Q:Will you announce anything at CES?
A: We initially had intended for a bigger unveil (one of our partnerships), but that was postponed for a later point. We have a lot of meetings setup for CES though.
Q:Will Trinity Wallet be ready this month?
A: Public Beta: definitely. Release depends on security audit.
Q:IOTA Foundation has made some excellent appointments recently and has stated ambitious plans to recruit further in 2018. Can you please elaborate on where the Foundation is now really looking to add further depth through recruitment, and perhaps even state some of the specific roles you're looking to fill? Thanks
A: The Foundation is focused on both practical implementation of DLTs and theoretical exploration. Given this we are hiring from both sides, for example see yesterday's blog posts about Clara and Koen.
Main focuses are stability of the Mainnet and also the security of the protocol. However, we have a wide range of work being done behind the scenes.
We are looking at putting up listings for specific roles, no date on that though.
Q:What are the top priorities over the next 3-6 months?
A: 1. Build up the IOTA Foundation as a globally operating organization, with key people and organizations from all industries being represented in the Foundation.
2. Achieve the reliability of the software and the network (1000CTPS)
3. Form more strategic partnerships
4. Foster our permissionless ecosystem, and enable more and more people to build stuff with IOTA (especially do startups!)
5. Lots and lots of use cases.
Q:To me it looks like the biggest issue that will limit scalability in the future will be how many transactions nodes can handle. What are the plans to reduce dependancy on individual nodes?
A: Economic Clustering.
Q:Can you guys explain what you are working on with banks ? Oliver Bussmann mentioned some discussions with Central banks during a Meetup. Would be interesting to understand how you perceive IOTA in the financial sector.
A: We are in touch with a few central banks and entities in the state sector which are interested in exploring how Distributed Ledgers can be integrated into the preexisting infrastructure and push forth a digital paradigmshift. We are not at liberty to disclose which or at what stage these dialogs are yet.
Followup
Q:But would that have any impact on Iota? (other then countries using the protocol for their own currencies and legitimizing the technology ofc)
Followup A: The IOTA Foundation is not a consultancy, so our dialogs surround utilizing the live IOTA network yes. Of course, for all sorts of reasons a central bank issued DLT need some unique properties, so there's still a lot of open questions.
A2: Banks play a crucial role in the IOTA Ecosystem, especially in the short and mid term. For one, banks are there to provide liquidity, and act as an entry and exit point between the current legacy system (i.e. Fiat currencies), and IOTA.
In 2018 we will be working more closely with Banks, not just industrial companies. Mostly on new use cases (think PSD2, and how IOTA can enable new business models there), but also specifically on products that we can develop together with them. Central banks are obviously the most strategic partners that we at the IOTA Foundation could think of :)
A3: Banks and central banks are playing are critical role in all existing and new ecosystems. In all use cases, the payment process has to move from a fiat currency to a digital currency in a realtime connected world. The huge volume, scale and low cost requirements are an excellent match with the IOTA technology
Q:@/u/obussmann , what did you initially like the most about IOTA when you first heard about it?
A: The value proposition around the IOTA tangle is fantastic especially in industries with huge transaction volumes like the Financial Services Industry. Scale, transaction cost and performance are the biggest bottlenecks of the other ledger protocols. In addition, the IOTA team and communication is great and very special.
Q:Where is the coordinator located? Is it just a simple server sitting under a desk or something different?
A: In my beard.
Naturally the details pertaining to the Coordinator is extremely sensitive for security reasons. What I can say is that we are going to open source it and that the next step of the Coordinator is further distribution, until the network is self-reliant and will be phased out entirely.
Q:What is the most advanced use case for IOTA that you can think of?
A: My opinion, the data marketplace. The possibilities there are so revolutionary. From distributed AI, smart cities, ownership of data and privacy rights, it is hard to truly fathom the impact this would have if implemented at scale.
Q:1. When will the Marketplace open for the public and how will I be able to participate? How is the current testing of the Marketplace going?
2. What will be the first real life use-case for Iota? And when can we expect the first?
3. When and how will you decentralize the COO? You said something about a distributed COO first, how will this work and how far away are we from this?
4. What steps are necessary to speed up the tangle and to make transactions nearly instant?
5. When can we expect dedicated IoT-hardware which interacts with the tangle?
6. Will there be an updated Roadmap soon? (Like soon soon)
A: 1.In January, we're currently testing this more thoroughly.
2. Because you asked first (I assume you think in the industry), I think it will be supply chain tracking through IOTA.
3. We'll post an updated roadmap + explanation of the Coordinator soon (FYI, the code has already been open sourced). 2018 will be the year where we're working on IOTA Tangle reliablity, and start to gradually remove the coordinator. We're starting to do some exciting research with some renown professors for that.
4. Improve the software, and ensure that people reliably run their nodes.
5. Q1 2018.
6. Soonish.
Q:Could you explain what makes IOTA superior to a Raiblocks etc?
A: I reviewed Raiblocks white paper. They had some interesting ideas. My one concern was this idea of voting to settle conflicts. I saw someone else on Reddit make a post which brought up the exact same concern I had come to. Quoting from their paper:
"Even when a fork or missing block occurs, only the accounts referenced in the transaction are affected; the rest of the network proceeds with processing transactions for all other accounts."
If that is the case ... why do the other nodes care to sort out these inconsistencies? It is important to think about incentives in these protocols. Note, I have not asked this question to them, and they may have an answer. That was just my hot take on it.
Q:1. current status of network (how many nodes)
2. plan for coordinator to be remove? Eta?
3. eta of the trinity wallet
4. status on the reclaim
A: 1. Network is fairly healthy, with stable confirmations. The number of nodes is unknown (or lets say hard to determine), but it's in the thousands.
2. The coordinator will not be suddenly shut off, it will be gradually removed. We'll post an updated timeline as well as an overall explanation of the coordinator, hopefully in January. We are however starting to do some very exciting research in this area already, that will benefit the entire crypto space :) More to follow soon.
3. Public Beta in January. Release depends on security audit.
4. ~1100 out of 1600 claims are processed. The rest will be processed by the 10th (as promised)
Q:Aside from automated vehicles, where do you see the next biggest application for IOTA?
A: Personally I think supply chains and logistics are major applications for IOTA technology.
There are some interesting projects looking to use IOTA tech to assist in these fields.
Q:From a business perspective, which industries in particular (aside from IoT) are you hoping to enter (e.g. health, banking, etc.) and how do you envision Iota helping them (i.e. which problems will Iota solve)?
A: IOTA will enter different industries: Mobility, Energy, eHealth, Banking, Transportation & Logistics etc. Whenever it comes to transactions in form of data or values, data verification, authentification, IOTA is the enabler for m2m to user communication and transaction. For example: ehealth: verification and proof of data which comes from medical devices. IOTA makes sure that the life-dependent data is the correct data and could be automatically transferred between medical devices without the possibility of human mistakes. Another expample is mobility: IOTA enables payment between cars, charging stations, parking lots etc. without any human interaction, thus accelerating the things currently done.
Q:Does an individual/organisation using the tangle technology have to use MIOTA, or can it use a coin that they create?
If an organisation can use their own coin on the tangle, what is the advantage of using MIOTA over other coins?
A: IOTA is an open-source, distributed, decentralized and permissionless protocol - people are free to, and undoubtedly will, build whatever they want on the tangle. This may include these 'utility tokens' we see running on Ethereum. This has been a great way for new ideas to raise capital quickly and easily (as this ICO craze has demonstrated), but it remains unclear to me what benefit to users these tokens have as opposed to just paying for a service with money.
The reason the native IOTA token would typically make more sense in my mind is that one of the biggest things that makes a currency a currency is its network effect. IOTA's native token will undoubtedly have this, whereas other tokens built on top of the tangle will not. And if other tokens on-top of the tangle are simply a 'utility token' which can buy x,y,z, product. Why would I want this and not simply IOTA? It would be like paying for a hamburger in Apple shares. Ya they have value, and ya they are liquid, but I'd prefer cash (or IOTA, hehe)
Q:Is there any explanation of what swarm nodes are and how they are going to work?
A: A swarm node is a device with software/hardware implementing a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence algorithm aiming for allowing several swarm nodes behave as a full node.
Q:As former CIO of SAP are you in contact with them to somehow integrate IOTA in SAP Leonardo?
A: Not at this moment but I see the excellent potential.
Q:In times were lots of Shitcoins gain huge volume by just using marketing strategies - Did you guys think about changing your marketing strategy and make people aware if the huge potencial of Iota by posting more polarizing stuff?
A: Quite frankly, our top priority is to not dictate our strategy exclusively by the price of IOTA, in fact, our strategy is it to decouple ourselves from this whole market craze as soon as possible, and establish IOTA as the first legitimate project with use cases that add concrete value to society.
Remember when we were speaking about Blockchain helping the developing world by solving crucial issues related to trust, corruption and financial access? Very few do. The focus is now on where the quickest gains are to be made, and quite frankly, most of the people at IOTA are disgusted by this, as it will achieve nothing but make those early adopters rich (I mean the Ripple Founder being one of the richest individuals in the world, to me is one of the most ridiculous things ever).
So to quickly answer your question: no. We do our own thing. Let the crypto-currency market do theirs.
Q:how do you imagine IOTA in 2025 and beyond ? Do you believe IoT could explode during this timeframe ? I hope to see a better and greener world.
A: A good mental exercise for this question is to begin by thinking 10 years back in time: no smartphones (if count iPhone as the first), no tablets, no wearables, no drones, no electrical vehicles, no snapchat, instagram, no cheap 65" OLED TVs in all homes etc. etc. etc. As you contemplate this you realize just how fast radical changes take place, and usually, it accelerates because the different new technological innovations and scientific discoveries synergize, so for every year progress takes place even faster.
We already see IoT sprout all around us and by 2025 we will indeed be completely immersed in sensors, actuators and AI that automate virtually everything.
My vision and goal are that we will have open data that allows us to optimize EVERYTHING: medicine, traffic, the electric grid, shopping, climate treatment etc. etc. Through nano-transactions I want the concept of ownership to perish. Your car, bike, tools, appliances etc. are idle over 95% of its lifetime, this is a huge waste on your wallet, but also society in general. As we start paying for the exact quantities of something, instead of owning it, Society today is permeated with products that are borderline planned obsolescence becomes obsolete. The entire manufacturing and sales realm will change drastically.
Imagine paying per second you use something. No more subscriptions, no more pay upfront, no more pay after. This will optimize our economy, make scamming almost impossible etc.
Q:Are there any project or use cases related to robotics being developed?
A: Yes! There are several use cases. For one, we can provide robots a secure audit trail, so we know what happened at each point in time (very interesting for insurance and liability management). Other than that, if you've seen some of our Machine Economy presentations: ownership is outdated, and robots (factory or service robots) in the future will be able to be rented on demand, so you pay per resource unit.
These are the use cases we're exploring right now (mostly Industry 4.0). It starts getting really exciting when we start talking about M2M.
Q:Does the foundation have any funds specifically allocated toward grants for visual artists interested in the Tangle and IoT? If not, is that a possibility in the future?
A: Yes! For our program, basically anything goes. We want to support the ecosystem, which obviously consists of not just developers.
Q:could you tell us more about CognIOTA and what is your vision here?
A: CognIOTA is currently being developed by a great group of IOTA community machine learning experts. The vision I have for CognIOTA is to utilize all the potential idle Machine Learning that the countless millions of GPUs in computers that are not in use have. I do not want Amazon, Google or other conglomerates to have a monopoly on Machine Learning.
However, there is also a bigger strategy here. There's a lot of miningfarms today that have invested major money into mining pointless blocks, they are naturally very opposed to IOTA because it renders their business model useless in the long term. A lot of these miningfarms consist of GPUs, with CognIOTA we can give them an 'out' by simply earning iotas for providing a genuine service to the world, rather than waste energy as is the case today solving cryptopuzzles.
Q:Will there ever be a possibility to have a generic receive address in IOTA which can't be compromises.
A: Yes.
Q:A philosophical question that falls under "community and beyond":
I think the tangle and IOTA should have a lot of "enemies" when one realizes the potential behind it and what it could mean for all our future. It may replace currencies, federal banks, political systems and that is in itself an extreme revolution and a real thread to the current ideology. I think this is an interesting issue that should be addressed in the future.
So, as for my question goes, I would like to know what the foundation thinks about the implications and how it might change the system we live in?
A: I think it's easy to get caught up in revolution, fighting against the 'system', and enemy making. But collectively it's 'us' who made the system we live in, and must take personal responsibility for its future.
I would imagine that in order for old and obviated systems to fade, we need to have something in place that allows them to participate as an equal instead of as the mountain. Whether that be central banks or political systems or what-have-you, I would hope that those dependent on the old systems don't suddenly find themselves without a place to go, or without a stake in a new paradigm. In any case, I'm a firm believer in advancing technology that maximizes personal power to the individual.
Q:When will feature like Address Alias come out? Right now, it is impossible or very inconvenient to use IOTA for accepting donation because people will not be able to send to the address after I have taken some IOTA out of that address and that means I have to go out and change address every time I make an outgoing transaction.
A: There is a team (external) looking at creating these. They will most likely utilising MAM streams to keep people up to date with addresses.
I'm unsure of the timeframe but its in the works
Q:1.) How do you combat volatility? Machines pay themselves in IOTA, but the machine owners probably care about the value in fiat. Otherwise, how to set prices?
2.) With the Coo becoming open source, what hinders big companies to form an IOTA Enterprise Alliance (IEA) and create their own tangle network? Such an IEA would have immediate legitimacy and a probably better distribution.
If something such as an IEA would form, how would you react?
3.) Is there an updated roadmap on the way? Something like this https://blog.iota.org/iota-development-roadmap-74741f37ed01
4.) I worry about the planned privacy features. It's a necessary feature for IOTA to become a global payment system, so far so good. However, let's pretend I'm a government and I want to fight tax evasion and terrorist financing. Any privacy features would be my number 1 reason to ban a crypto.
A: 1.) The whole market, not just IOTA, needs liquid exchanges where major capital can quickly move in and out of digital assets, new financial products to manage exposure, etc. These things are just a matter of time (see Bitcoin futures).
2.) The answer is nothing prevents them. I can think a bunch of reasons why they wouldn't, first and foremost of which that they would immediate have better distribution. But more importantly, IOTA is great because it gets better, more valuable, more secure, etc. the more it is used. Making a new competing tangle would hurt their long-term interests.
3.) Yes.
4.) Tax evasion and terrorist financing in this new digital currency arena are complicated issues with no easy answers. IMO, governments will have to move more to consumption based taxes. As a government, its hard for me to prove whether you earned or have X in digital currencies, but I can certainly prove that you bought a lambo.
Q:5.) UBS gave in its Cryptocurrencies Report - October 2017 https://www.ubs.com/content/dam/WealthManagementAmericas/cio-impact/cryptocurrencies.pdf on page 3 a good explanation why cryptos probably never become mainstream.
They argue, that the single most important payment in every system, taxes, are always meant to be paid in the local fiat currency. I think this makes sense.
Ok, so we have those machines which transact with each other in IOTA. Obviously, they have to pay taxes. How will this happen? Convert back to fiat, pay the exchange fees and then pay taxes?
6.) Smart Contracts: As the World State of the Tangle with its Subtangles, in contrast to Blockchains, will be quite fragmented, how will IOTA Smart Contracts differ from other solutions such as the EVM?
Without a common World State, it's hard to imagine DApps or anything similar.
A: 5.) Yes, initially they will have to convert back to fiat. See 1.
6.) Smart contracts will differ for many reasons, but the most obvious one is that they will actually be scalable. DApps, may have to be more local (think about like an uber service, 'i am here, I want to go here', don't need anything but local information).
Q:From a business perspective, which industries in particular are you hoping to enter (e.g. health, banking, etc.) and how do you envision Iota helping them (i.e. which problems will Iota solve)?
A: The financial services industry will be embedded in new ecosystems like mobility, smart home, B2B etcs. The ledger and IoT technology will enable the set up of new ecosystems and the integration of services across old lines of industries. Therefore a technology like IOTA enabling scale, performance and very low transaction fees will be a game changer for these industries.
Q:From time to time you add new members to IOTA Foundation. What type of people (or people with specific background) you are willing to add in the future?
A: We add the people that we know will bring value to the IOTA Foundation. We are looking to hire ~100 more people in 2018, most will, of course, be developers, cryptographers, mathematicians, economists etc. However, also executive assistants, content creators etc.
Q:Did Bosch by the tokens OTC or from an exchange? Did any other companies buy Iota tokens you cannot make public yet?
A: RBVC bought directly from the Foundation. There are other companies that express interest yes, but I can't give any details. In principle the IOTA Foundation is reluctant to part with its iotas except for securing runway.
Q:Can you describe a use case for interoperability please. Something that I can describe to help others understand.
A: Think about the supply chain. It's vast and hugely complex, with many different stakeholders having to interact with each other. When it comes to IOTA in the supply chain, the obvious use case is supply chain tracking (all the relevant data of a transported good gets stored, encrypted and can then be shared with relevant stakeholders).
But supply chain is obviously not just about the tracking of goods. Trade finance is huge, and this is where the interoperability with other chains comes into place. Hyperledger is a perfect example here, as they have done a lot of work on trade finance on the Blockchain.
This interoperability with IOTA, would now enable a Hyperledger instance to read data about the goods current state (as well as historic) and then from that data make automated decisions (i.e. smart contract).
Simplest example: If the bill of lading is issued, and the entire chain of custody of the good has been validated, the letter of credit payment is automatically transferred to the exporter.
But there is tons more. In 2018 the first interoperability use cases will be going live :)
Q:What will the migration to Network-Bound POW entail (i.e. ELI5!) and will it eliminate the current POW delay?
A: For Network-bound PoW we need to run devices with radio-modules (Wi-Fi or Li-Fi) broadcasting IOTA transactions. The PoW delay will be in millisecond range then.
Q:Have you heard of Google's smart city project "Quayside"? Do you think they develop their own M2M payment system or could they possibly use IOTA?
A: Possibly use IOTA: for sure. We are however, not in contact with Google right now (not sure if they even care about Distributed Ledgers).
Q:Sometimes sarcastic/trolling comments are made on Slack about upcoming announcements which are taken seriously. There is now a huge level of expectation for the future which you must be aware of.
Are you confident IOTA can meet these expectations? I.e. it will disrupt the traditional banking system etc etc?
A: Yes. And no, we will not disrupt the traditional banking system. We are creating an entirely new market.
Q:What do you think about Roman Semko and all the good stuff he's developing for IOTA to succeed? Nelson, Bolero, Carriota etc... Have you ever been in contact with him? Have you planned some sort of partnership with him?
A: I love Roman Semko's community contributions. It is guys like him that make open source projects possible. You can't only rely on the IOTA Foundation for IOTA's success, there has to be natural grassroots growth.
We have talked with him casually, yeah. As for partnership, not something we have discussed, however he is very much free to apply for Ecosystem Fund grant.
Q:What is the most advanced use case for IOTA that you can think of?
A: It's hard to pick one, but securing machine learning inferences and distributing them is certainly an insanely powerful and important one.
I also agree with John who has already replied, the free flow of data which is secured and incentivized by the IOTA protocol is insanely powerful.
Q:Do you plan any partnerships/meetings with the /r/Oyster Pearl Team?
A: No, but we're generally very open.
Q:Do you think IoT Chain or StreamR are serious competitors of Iota?
A: No, they could work with IOTA.
Q:About the Ecosystem Fund announced on May - has any idea/project received funding? And will the unlucky ones receive a refusal message?
A: Dozens, including the Android wallet (current), as well as the new Trinity wallet. Now with the new Leadership (thanks to John) we expect a lot more to follow, with regular updates!
The only hiccup right now is legal, which we are resolving ASAP.
Q:1. Lior Yaffe said in a blog post that without the coordinator, full nodes will not be able to do snapshots (prune the tangle) because there won’t be a stable state which nodes can see. So far, I have not found any rebuttal. Can you please clarify this? https://twitter.com/lioryaffe/status/932996945454555138
2. I always find bandwidth the biggest hurdle when I'm thinking about how IOTA can process millions of transactions per second in 10-15 years time. How exactly you imagined infinite scalability? There are seem to be many potencial solutions to the bandwidth problem ie.: swarm nodes, swarm intelligence, clusters, sharding, gossip protocol, 5G, unlimited bandwidth etc. It would be good to write a blog post about it.
3. Why do you think that Pear project and any kind of tokens that appears in its layer will not devalue IOTA tokens?
A: 1. I'm sorry I haven't read his post, but I'm not sure what his argument is. If I have a solid sub-tangle in my memory (the green part from that image circulating somewhere) .. I can just snapshot the state there, delete everything else, go get coffee, and come back and ask someone to update me on what happened. Eventually their history will converge into my history and I know its all good and can carry on. But maybe I'm not understanding his point.
2. Bandwidth is the ultimate bottleneck for sure. Can't do anything about the speed of light. But theoretical limits on LiFi I think are in terabytes per microsecond order of magnitude range (read: a shit load of transactions).
3. I've explained this elsewhere.
Q:4. Can transaction's fix difficulty cause any inconvenience in tangle's security or transaction generation speed, when the Curl hasher is up and running, but there will be also regular CPUs that can not generate transactions as fast as Curl hashers can? Because if transaction's fix difficulty will not be increased, a malicious attacker might be able to attack the Tangle (if he has enough malicious nodes also) with a bunch of Curl hasher.
5. When IOTA will have smart contracts, where these contracts will be stored? Maybe on another layer?
6. Can a malicious attacker with many GPU spam the network so much that full nodes with weak bandwidth connection to the internet can not synchronise with the network and these weak nodes will drop off? If I am correct, a full node with a 10 Mbps download speed can only download 800 TPS, because: (10Mbps/8= 1,25 MB/sec=1280 KB/sec. 1 transaction (not a bundle) is currently 1,6 KB. 1280KB/1,6KB=800 transaction/sec.)
A: 4. Security will eventually be dependent on things not related to PoW in the way it is today (or way it is explained in the whitepaper, where 'omnipresence' is an implicit assumption meaning everyone has view of whole network). In future it will be based on Bandwidth saturation.
5. I don't think i'm allowed to answer this one? lol David?
6. Yes probably in today's set up. In the future there will be other reasons this will be hard (but maybe not impossible).
Q:Would it be possible to create a digital ID (passport, etc.) that could be secured in the distributed ledger?
A: Quite frankly,in my opinion, a digital identity protocol should be standalone, with a distributed ledger only playing a small, but important part (storing attestations and identity hashes, making them immutable).
Q: 1) What is the future of IOTA in South Asia , any specific plans for India in particular atm?
2) On the same line, what can we expect from IOTA for developing nations, where machine to machine economy will take some time ?
A: 1) We got quite a lot going in this region that will be announced as they are official. the ASEAN region is of great importance in general.
2) Developing nations will probably adopt M2M and IoT in a grander scale and more rapidly than the developed world. Developing nations have the benefit of being able to just leap frog all the slow iterative processes we have gone through to reach a certain technological maturity. Example: Nairobi in Kenya got a way, way better internet infrastructure than Berlin.
Q:Hi David, why was the IOTA Foundation established in Germany and not Norway?
A: The main reason is strategical. Norway is a great country for idealistic non-Profits and is one of the most digital countries in the world, far ahead of Germany. However, Germany is still the center of Europe, and in many ways the international center of industry, it bears a lot of gravitas that make it easier for us to gain traction fast.
Norway will forever remain it's HQ in the Nordics though ;)
Q:Thanks for the AMA. In my company, we explore various blockchain & DLT solutions for our business. IOTA seems to be one of the best choices in the future, but current Tx/s is a problem. Do you think the Tangle will process thousands of Tx/s in the beta version in the medium/long term?
A: For a device to process thousands of tx/s there are hardware requirements. IoT devices need to be installed with specialized ASICs. David explains this really well on the Ether Review podcast he did.
Q:What is the future of IOTA in South Asia , any specific plans for India in particular atm?
A: I'll (Lewis Freiberg - Ecosystem lead) be manning the Singapore office in the next month or so. Will be looking to establish a greater presence in the area. I think there is amazing room for growth for DLT technologies to provide infra in the region.
Q: Hi team. How do you validate information coming into the tangle to avoid garbage in garbage out?
I.e. could I theoretically hack an iota device (or if a device was faulty) to output the wrong message to the tangle?
A: You could use sampling methods (excluding outliers etc) to get a general consensus of data being read from the tangle. Since the data is usually small and cheap (think: ubiquity of sensors) you'd be able to get a reasonable certainty that the data is correct.
In private situations, ie temp of nuclear rods where sensor data is limited, you have to rely on the security of the system and redundancies built in.
A1: Security of the device for sure needs to be rock solid at the core (see Meltdown and Spectre disaster). If this is the case, hacking of device would be detected.
On the faulty devices (like a broken thermometer or something) these things are always possible. If it were nefariously broken thermometer how could you scale such an attack? And if its just device malfunction, data science has all sorts of sophisticated ways to detect out-liars etc.
Q:What's the advantage of the tangle over the proposed lightning network for coins on the blockchain?
A: 1. It is currently working
2. It doesn't require channel staking
3. It doesn't suffer from networking problems
4. It is a 1st layer solution (DLT) rather than a second layer solution stuck to a 1st layer solution that can't inherently scale.
Q:Are there any connections to people or companys who work on smart cities? Like Klaus Kleinfeld (Ex-Siemens) who leads the NEOM development. He is also german, so I was wondering if you had the chance to present IOTA.
A: We work a lot in smart cities, and are increasingly doing more.
Q:1. Do you think nelson is helping the network? Or does it more split the network into "manual" and "nelson" neigbours?
2. How many full nodes are currently up and running?
3. And finaly: When you were an object of a kitchen, which would you be and why?
A: 1. Deeper analysis is required to know exactly what Nelson is or isn't doing to the Network. My guess is that there is no affect, he's just making it easier to run a full-node (which I guess then is helpful as it encourages more full nodes).
2. No one can know that because of the manual tethering.
3. I would be a bottle opener for obvious reasons.
Q:Can we expect big, I mean like REALLY BIG, partnerships in 2018? :smile:
A: We will make sure of that.
Q:Hi Iota team, with the recent bottlenecks on the ethereum platform caused by Cryptokitties, theoretically would a dapp like that on iota platform increase transaction speeds?
A: Yes. But as we are currently working on rapidly developing the protocol (the final design will be settled soon), we don't want any of these more serious DApps to run on IOTA just yet.
Q:How big is the chance that big companies are going to create their own IoT system instead of working with Iota?
A: That's one of the threats. But quite frankly, many of the large companies are starting to realize that for them the best strategy moving forward is to collaborate, instead of competing. This is why the IOTA Foundation as a medium to enable and foster this collaboration is one of the most valuable assets that the IOTA ecosystem has. It is the one driving the adoption and standardization.
Q: /u/johndomenic In what specific areas do you plan to allocate resources in 2018... what are your immediate priorities? Also, Is the IOTA foundation sustainable for the next 5-10 years and beyond without additional funding?
A: Immediate priorities aside from organizational ones (setting up proper processes, administration, checks and balances, etc.) for me personally and the Fund is obviously are actual near-term use cases in production so we can start showing what is possible. Because its near-term these things won't be a grandiose as the data-marketplace and other things, but they'll still be neat. First grant we are making will show that. Also tools to help people make the previous point happen (new libraries, modules, etc.).
If IOTA is successful, the Foundation will have enough funds to last indefinitely.
