Hi dear readers,

It has been long time for me to write down on a technical topic seriously.
Days ago, I found myself dealing with IOTA deeply then decided to share my know-how and experience through my blog for the interested people who would like to search IOTA on web and visit my pages.

There is also a funny coincidence that IOTA has been making its show on the stage for last a few days and I was recommending my friends to invest on IOTA coin when it jumped over 1 USD. I saw it was around 5.50 USD yesterday and awaiting it to increase more and more in the future (sure there will be waves).

Please see one of the funny reactions in Twitter :

See the show below as well. The mouse pointer was intensionally located where its value was lower than 1 USD – on just 27th of November.

The question is “What is IOTA ?” or “Why specifically I am writing on IOTA when there are more than 1300 types of cryptocurrencies (say altcoins) as of today ? ”

The reasons can be found through following IOTA home page but no worries I am here for you dear lazies. I have read and experienced most of it with extensions for you..

Let’s start with “Why IOTA differs from all others including Bitcoin ?”

Briefly – if you would not like to go deep technically – first thing you need to know is IOTA has a completely different infrastructure and background in comparison to Bitcoin as well as other altcoins. It is the cryptocurrency designed for Internet of Things (IOT) and relies on Machine to Machine (M2M) communication between connected devices. If you have not heard “Industry 4.0” yet, I strongly recommend you to search it on Google in order to understand the importance of IOT and why the IOTA can be the most important cryptocurrency in the future as it is dependent to those underlying technologies.

In mathematical point of view, IOTA is based on “the Tangle”  which is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for storing transactions and relies on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. You don’t need to understand mathematical background of the Tangle but you may would like to know that; when all other cryptocurrencies are being structured as a sequential chain where blocks are added in regular intervals, the Tangle is based on a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) and it is a technology with no “Blocks” and no “Chains”.. That’s the main reason why some are asking like “How we can say IOTA is a blockchain cryptocurrency ?” or commenting like “IOTA is blockchain v2”.

That said; IOTA offers “no transaction fees on transactions” when the technology underlying for other cryptocurrencies can not get rid off transaction fees which means it will always be dependent to normal/real currencies. So, IOTA also offers people the imagined world where there is no physical money. Moreover, the Tangle is expected to provide more secure and faster transactions as well as shorten the confirmation times and transaction finality. It is also more resistant to quantum computations which was thought to be the end of cryptocurrencies.

I can not stop myself to warn people who would like to invest on IOTA as well. Please notice that the IOTA is still under development and trying to come over the similar challenges and obstacles like Bitcoin achieved to survive in the past. There are some cases where I have seen that some people lost their IOTA coins in their wallets. So, even though I am trying to contribute to IOTA project on github as a volunteer, I still keep my IOTA coins in the exchange markets (I don’t know which is safer :))

Serkan