They're claiming this, for what operation? And similar question for the 10% usage claim.
I suspect storage will be the same when you get done packing into machine words and storing those, yes? Unless they're not using all the bits in a word...
Any independent references for ternary efficiencies for any operation?
One of the reasons I wouldn't trust IOTA any farther than I could personally throw the entire development team is that writing a strong cryptocurrency requires a deep understanding of mathematics, and theirs is the sort of shallow I'd expect from a high schooler. They appear to be operating under the misapprehension that numbers come with their base built into them, as if they are operating in a mathematics regime where "10 != 0xa != 012(octal) != 1010(binary)", and anyone that confused about mathematics is not someone you want designing your CSS stylesheets ("no, that's rgb(255, 255, 255), you really want #fff. Or maybe #ffffff."), let alone your cryptocurrency.
For all these applications IOTA is not feasible. It is not feasible because the ternary logic needs to be emulated on a processor that itself has not even enough beef to do cryptographic functions by itself. If they have cryptographic support like the e.g. the SE series from STM with a Cortex M0 as used in the Ledger Nano S, then this is optimized for standard cryptographic algorithms and not for some newly invented stuff.
Also if we talk about IOT sensor networking with LPWAN (LoRa, SigFox, ...) than bandwith is a real issue. That means collecting transactions from others and doing PoW on that before sending of your own transaction is completely unrealistic. The remote sensor just wants to transmit its data. But that would mean the LPWAN Gateway needs to be a full node doing the PoW. But LPWAN works, that everybody can listen to transaction request and so we are back to the collisions problem.
8x efficiency _of_what_compared_to_what_?Totally forgot about it, and never put two and two together(three and three? :P) to link it to IOTA. Now that they are quite wealthy, I wonder if it will become a reality. I'm highly skeptical, but I really don't know enough to form a real opinion. Definitely one of those things that make you go 'huh?' though.