IOTA- Truly Decentralized? - what is the "Coordinator"

Hi All,

Can anyone expand on what the “Coordinator” process is with the Curl P Hashing Function.

does this mean that the data is sent through a centralized body (IOTA) which enables its functionality?

Thanks.

They fixed that problem already it was part of the MIT discovery

From what i understand the coordinator is in place because of the size of the network, which is still relatively small to the expected size in the future (with billions of IOT devices). This small size breaks some assumptions that the network is designed upon and that could create some security issues. In this light the coordinator exists to simulate a more populated tangle, which does not suffer from this problems. As such the coordinator should be disabled when the network gets large enough, however since the coordinator code is not open source, it’s impossible to be sure that this is all it does.

Because the network does not have paid miners, the network is dependent of users to confirm transactions. Because the network does not have that many users they are simulating users with the coordinators. David Sonstebo says that the code is being opensourced soon.