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.
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. 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
