IOTA - The Transparency Compendium

David Sonstebo just places a new blog post about IOTA on the IOTA blog. In his post, he clarifies a few things about the technology behind IOTA and the current status. Also, he want to take away a few misunderstandings about IOTA.

IOTA basics (very basic)

The basic idea of IOTA is to take a different approach to blockchain. Bitcoin separates the Proof of Work from the users that make a payment (i.e, the sender makes a payment and the payment must subsequently be confirmed by a miner; they are separate groups). IOTA takes a different approach: the sender of a payment must also do some work on transactions made by previous senders of IOTA. Basically, a sender verifies older payments.

Wallet software

The software is still very much BETA, meaning that the team is moving towards a production ready version, but they are not quite there yet. I tested the Windows wallet myself and it is not really polished yet (both in terms of UI and ease of use). Many times, the UI simply freezes and after a few minutes, the wallet suddenly responds again. I note that I have not tested yet whether this is a general problem or a particular problem on my system.

The wallet is currently written in Java, but work on a C++ and Rust client has started. The IOTA roadmap shows the development planning.

Coordinator

Because IOTA is only in a very early stage, there is a so-called Coordinator whose function basically is to provide protection against network attacks in this very early stage. The Coordinator is supposed to be shut down at some moment when the users are sufficiently spread out. However, the devs ensure us that the network is decentralised right now already and that Coordinator could in principle be shut down already without the network suffering.

See the Coordinator as 'training wheels' that will be removed once the network has evolved.

Curl

I make this one short: Curl is essentially a new kind of hashing operation that is supposed to guard the network from hacks by quantum computers. The devs have taken this in to account because IOTA is for a large part aimed at the 'Internet of Things' (IoT); machines connected to the Internet as autonomous agents (think of your refrigerator that can provide stats online but also automatically order new food if needed). Since the IOTA protocol is to be included in hardware of various stuff (the Things in the IoT-definition), it needs to be ready for the developments in cryptography of the next 10-15 years.

Curl as new function has gone through some reviews but it has no history of extensive testing yet. Curl is continuously being auditing by more and more cryptographers and security experts, so its strength should be confirmed further and further over time. In the end, the devs would like to see implementation of Curl in CPU's so that IoT will provide hardware support for IOTA.

More information

The following video explains a few things about what the devs wish to achieve with IOTA:

Also, the primer on IOTA is a very nice and comprehensive (15min) read up on what IOTA is about.

Help me with testing

I would very much like to receive a few IOTA to test the wallet software and make a video of making payments over this network. You can help by sending a few IOTAs to the following address: IJWZZEYCLSNYXYUXQEXXJITVYXVSPHTQHCI9LBODJBDNGALAENA9WVQHLUYXEXZTUFMBCADTKWEPPVWGBZTEPRCPMS