Does anyone truly understand IOTA?

[jubalix]

Let's leave price aside.

IOTA promises to have found the holy grail - infinite scalability with zero transaction fees.

If that is truly so, then screw just the IoT usage, such a system should replace every imaginable form of value transaction known to humanity.

Unfortunately that is a claim I have seen no evidence to support.  A transactional DAG still relies on a global state to ensure double spends can't happen, thus its still vertical in nature even though the architecture promotes horizontal scaling.

Ultimately the problem of scale comes into effect when you try and shard it.  The structure of the transactions within the DAG is shard-friendly, but the consensus is not.

Lets say we shard a DAG into 2, and I present a transaction on the strongest tip on each shard.  Unless there is still a node that has both shards, the transactions I presented will validate in each, thus a double spend.

The 2 shard example is very simple, but as it scales you'll have less overlap between shards as nodes scale back how many shards they can support, thus the possibility of double spends going undetected increases.  Auto-detecting shard availability and overlap is an NP-Complete problem...i.e expensive!

Does IOTA have a mechanism to mitigate this?  I don't know and for my example I'm talking about a pure DAG implementation.  If there is a solution it will likely be a form of master node that witnesses all transactions within the network / batch of shards and alerts on a possible double spend across shards.  Not really ideal IMO.

The good news is, I researched and implemented similar architectures a number of years ago now and it certainly WILL scale better than a block chain (a lot better), and the lack of a global state won't become a problem for quite some time.  IMO though, it's no holy grail, just step forward in the right direction.

Questions that arise from it are:
1. What is the mechanism behind such an ingenious discovery?
2. How come nobody came with the idea before (there must have been some bright minds within blockchain technology who understood the scalability and fee problem and never came up with solution)?
3. What prevents other coins from implementing such a revolutionary design?
4. Can other coins with established market caps and track records switch to such a design?
5. Who secures the network if there is no fee-incentive?

1. Not sure what the question is.
2. They have, DAGs have been around for a while, using them in a decentralized transactional nature is fairly recent and so development has taken the time.
3 & 4.  Can't be done, they are TOTALLY different architectures.  It'd be like trying to install a combustion engine into a horse to make the horse run faster.
5. Thats IOTA specific, so I can't really answer it.

From what I can intuit and I may be wrong  but the tangles reach a specific usage in a local area that is become impractical to double spend them, then these thangles themselves at the edges are also parts of other tangles, and the whole thing gets sort of stitched together in a mesh of tangles....

What may happen is sort of an unlikely en tropic event and a tangle becomes sort of detached or not sufficently hooked up, but the more people you have using (or things) this becomes infinitesimally small chance

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[Come-from-Beyond]

Resource based consensus mechanisms (POW, POS) are not designed with sharding in mind.

What do you think of https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ then?

[ulhaq]

Some information on double-spend:

https://forum.iota.org/t/iota-double-spending-masterclass/1311

[s11made]

Let's leave price aside.

IOTA promises to have found the holy grail - infinite scalability with zero transaction fees.

If that is truly so, then screw just the IoT usage, such a system should replace every imaginable form of value transaction known to humanity.

Unfortunately that is a claim I have seen no evidence to support.  A transactional DAG still relies on a global state to ensure double spends can't happen, thus its still vertical in nature even though the architecture promotes horizontal scaling.
[...]

Would eliminating the global state be a step in the right direction ?
I came across another coin without fees(Raiblocks), that states having replaced "shared state" with "message passing" to be able to scale better.

Here some lines from the whitepaper :
RaiBlocks is designed to be a scalable and efficient distributed ledger platform.  The design makes several significant improvements over alternatives giving a simple system that can process transactions in seconds making it a useful in a digital world.
To get these performance improvements we apply a critical optimization borrowed from concurrent computing where we replace shared state with message passing. This eliminates shared state contention greatly improving global throughput and lowering transaction time.
...
The ledger is the global set of accounts and each account has its own chain.  Only one entity can add a transaction to an account’s chain, the account owner.  This means each chain is not a shared data structure eliminating all contention when adding transactions to the ledger.

The ANN is quite small : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381323.0

[Febo]

Let's leave price aside.

IOTA promises to have found the holy grail - infinite scalability with zero transaction fees.

If that is truly so, then screw just the IoT usage, such a system should replace every imaginable form of value transaction known to humanity.

Questions that arise from it are:
1. What is the mechanism behind such an ingenious discovery?
2. How come nobody came with the idea before (there must have been some bright minds within blockchain technology who understood the scalability and fee problem and never came up with solution)?
3. What prevents other coins from implementing such a revolutionary design?
4. Can other coins with established market caps and track records switch to such a design?
5. Who secures the network if there is no fee-incentive?

IOTA is your refrigerator talking to your lawn mower. What they will talk about I have no ideas. Maybe how wars influence oil prices or how fast lately Eggs gets bad.

[Fatoshi]

Iota is a crypto paradigm shift.

Are you guys aware that Xtrabytes does everything IOTA does and more and is 10m marketcap?

Plus it solves the 51% attack (no other coin does this) And didn't grab millions in an ICO. Its getting silly how unknown it is now.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Are you guys aware that Xtrabytes does everything IOTA does and more and is 10m marketcap?

Now we are aware, thank you.

[Fatoshi]

Are you guys aware that Xtrabytes does everything IOTA does and more and is 10m marketcap?

Now we are aware, thank you.

Great. You're a good guy. I did great on NXT. Good luck with IOTA. Not cheap though..

[Come-from-Beyond]

Not cheap though..

Ping me in 6 months when you change your mind, please.

[Waverider]

Not cheap though..

Ping me in 6 months when you change your mind, please.

You mean it will be more expensive than now?

[Come-from-Beyond]

You mean it will be more expensive than now?

There are 2 interpretations, I let everyone pick what they like.

[Xavofat]

Not cheap though..

Ping me in 6 months when you change your mind, please.

You mean it will be more expensive than now?

It probably will be, but it'll never be used on IoT devices.

It's common sense that small transaction fees like Byteball would make a million times more sense than having to do PoW on IoT devices.

Doing transactions on IoT devices would destroy the battery life.

[clardalan]

I do not even care to understand the technology.


Why?

They premined the whole thing, claiming it is worth 1,000,000,000 dollars.

Now they wait till there is enough orderbook developed for them to dump it on innocent bypassers.

So far, the daily volume is far from enough to absorb any dump. So they wait.

Really, if about 20? people control a billion, each gonna make 10-100million out of a decent dump; do you think they are "religious" enough not to get rich in one click?

This thing has no market dynamics that formed it. The price is fake, the technology is not there yet. Only reason it is not crashing is there is not enough market for it to crash yet.

TELL me who holds the IOTA, I tell you what happens next.

[Come-from-Beyond]

I do not even care to understand the technology.


Why?

They premined the whole thing, claiming it is worth 1,000,000,000 dollars.

Now they wait till there is enough orderbook developed for them to dump it on innocent bypassers.

So far, the daily volume is far from enough to absorb any dump. So they wait.

Really, if about 20? people control a billion, each gonna make 10-100million out of a decent dump; do you think they are "religious" enough not to get rich in one click?

This thing has no market dynamics that formed it. The price is fake, the technology is not there yet. Only reason it is not crashing is there is not enough market for it to crash yet.

TELL me who holds the IOTA, I tell you what happens next.

I'm pretty sure you'll make into the 2nd season of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD9fArwkhNY...

EDIT: Sorry, after rewatching the video I spotted you are already there

[Prodigan786]

Neither I understand iota strategy nor I understand the free transaction I just believe in iota because of huge market cap which is 1.6 billion that is the only thing i believe in iota

[Xavofat]

Neither I understand iota strategy nor I understand the free transaction I just believe in iota because of huge market cap which is 1.6 billion that is the only thing i believe in iota

Well, I can see that you've never heard of the dotcom bubble.

If you go by that logic, you'll be losing a lot of money in the years ahead...

[Fatoshi]

Neither I understand iota strategy nor I understand the free transaction I just believe in iota because of huge market cap which is 1.6 billion that is the only thing i believe in iota

Lololololololol funny thing is as silly as this sounds and no reference to IOTA this pretty much sums up at least 50% of investors thinking.

[lakimens]

So IOTA has a market cap of $1,055,215,318  on CoinMarketCap.
If the M stands for million that is $1,055,215,318 * 1000000 = 1 055.21532 trillion US$
That's a lot, Google didn't even want to write it in numbers.
I mean, it feels like there's only the way down from that point.

[Cubirez]

So IOTA has a market cap of $1,055,215,318  on CoinMarketCap.
If the M stands for million that is $1,055,215,318 * 1000000 = 1 055.21532 trillion US$
That's a lot, Google didn't even want to write it in numbers.
I mean, it feels like there's only the way down from that point.

Don't get confused between the global marketcap of the Iota ecosystem and the value of "one" iota token. Actually the later is "quite low", and 1 million IOTA tokens is worth about 0,38 USD. As you've got about 2 800 000 000 MIOTA in total, the total marketcap of all iota tokens is 0,38x 2 800 000 000 so roughly 1,05B Usd.

[SatoNatomato]

From the lack of answers in this thread, the answer is No.

Not even the main devs understand it, they are working on solutions for the mentioned obvious problems of PoW on IoT, or achieving global consensus and trustless DAG-coin.

Coordinator, so far they took a short-cut and they cant provide an answer when if ever it will be turned off.