Hi,
I am a real fan of IoTA and its tangle, But I cant think of any inherent cons the Tangle has the block chain. The notion scares me because that means that the block chain has no valid existence (which I don’t think is true!). To help IoTA grow I think it is important to talk about its weak points as well.
Pros:
no miners!!!
free transactions
truly distributed (no miners!)
enables micro transactions
scale-able transactions count increase -> transaction time decrease
Cons:
can you explain what are the main applications of IOTA?
How is power distributed in IOTA? with no miners, are there Hard Forks? The developers decide everything?
I am a early holder of IOTA … problem I have that there is still not a good wallet for IOTA … also transactions get stuck all the time … So a con would be highly experimental
There’s very little community support at the moment. Everyone is into XBT or LTC or XLM. There’s potential, but for IOTA to mature two things are essential: a stable “official” wallet and one “big” real world use case.
By saying stable I mean, I should not purchase 1G IOTA today and 10 days later when I check the wallet it shouldn’t be empty just because the developing team decided to upgrade the version (& with no clear notice whatsoever to the end users)!
And by saying real use case I mean something like: bitcoin is new storage of wealth, litecoin is best crypto currency for transactions, Monero for privacy, BCH for hedging against bitcoin etc. What is the “slogan” for IOTA that’ll make the whales pump more money into it?
I do not agree with: bitcoin is new storage of wealth, litecoin is best crypto currency for transactions
But I do agree that we need to hold these project to higher standards …
The PoW is done with IoT devices. So, the more devices participating, the faster everything will go.
@criptoanarquism Great point!
on top of what @robstah mentioned
I am not sure but i think since the Tangle can have conflicting consensus the issue is less problematic.
Since a merchant can decide that as long as 33% of the Tangle approve the transaction is enough.
Please keep me honest if what i said is wrong.
The issue you stated is one of a young crypto and not an inherent issue of the Tangle correct?
IOTA have two main applications (or at least the two IOTA pushes)
I’d say yes. But particularly in case of IOTA the curious case of missing coins plagues it’s reddit forums. I am not sure what stops them from giving more detailed instructions as part of the app installation instead of relying on forums.
I’m not saying this will spoil it’s value and, in fact, I’ve a feeling it’ll have an excellent 2018. But surely a better user experience will help boost positive word of mouth campaigns much faster.
I might be novice in this crypto world - but - as far as I know Tangle is not fully decentralized. IOTA developers are claiming that this will be fixed simply by network being stronger (more participants), but this is still something to be proven. Truth is that Tangle don’t use miners or delegates, so this type of partial centralization is avoided, but Tangle needs coordinators. At least for now.
I haven’t read their white paper to be able to say if Tangle leaves a track of immutable transaction. If not - this could be biggest disadvantage in some cases.
I would think the biggest problem IOTA has is in communication, but i see your point that the tangle looks simply superior to the blockchain in many aspects.
The main problem with Tangle in my opinion is that from what i know it has no way of supporting smart contracts and more complicated structures like Dapps, which in my opinion are the real ‘killer’ applications for blockchain technologies.
One of the main things to notice however is that blockchain applications have been tested a lot more at the current point, and you see some new third generation blockchain protocols - like Cardanos Ouroboros - coming out to deal with some issues in current blockchains, the main point to me is the interoperability aspect - they want to integrate different blockchains and even possibilitate an interface with the traditional financial system.
Another doubt i have concerns the state of the network, I haven’t found any information explaining how do you avoid consensus flaws if all nodes of the network have a different view of the state of the tangle from genesis due to transaction propagation(couldn’t find anywhere if this assumption is true also).
Nor have i been able to find an explanation to why iota is not susceptible to sybil attacks by <50% of the nodes.