I know that there are many sceptics here of cryptocurrency as an
investment, and rightfully so. There have been numerous ponzi schemes,
lots of hype and very little innovation. I could see many investors
asking themselves why is it bitcoin useful to society? Well I'm here to
tell you that you shouldn't invest in BTC because it is useless to
society, but there is a crypto that does have a use in society. BTC
creates more problems than it solves and it will eventually be replaced
by a new cryptocurrency that solves problems. The problems that BTC
creates are high transaction fees ($5 fee per transaction) insane energy
consumption for the transactions to confirm (BTC uses more electricity
than the nation of Switzerland) and long verification times for
transactions to confirm (60 mins) . Imagine paying for your $10 taco
bell order with BTC, you'd pay $15 for $10 worth of food, then you'd
have to pull over and wait roughly 60 minutes for enough block
confirmations to confirm that your transaction is valid and it would
cost a miner 980 KWH of electricity to confirm. There is nothing about
this business model that is long term sustainable and the more popular
that BTC gets the worse these conditions will become. Many in the BTC
community say BTC is more of a store of value, but a store of value
needs to have a usecase outside of making investors money. Gold can be
used for jewellery, real estate can be lived in. Bitcoin can do nothing
aside make people more fiat currency, and a look throughout history
shows that assets that don't have strong fundamentals always end up
going to zero. So in conclusion BTC is not a store of value, or a
currency as it fails on both accounts. BTC is probably the biggest
example of the greater fool theory in the history of mankind. Once a
superior crypto currency becomes known to the masses virtually all other
coins will become obsolete. I'm here to introduce you to IOTA and why I
think it has the potential to become something huge.
Iota is a DAG based cryptocurrency and data transfer protocol that
invented their own form of distributed ledger called the tangle invented
to be able to scale to thousands of transactions per second and have
feeless transactions. Iota is still in the process of optimizing their
code and adding functionality. If successful I could see Iota being the
#1 most valuable cryptocurrency, as there would be nothing that any
other coin could do that Iota couldn't do better. A major bottleneck on
Ethereum's NFT platform is the insane amount of fees to mint an NFT,
last time I checked it was around $200. With Iota's feeless transactions
there would be no reason for anyone to use ETH's NFT platform. Iota is
also in the process of developing their smart contract platform. Combine
Smart contracts with Iota's feeless transactions and again there is no
reason to pay the insanely high gas fees that we have grown used to on
the ETH blockchain. Of course NFT's and smart contracts are still in
beta and not yet released on Iota's mainnet if successful it would
render all smart contract platforms obsolete as they would be slower and
more expensive to use. This even includes ETH after the 2.0 update as
ETH would still have fees.
Another feature of Iota is that you can send micro transactions (less
than $0.01) or zero value transactions (Data only, $0.00) It is
currently impossible to send less than $0.01 with any cryptocurrency or
any payment method for that matter. The benefit of sending
microtransactions is it opens up whole new industries specifically the
IOT or internet of things. For the internet of things to be successful
small amounts of data and value need to be exchanged between machines.
This may not sound like a big industry but multiplied by billions of
devices sending hundreds of $0.001 transactions a day. It adds up to a
gigantic industry that is currently impossible to exist due to there not
being a payment method to exchange fractions of a cent. Zero value
transactions can come into place for crypto sceptics who do not want to
utilize cryptocurrency due to the uncertainty around taxes and
volatility. Iota allows them to exchange data in a p2p way without the
need for their token and without fees. The 4th industrial revolution
revolves around exchanging data, google 4th industrial revolution if you
don't believe me.
Iota has an incredible amount of partnerships and collaborations with
several multi billion dollar companies. Companies that have currently
announced they are building solutions with Iota's technology are Jaguar
land rover, Zebra technologies, Dell, Intel, STmicroelectronics,
Software AG, EDAG, the linux foundation and many others. Iota has also
received grants from the European union and the city of Austin TX to
build smart city infrastructure. On top of this there have been 375
Patents referencing iota from 160 different entities. Some of these
entities that have filed iota patents are Bank of America, Siemens AG,
Panasonic, HP, American Express, British Telecom, Fujitsu, First
American Financial Corp, Mastercard, Sony, Ford, T-mobile, Bosch,
Volkswagen, Adobe and many others.
The iota foundation has 150 Full time employees including Dr Richard
Soley on the supervisory board who is the CEO of the object management
group (OMG). The OMG is a standardization body that standardizes
emerging technologies. Richard Soley was responsible for standardizing
UML which is used by software engineers every day. The OMG is in the
process of standardizing iota and to my knowledge zero other
cryptocurrencies are in the process of being standardized. Iota is also
being standardized by IEEE who is the largest standardization body in
the world who standardized 802.11 wifi, if you check your wifi settings
you will notice a number that starts with 802.11 every single wifi
connected device uses IEEE standards. Standards are important because it
allows products from different companies to be interoperable with each
other. Imagine if 802.11 wasn't the wifi standard and your
computer/phone couldn't connect to your router because they were made by
competing companies and utilized a different way of accessing the
internet wirelessly. The benefit of standards is interoperability among
different manufacturers. When Iota successfully becomes a standard I
can't imagine any company building a DLT/blockchain solution on anything
other than Iota because their product would not be interoperable with
every other device and would thus be a commercial failure.
In conclusion Iota solves the problems that BTC ETH and every other
cryptocurrency has. Iota has feeless transactions, uses 0.000015 KWH of
electric per transaction and transactions fully confirm in 10 seconds or
less. The developers are also actively working on making these numbers
even lower as they continue to optimize the protocol. However Iota is
relatively unknown and not on many exchanges, once the word gets out
about Iota I think the price could go sky high as it has a solid use in
society going forward.
Thanks for reading Ill leave some links down below to check out, and as always do your own research.