I'm a reasonably smart guy. Not super smart. Just semi-smart. I've been a professional software engineer for over 35 years. I've written a fair amount of bitcoin software in C++ and I feel like I understand blockchains in some level of technical detail.
I certainly had no problems understanding the original bitcoin whitepaper.
The IOTA whitepaper, on the other hand, that I really could not grok much of it at all. Sure, I get some of the concepts, but it's all couched in some heavy math, technical jargon, and doesn't really explain a whole lot of things I still have questions about.
Is there a better non-technical explanation of IOTA out there, one that doesn't resort to just repeating the same marketing hype we have all heard up to this point?
Some questions I don't feel like the whitepaper answered, in particular, is a very detailed description of the data layout of the 'tangle'.
As a frame of reference, here is an article I wrote years ago which explains, in exact detail, how the bitcoin blockchain is represented down to each individual bit and byte.
http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-to-parse-bitcoin-blockchain.htmlSome questions I have are:
* Are all transactions which have ever occurred in IOTA stored without pruning? And, if so, wouldn't this produce a database of unmanageable size at scale? I read the entire whitepaper and not one word seemed to address this most basic of all questions.
* IOTA transactions do not appear to be confirmed instantly, like lightning network transactions are. In fact, confirmation all seems super probabilistic. It 'might be confirmed', 'maybe', if you wait long enough and check the score. While I love the 'no fees' aspect of IOTA and that it doesn't require the crazy complex routing of LN, it's still not really superior to the Lightning Network necessarily.
* How are rules enforced? What prevents any client from using t his own algorithm for selecting, ranking, processing transactions?
I really view the lightning network as the most obvious competitor to IOTA and I'm not yet convinced IOTA is better.
Long confirmation times, proof of work, massive data sets, these are all big negatives compared to LN. Now, LN has it's own problems, so it's not super black and white. but it doesn't require proof of work and transactions are confirmed essentially instantaneously since the two parties merely exchange signatures.
I would be happy to write my own article that explains IOTA to the layperson, without mathematics or requiring a Phd, but I can't write such an article until I understand it myself.
I get that the math and all of that detail is important, and useful, but I really would like to understand the whole network at a much more basic level. How are transactions submitted to the peer-to-peer network? How much of the 'tangle' must be stored by any participant in the network? Do they need a complete copy of the entire tangle and, if not, how does that work? Is there the concept of 'full nodes' and 'spv like nodes'? Do some nodes store the entire database? Do they have a complete copy or an approximate copy? If the databases are fragmented, meaning there is no one singular definitive copy like in a blockchain, how are they merged and reconciled? How do 'light wallets' communicate with the rest of the network?
I'm going to keep digging for resources but so far all I have found is either 'marketing speak' (stuff which rattles off the amazing miraculous features of IOTA without any explanation how it works) or technical documents that require a PhD to understand and, even then, seem to ignore many practical questions and issues.
