There was a time in 2017 when all you needed for a successful ICO was a flashy landing page with countdown timers and a 5-page "whitepaper" of gibberish set in Computer Modern. Maybe those days are back, with altcoins riding the hype wave again.
But my interest was initially piqued by IOTA back in 2017. It quickly died when I realized that it didn't prevent double-spends and, critically - at least at the time - it was completely non-functional!
The fact that it was down for 11 days only a few months ago and that it's still somehow worth $3Bn is amusing.
What's really interesting is... From my limited knowledge, Zcash and Monero DO actually work and have use cases being anonymous. Yet they have roughly the same "market cap" as IOTA.
For perhaps the most egregious example of this, look at the "Cardano" project. It does nothing, without any apparent plans to even change that. Even their hello world example doesn't run. And yet it is the #4 ranked cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $44 BILLION dollars.
All of it appears to have stemmed from their founders doing these creepy aspirational youtube live streams. If you're still investing in cryptocurrencies at this point, seriously look at that project and tell me that this space is reasonable. This is the 4th most popular project behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether (an obvious fraud).
https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...
That said, I don't believe that there's an actual demand or need for smart contract platforms, or that it makes sense to build new currencies that are tied into these platforms.
Also, proof-of-stake is not very secure, and Cardano has admitted this by supporting Ergo, which is a new smart contract protocol based on proof-of-work. However, PoW needs a lot of hashing power to be secure, so Bitcoin with secondary smart contract layers such as Rootstock and RGB are actually the best option (if there's a need for them).
I'm no Cardano shill and would never buy at the current prices, but if I believed they had what it takes (which is more than just sound tech) to siphon off much of the Ethereum crowd and bring in more nation-state level projects in the coming years then the valuation isn't that crazy.
Again, I don't have such lofty assumptions and will be waiting for smart contracts before I consider investing, but to say it does nothing is patently false- and if my time horizon were in the multiples of years then I'd probably consider inclusion in the large pool I'd spread my play-money across.
Is it worth $44B right now? Obviously not, but investment is a bet on the future, not current performance- and I've been wrong a lot.
[0] https://iohk.io/en/research/library/
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/from-paper-to-cardano-blockchain-io...
2) Pick 100 'influencers' and give them each 0.5% of the initial batch of coins
4) Profit
payola is a helluva drug
It is a combination of a Markov chain that stores the transitions between nodes. The problem with this is how can it be consistent at all if it is storing a public distributed ledger (another poster said that it allows for double spends).
sounds like a great way to go from a tangle to a rektangle
I think being friendly to programmers is a pretty good way to actually get things flowing with blockchains. You mess that up from the get go and it's just no fun for anyone
Now, there are ways to build graph-like data structures that do prevent double-spends correctly. I believe both Hedera and Nano (formerly called RaiBlocks) have working solutions, for example.
The key is that not just anybody can create a block (or a graph node), as IOTA does. If anybody can create a node at any time, what prevents them from sending out contradicting messages? Instead, working solutions always involve putting some sort of asset at risk (such as currency or energy), so that if the block producer decides to make a contradicting statement, they pay a steep price. This ensures that there is a financial incentive to always work towards consensus.
But in the last year or so the project has made a lot of interesting developments, redesigned the protocol to remove the 'exotic' design decisions, parted ways with some of the controversial founders and developed into a more mature research project. To solve the issue of double spends, they developed a consensus protocol called Fast Probabilistic Consensus, a leaderless voting protocol, that draws on the "voter models" introduced in the 70s by Holley and Liggett and Clifford and Sudbury. The research has been published and peer reviewed, and is implemented in a test-net which is open source and currently running without a central coordinator.
The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10895
and the testnet codebase is here https://github.com/iotaledger/goshimmer
And without going too far down the rabbit hole, it seems in the more recent versions of the decentralized test net, the FPC works alongside a kind of consensus which might be described as "Nakamoto Consensus on the DAG" where writing ledger updates is the same as voting on conflicting transactions, so that the behavior of updating the ledger also communicates node opinions on a given conflict set without additional message overhead.
I can understand why there is a lot of distrust of this project - there were many bad decisions in the past, and bad communication on top. But, in my personal opinion, if you dig a bit deeper into the research they are doing there is some very interesting stuff going on.
