- In a new interview IOTA co-founder David Sonstebo describes that the blockchain technology could be replaced by the tangle in 10 years.
- The advantages of the Tangle as well as the greater decentralization are clearly superior to the blockchain.
The difference between cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and IOTA is the technology used. While Bitcoin and Ethereum rely on the blockchain to handle transactions, IOTA uses the tangle. This is still a decentralized distributed ledger, but the tangle works in a very different way.
David Sonstebo: Blockchain technology no longer relevant in 10 years
In an interview with the news magazine u.today David Sonstebo describes that he cannot imagine that the blockchain technology will still be relevant in 10 years. He states that at this point in time there is no serious competitor for IOTA and many companies are still stuck in the old blockchain paradigm:
If we consider the current live networks, I don’t see any of them that could rival IOTA because all of them are still stuck in that old blockchain paradigm with miners, bottlenecks, and fees. I just can’t imagine that they will be relevant 10 years from now.
Sonstebo sees a fundamental problem especially in classical mining, which can lead to a centralisation of power. There are two different user groups in the blockchain. The actual users who send transactions and the miners who validate transactions in the network. He states that the miners are only interested in the amount of the fees and the block rewards.
Therefore, according to Sonstebo, miners will always prioritise the transactions with the highest fee. This situation can lead to a bottleneck, as was already observed at the end of 2017. IOTA’s tangle puts the user and the validator on an equal footing. When a user sends a transaction in the IOTA network, the user must first validate two other transactions in the network. Thus, each user is also a validator.
This crucial difference offers a clear advantage of the tangle over the blockchain (freely translated):
What we essentially did and how we differentiate from blockchain is that instead of divorcing validation from the usage of the network, we made validation an intrinsic property over using the network. We got rid of the bottleneck in scaling because there are no longer any limitations on how many transactions can go into the network at once.
Many projects have already recognized the advantages of the IOTA approach, but there is no real possibility of switching to a model where the miners no longer generate income. Sonstebo points out that it would be very difficult to convince the miners to upgrade or fork if they did not generate revenue:
And at the end of the day, the miners decide which fork is relevant. It would be like trying to convince a company that you’re now going to give away a product instead of selling them. It would be a hard sell.
IOTA was able to achieve many important milestones in 2019 and recently presented the technical roadmap for this year. One of the most important projects, which is personally very close to Sonstebo’s heart, is the development of an innovative farm, which drives the use of IOTA in agriculture and agribusiness. In mid-December IOTA entered into a partnership with the Norwegian Future Farm Consortium.
The project deals with the entire value chain, starting with the production of cow’s milk, from the harvest of the grass the cow eats to the finished milk. The IOTA Tangle will serve as the basis for achieving data integrity and scalability. It also creates greater transparency between all parties involved in the dairy industry.
When will IOTA be ready for the mass market?
Sonstebo states that some projects are under development and many of them will be released this year. In the near future, many people will not even notice IOTA being used, as it is more of a “back-end technology”. Sonstebo makes it clear that it will arrive like a Trojan horse:
Instead, what will happen is that these killer applications that are currently being tested out, will arrive slowly and then people will just suddenly be using it. That means that all these different projects, that want to be around 10 years from now, have to focus on delivering something real and not just fluff. When exactly that will happen, I’m not sure, but we will start to see the beginnings of it in 2020, at least with IOTA because of the products in development.
IOTA’s price is currently experiencing a small correction of – 1.34% to a price of USD 0.1896.
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