As technology advances, more an more innovations spring up that in time render previous versions obsolete. One of such new innovations is the TANGLE, developed by IOTA Foundation, and the IOTA cryptocurrency.
IOTA and the TANGLE
The main innovation behind IOTA is the Tangle, a revolutionary new blockless distributed ledger which is scalable, lightweight and for the first time ever makes it possible to transfer value without any fees, yes no transaction fees.
For the first time ever true micro and even nano-transactions can be carried out using IOTA unique Tangle architecture, providing developers with a brand new set of tools for their applications in both IoT and Web.
Unlike today’s Blockchains, consensus is no-longer decoupled but instead an intrinsic part of the system, leading to decentralized and self-regulating peer-to-peer network.
In IOTA, the global blockchain is replaced with the DAG ( directed acyclic graph) which is called the tangle.
The tangle graph is the ledger for storing transactions. It approves its transactions, without the need for miners, hence no transaction fees. These approvals are represented by directed edges. If there is no directed edge between transaction A and transaction B, there is a directed path of length at least two from A to B, we say that A indirectly approves B.
There is also the “genesis” transaction, which is approved (directly or indirectly) by all other transactions. The genesis is described in the following way. In the beginning there was an address with balance containing all the tokens. Then the genesis transaction sent these tokens to several other “founder” addresses. Let us stress that all the tokens were created in the genesis (no other tokens will be created), and there no mining in the sense “miners receive monetary rewards”. So in short, since there are no miners, and all coins or tokens originate from genesis, this enables the tangle to confirm all transactions, since only tokens or coins that originate from genesis exist.
IOTA and the internet of things
As the expansion of the internet of things is on the rise, IOTA has seen the need for interoperability and sharing of resources. IOTA enables companies to explore new business-2-business models by making every technological resource a potential service to be traded on an open market in real time, with no fees.
In this new autonomous Machine Economy IOTA will be the backbone. The Tangle ledger is able to settle transactions with zero fees so devices can trade exact amounts of resources on-demand, as well as store data from sensors and data loggers securely and verified on the ledger.
The price of IOTA has been on the steady rise. It has risen over 150% in the past one week, and at the time of writing this article the price was at $1.10.
This is the ample time for investors to key into IOTA, as I see IOTA and a repeat of bitcoin and the blockchain.
Core feature of IOTA is the ability to transfer data through the Tangle. IOTA gives you several options to do so, making it possible to establish secure and authenticated communication channels between devices. All data which is transferred through IOTA is fully authenticated and tamper-proof - making attacks impossible.
While the whole world has adopted the ‘Sharing Economy’ in areas like driving and accommodation, IOTA enables a whole new realm where anything with a chip in it can be leased in real time. Most of our belongings stay idle for the vast majority of time that we possess ownership of it, but through IOTA a lot of these things like Appliances, Tools, Drones, eBikes etc. and resources such as computer storage, computational power, WiFi bandwidth etc. can be turned into leasing-services effortlessly.
Lots of big names are moving onto the TANGLE from blcokchain. This move will continue to increase the market capitalization of IOTA which is currently over $2bn.
The price of IOTA is on the rise and will continue to be. Get on board now.
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