it's one of the most promising coins in terms of future, but far from best on paper. Take a look at byteball (which is also DAG) but with better tech (but bad marketing) and skycoin (which is on blockchain but also with no fees and no posibility of 51% attack). There are also quite a few gems out there if you are willing to dig deep in the whitepapers. It's just that speculators don't always see beyond marketing

you should have been on both trains )) I hope you didn't take that rivalry between communities to seriously. There was no reason not to join both, since both are good ideas with roughly equal success chances. The way I see it: Byteball has the tech upper hand but is a marketing wreck, iota is doing all the wrong things with tech right now but brilliant in marketing. Imho odds are still 50-50.

As a software developer working for several big companies until now, I can tell you a partnership with Microsoft means nothing. ALL the companies I worked for in the past were "partners". Don't fall for buzzwords. Neither of these companies have promised to do anything special yet.

Also I didn't miss the train at all. I'm on it, but I'm keeping my eyes open. There is a lot of promise, but I also see it moving fast and I see plenty of risks to derail. When I see the fanboy attitude in the thread I get really scared because the train seems to run blindly

While the tech is very promising (which is why I actually bought quite a few coins) there are some really big problems:
  - 2 huge security problems until now (inventing their own encryption + address re-use after snapshots leading to wallets getting hacked)
  - still centralized depending on the coordinator. We have no proof the coin can ever be decentralized
  - iota foundation can apparently seize funds? can you say centralized again?
  - 10 people own 50% of the currency mass
  - transactions go unconfirmed for days and need to be replayed all the time - how will this work again for IoT?
  - currently only on a single broker that was suspended in the US (shady broker)

those partnerships don't mean a thing. Bitcoin has real world uses for 8 years now. Thousands of stores that accept bitcoin both online and offline. Cash dispensers that where you can withdraw BTC.

When IOTA will start to be actually used to buy something then it will be the real thing. It's never going to be number 1 until then. For now we are just speculating, pumping and dumping. 100% of transactions are speculative.

because they invented the word tangle. They are useing a DAG and no, they are not the only one. Look at byteball which has a superior tech from every point of view (except the no fees part) but have no marketing team. And I know these two weren't even the first DAGs. There was another coin that failed to get any attention at all, but I don't remember the name.

after the snapshot the counter is reset and the wallet will generate the same old addresses.

well this never happened to me with bitcoin (any wallet) in 5 years of use. Possibility of making a mistake to loose all funds??? Sounds like the problem is real.... All possibilities NEED to be ELIMINATED for the coin to be viable.

it's not just iota.....but all alts + btc

because it has significant risks for now, that bitcoin doesn't
- iota is still centralized working with a coordinator. Until we see it work without, we don't event have a proof of concept
- wealth is currently in hands of very few people. Iota was poorly distributed which may create liquidity problems later
- there are unresolved technical problems - see transactions hanging for days, balances that need to be recovered routinely, etc
- there was big snafu on the technical side where they decided to roll their own encryption algo, which in the security/technical world is a capital sin. A lot of credibility was lost with this

more marketing perhaps (not perhaps...definitely). Also (not pointing any fingers) a lot of coins are artificially pumping the price through "fake"  transactions between the same wallets, just to create volume and impression of demand.

Seriously, when the volume is so low, the price is meaningless and can be manipulated so hard, it's not even fun. And this is true for most coins. In the long run 90% of these alts will go to 0 and only a few will actualy get used in the real world. Hopefully byteball is one of them because of it's technology. This should be the only criteria when you decide to invest. Everything else is like playing the roulette.

Also, a high market cap isn't necessary good. It only means you are to late to the party. IOTA has a 2 bil market cap. How much do you expect it to grow in the next 10 years? 10 times? That means to 20 bil. Perhaps, but only if it goes mainstream. A platform worth 20 billion dollars is huge, and personaly I don't see many chances for that happening. By comparison take byteball: it's currently worth 160 million. It would grow 100 times to reach the same level, with less risk (lets face it, IOTA has some serious technical challenges and risks ahead).  10x vs 100x payout.

why is it for the darknet? Doesn't seem to be that anonymous by design, and I've never seen it used either. It's usually bitcoin, monero and dash that are used, the last two being pretty good for anonymity.

I'd hate to rain down on your parade but in case of bytes, powers of two actually make sense. It was not lazy. Whoever later "decided" that 1 KB = 1000 bytes was a moron, whenever it's published on NIST or not. It's not used by anyone. Universities don't teach it that way. Your operating system (whenever if it's windows or linux) doesn't show it that way. 1 KB = 1000 bytes is only in the head of some senile bureaucrats that don't understand technology and memory alignment. Just because a bureaucrat says the earth is flat it doesn't mean it is. You can't wish it that way, just like you can't make a memory chip that holds exactly 1000 bytes of information. Bytes are stored in binary. That's the reality.

I hope that is a legit integration problem with skycoin and not something funny. I'm using cryptopia for the first time and I don't really appreciate the adrenaline rush

We really need to get skycoin on a decent exchange.

I'm still having the same problem today. The sky wallet status is "maintenance - investigating wallet issues"