IOTA: The $3.7 Billion Cryptocurrency Developers Love to Hate

[Cordillerabit]

The project IOTA is garnering quite a bit of attention for adding cryptocurrency-inspired technology to this use case, turning it into a more open market.

Indeed, at tech meetups in New York City, it's not uncommon to hear developers remark that IOTA's underpinning technology, the "blockchainless blockchain," or the so-called "tangle," is the future of the blockchain space.

"It's pretty horrifying. The horrifying thing is their market cap is so high," said Aviv Zohar, a crypto researcher and senior lecturer at The Hebrew University.

Since researchers have pointed out so many holes in IOTA already, he expects more to come, and the IOTA bashing to continue.

Zohar told CoinDesk:

"IOTA is a currency I love to hate."

During the Financial Crypto 2018 conference at the end of February, Ivancheglo's tweet was a major discussion point. While nerdy debates turning vicious is nothing new for the cryptocurrency space, security researchers argue that threatening lawsuits can severely undermine the industry.

As UCL computer science researcher Sarah Azouvi told CoinDesk:

"The founder suing researchers is very, very concerning. Researchers try to measure and try to make things more secure. It could have a serious impact if people are afraid to report bugs."

Co-founder Dominik Schiener acknowledged that the user experience is far from ideal, but argued that IOTA shouldn't get lambasted for it since the user experience throughout the crypto community is inferior as a whole. While Sønstebø argued that the project wants to leave randomness generation up to the user so they have more control.

"We leave it up to the individual to get their own randomness," he said, adding:

"We give them the liberty to do that. You're in crypto. The entire point is you don't have to trust anyone."

"Currently it's semi-centralized," he said. "There's a central coordinator node."

IOTA nodes today can validate transactions without this coordinator node, but it's less secure. As such, a significant amount of trust is put on the central coordinator node.

That said, IOTA developers are working on it.

Just as more bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies become more decentralized as adoption increases, so to will IOTA, Sonstebo said. And it's important to note that IOTA isn't the only cryptocurrency that has sought to project a message that change is coming, with time.

He concluded:

"You can't create a fully decentralized network overnight. You have to start somewhere."

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