by Hodler Ash 
What is IOTA?
IOTA is a kind of distributed ledger which is designated to maintain, facilitate, create and write down details of a transaction between machines and devices. It is co-founded by David Sonstebo, Sergey Ivancheglo, Sergei Popov, Domnic Schiener on December 21, 2015, which is intended to enable data exchange between sensor-equipped machines that populate the internet of things.
Its core idea was developed from Jinn for use in the IoT ecosystem. It sold 100,000 tokens on a crowd sale which were worth $250,000 in a crowd sale in September 2014 in order to create an energy-efficient low-cost system of the ledger. They were later improved to be profit-sharing tokens which later changed its name to IOTA which were utility coins. The idea for this creation wad to create a cryptocurrency that did not depend on mining.
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How it is different from other cryptocurrencies?
Apart from other cryptocurrencies that use blockchain designs, IOTA uses a new platform known as TANGLE. Instead of the traditional binary methods used by other cryptocurrencies, IOTA is written in ternary. It uses the mathematical concept of Direct Acyclic Graphs (DAG). It means that it’s graph id cyclic which means that it is only directed in one direction and is not circular.
The graph itself is the ledger of all transactions. Each node in a DAG tangle has the power to approve each transaction. For a transaction to be valid each not must approve the previous two transactions. As claimed by the IOTA there are no fees charged per transaction. To easily put it, some teachers take the whole pressure to mark each and every student’s sheets. But some smart teachers ask each student to mark the neighboring student’s mark to ease up the job. IOTA is equivalent to the latter method. It is the method of removing the miners of state consensus out of the way.
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It aims to be the standard mode of the transaction by removing the miners from them the network without sabotaging decentralization. The use of IOTA is completely free without the need for full node miners and the users are made to authenticate the previous two random transactions. IOTA can be accessed by any medium including a small scale. This allows the optimum use of micro-transactions. Microtransactions were a major problem for previous cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin as miners are required for each microtransaction. The centralization by the specialized through blockchains removes the autonomy and freedom of users. Most cryptocurrencies use Transactions Per Second or TPS. No one has the time or patience to wait for the transactions to be completed. Thus IOTAs user authentication helps speed up the transactions i.e the more users there are the faster the transactions will be alleviating the issues of blockchain.
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IOTA aims to create a machine for the machine economy. Tangle has no soft/ hard fork capabilities. It has distributed consensus and has something similar to hash cash for proof of work. It has features such as offline capability and quantum scalability.
Critically IOTA has certain flaws that make it imperfect. The system is unproven and IOTA’s hash function known as Curl had been subjected to many digital attacks. Hackers only needed 33% of total hashing power to gain control over the network apart from Bitcoin which needed 51% to tamper the blockchain. Although IOTA uses a central server known as Coordinator in order to undergo transactions to secure its network which has resulted in dilution of its decentralized system which leads to criticism.
An all-time high of IOTA
IOTA had an all-time high of $5.3763 in 19th December 2017.
IOTA Price Prediction 2022
IOTA has been developing ‘snapshotting’ in order to maintain a small storage size and even smaller ledger database. IOTA is expected to grow at a huge pace so its price may reach up to $4.8 till 2022.
