IOTA and the Internet of Things (IoT)
As noted, IOTA, founded in 2015 by David Senstebe, Sergey Ivcanchegio, Dominik Schiener and Dr. Serquei Popov, is designed as a secure payments and communications platform for machines that are part of the Internet of Things.
IOTA does not use the traditional blockchain technology of most coins such as bitcoin, ethereum and many others but a special type of directed acylic graph (DAG) technology called tangle.
The advantages of tangle versus the blockchain
Unlike transactions on blockchains, such as those involving bitcoin, tangle transactions are free regardless of size. Confirmation times are quite fast. The tangle system can handle an unlimited number of transactions simultaneously, unlike bitcoin.
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Iota also has the advantage of not needing any miners, as the authentication process just involves the users linked together in the tangle. This does away with the costs of paying miners in the iota coin for their work in solving mathematical problems to authenticate transactions. Everyone who initiates a transaction must verify two other random transactions.
Compared to a blockchain system, the more people who are using the tangle system, the faster it is. Also, unlike bItcoins, all Iota coins already exist, so mining the currency is not required. However, the supply of Iota coins is huge.
The number of Iota coins and units
There is a fixed supply of 2,779,530,283,277,761 Iota coins.
The smallest unit is the iota named after the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet or 1i. A Kiloiota or one Kiota. Ki, is equal to 1,000 i. A million i or 1 Miota is called a Megaiota 0r 1Mi. A billion is a Gigalota or one GIota, 1Gi. A trillion is a Teraota or 1 Tiota, 1Ti. Finally there is the Petaiota, or 1 Piota, 1Pi. The base unit for trading on excahanges is the Miota (Mi). The symbol on exchanges is MIOTA.
An example of how Iota might work
Consider an electric vehicle (EV) coming into a charging station. The method of payment would be using IOTA. Both the EV and the charging station would be able to understand the IOTA protocol used to facilitate the payment. The EV and the charging station are both items in the IoT and are able to use IOTA to communicate and make payments.
IOTA already has collaboration with Deutsche Telecom, Microsoft and Fujitsu. Obviously, big players in the technical area must see potentiality in the platform.
Present price of Iota
As I write this the present price of Iota (symbol MIOTA) is $4.05. This is down considerably from a high of over five dollars in December of 2017 but is a huge improvement over its price during November when it was just around 39 cents.
Iota is one of the top ten cryptocurrencies rated by market value. It is number ten with a market value of $11,297,289,654.
