Iota Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Iota, the open-source cryptocurrency for IoT that does not use a blockchain. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
For beginners, I always fail to explain why IOTA is necessary for the Machine To Machine communication. What is special about it and what IOTA brings new on the table compare to existing technologies? I understand how it works and what is the difference with the blockchain but what is the purpose of IOTA?
To make it even more clear, what can the IOTA environment do that the existing technologies couldn't do?
I would appreciate a clear answer, it would help me to invest more in IOTA.
This appears as an opinion based question/answer, but the first few paragraphs describe many purposes for IOTA:
David Sønstebø (co-founder) noticed in the early days of blockchain technology many flaws that would leak discrepancies as technology evolved (particularly IoT, which will dominate all economies in the 2020's).
At the top of the IOTA website states the main purposes:
In addition, check out these questions from the community for David & Dominik.
Existing Blockchain technology significantly improves authenticity and integrity of data. The technology creates truly reliable and immutable records, making it easier and less expensive to transact with one another in a verifiable way. It provides an interoperable transaction layer where previously unknown parties can dynamically start exchanging value in an „easy and trustful way“. However, today’s blockchain technologies have clear limitations regarding scalability, computing resource requirements and transaction fees. This is among other aspects the reason why, despite the numerous IoT applications developed or currently under development, there is no way to perform micro-transactions (really small payments) without paying fees that in comparison to the value of the txs are huge. At the moment, neither the current infrastructures nor blockchain-based cryptocurrencies can satisfy those micro-transactions (especially not on a large scale as the transaction delay becomes consequent and thus unsuitable for most applications). In addition you can add the aspect of centralization to the down-sides, which can be observed in Bitcoin and its dependence to huge Mining farms. In IOTA each network participant (whether human or IoT device) is active in the consensus and the validation of transactions. When a device makes a tx and broadcasts the tx to the network, by protocol it has to validate two previous transactions. So it can function as a real peer-to-peer network by machines for machines (or humans,...). Next to the „killer feature“ of not having transaction fees, the architecture of the protocol has at least clear advantages in fields of scalability and energy consumption.
In the following years there will be huge development in Logistics, Transport systems (not just smart cars), Smart Home, Fintech etc. The challenge is not in developing smart devices or machines, but in communication level. Once we solve that, there will be a huge step forward.
