Theymos has an opinion about IOTA:
~
For each one, I will assign a technical merit/innovation score. On the day of its release, Bitcoin would have had a score of 100, whereas a score of 0 would be a pure pump-and-dump built on stupid gimmicks and other nonsense -- I don't list these at all.
IOTA
The tangle design is interesting and potentially useful, though I have several serious concerns about how it will actually work long-term:
- In order to achieve lasting, stable scalability, something will need to be done to limit bandwidth. Otherwise you still have the problem that everyone needs to download everyone else's transactions in order to be a trustless node, and this simply doesn't scale no matter what else you do. How can you split the network so that one node can trustlessly ignore a lot of the network's total transactions, but transactions are still possible cross-split? Doing something like splitting the graph into a cycle of semi-separate segments might be possible, but it seems very difficult to do this and maintain security+convergence.
- With a chain, if miners become evil and rewrite the last 6 blocks or something, everyone is going to notice and be affected, and so a unified response (PoW change, etc.) will be fairly easy. But with a graph, maybe an attacker could just nibble at the edges in such a way that 99.99% of users are able to think "well, it's not really my problem". In fact, it may not even be easily provable that an attack happened at all.
- I am not convinced that a tangle is stable/convergent/secure in all circumstances. Even if it seems to work under all tests so far, it may well fall apart under a clever but not-too-difficult attack, or perhaps even just on its own. The whole idea that transaction volume is what adds security to the tangle makes me uneasy, since an attacker can always produce unlimited fake transactions, while the network will only produce a "natural" number of transactions unless additional measures are taken to generate good fake transactions.
Possibly due to the IOTA devs sharing similar concerns, IOTA's software currently relies on centralized checkpointing.
Score: 0.1
~
- Possibly some merit, not sure: ~ IOTA
Personally, the chance for IOTA to completely flip BItcoin is near zero. Not to mention there is some issue about IOTA centralization. IOTA might exist for some time in the cryptocurrencies markets space, but to even think about the flippening, its bizarre. Bitcoin might have some tight competition within the spaces, but I'm sure any sort of flippening things are too good to be true.
