 2. Iota is designed for new devices not primarily existing infrastructure.
The iota founders founded a stealth startup for microprocessors for iot before 2015 and found out that it is more efficient to calculate turnary.

Ivan is quite sceptical: Today we have to build on a second layer to make a trinary calculations.
David: just make a Google search on ternary neuronal networks. Use of ternary weights is much more efficient. Octfold is even more efficient for some graphical calculations.

Energy consumption is critical for iot and ternary takes that into account.

Iota has also a smart contract play. Simple example: accessing databases etc.

Ethereum as a Swiss army knife. You can do anything with it but it is not well suited to do a single task.
One environment doesn't suit for all smart contacts can't solve.
Iota has a core protocoll for payments. The other layers will work via interfaces to the core.
Identity should also be another layer.

A wallet was never a priority. We are a back end tech. Upcoming UCL wallet should pass the grandma Crack test and will be in public beta soon. Sorry for the lost funds. We think people should be more responsible for their assets if they want to get rid of the banks.

We have only 70 employees

Ivan: "Hashing functions shouldn't be made by the own team yours has some collisions"

We are pushing the boundries of iot. We wanted to make a very efficient heading function based on open source. Those found collisions don't matter because you would need the keys to exploit them. The accusers have still not provided us with the code or the found flaws until today even though we asked them 100 times.

Our open source code has to have some protection because it is so cutting edge. We want to avoid copycats. The crypto market is running crazy hot right now. CurlP is our hash function. Is a prototype. Later everything will be open source.

Iota is difficult to list on exchanges. Erc20 token are easy to add but custom coins are difficult. We oversaw the security at some exchanges in order that they are doing it right.
We are currently working on a plug and play solution for the exchanges to get listed at more.

Ivan: What about raiblocks and lightning network?
Blockchain was the holy grail in the early days. I am happy that today people realized the problems with them and that they are trying to solve them with new approaches.

The only negative thing is that raiblocks needed a whole month to compare them against iota and tried to convince people that they are only for human to human whereas iota is for machines.

LN is at the point where they have to jump into the cold water and test it in the real world.

Partition tolerant is important in the machine to machine world. Imagine a part of the network that is offline. In BTC this would result in a fork.

The problems of LN are the opening and closing of channels. Payment streams are the cool thing on the LN. In iota there is no fee.
We applaud bitcoin for finally doing something innovative. The routing problem is still existence today. LN will get centralized like the internet is today. This defits the purpose of BTC.
I am not on bitcoin cashs side at all.

Bitcoin is centralized in 3 mining pools. Miners like it when fees go up cos they make more money.
Pos and Pow are leading to centralization. Iota is very much more decentralized once the coordinator is removed.

Ivan: why are you so arrogant?
I don't think we are that. We are not building up deities. Not like wunderkind style.
We tried to not attract speculators. We don't care. I am blunt and I speak with everybody.
Iota is 24/7 we are working all the time and responses might be impulsive. We are on the way to now professionalism.

Ivan: How can we help?

We have 50 or 60mio dollars for funding for iota projects. Run a full node. Or correct misunderstandings in the forums or webpages.

We don't want to be just a crypto project. This is just a small part of it. Blockchain is only speculation right now. We want to be production ready as so on a possible. We had to turn down partnerships we need 150 full time employees until the end of the year.

David to Ivan:
Thank you for you objective views on YouTube. You don't pump coins like a lot of others do.