My Evaluation of Iota, the IoT Cryptocurrency

Iota is a company, based out of somewhere, that sprang onto the scene in 2015 promising a cryptocurrency that would serve as the backbone of the Internet of Things (IoT). The name itself comes from that abbreviation. Mission statement: create a cryptocurrency with unlimited transactions per second, with zero transaction fees. They claim to have invented a blockchain alternative called “The Tangle” which relies on a vague mathematical construct to serve as the platform on which transactions are stored and verified. More on this later.

Competition: None. No one else has the balls to make the claims Iota does.

Minimum viable product? No. I would argue that since the claims made by Iota about their platform’s capabilities require an enormous number of transactions to test, there would be no minimum viable product as this is a new invention that has never been subjected to stress. They don't even have a theoretically viable product, because 1) they decided, insanely, to use balanced ternary rather than binary, because reasons. The mere requirement of constant back-and-forth translation from binary to ternary makes this platform - if you can even call it that - extremely suspect.

But The Tangle! They claim that they can use a node-based web of transactions that self-validate because every transactant must verify two randomly-chosen adjacent nodes in order to be accepted into the Tangle. And this provides security why? What's the level of encryption? What does this verification process look like? Where's the math? It's all a bunch of smoke to hide the fact that they don't actually have, you know, a product.

Developers? Here’s an excerpt from one of the developers’ bios:

“His background is in physical and economical systems simulations, he hopes to bring this knowledge to the IOTA project. His main goal is to simulate the Tangle and make it possible to better understand the DAG based systems. He wants to establish values of parameters that allow for the smoothest performance of the Tangle and find the best ways to protect against attacks on the system.”

In this paragraph alone, we can see that The Tangle hasn’t even been simulated. His goal is to better understand the DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) based systems. They don't even have a complete understanding of the DAG? This project is purely speculative.

Not to mention that they currently have two “developers” on staff, one of which got his degrees in math and physics. Oh, and they were both hired this month.

Quality of the team: Most of the names listed are people with marketing backgrounds.

If you’re not persuaded that this project is a joke thus far, I’ll be happy to complete this report. I’d prefer to move on. This is not a serious effort to solve problems. I feel dirty even reviewing it.