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Interview
Who is involved in IOTA and what previous work have you done?
The IOTA core consist of Me, CfB and Mtchl. At one point we’ve all been involved with NXT on different levels, but also other crypto projects. For the past year I have been leading the Jinn team.
IOTA has some very forward thinking technology. Could you explain some of its features and how it's unique from other coins?
The biggest difference between IOTA and other cryptos is that we drop the blocks in the blockchain in favour of a Directed Acyclic Graph architecture called Tangle. The Tangle is the backbone of IOTA, equivalent to the blockchain in Bitcoin. This increases the decentralization to the absolute maximum, decreases the hardware requirements and also allows it to scale to fit the demands of Internet-of-Things. Additionally, it’s designed to be quantum secure in preparation for the inevitable day in the future when scalable quantum computers pose a threat to all coins. Perhaps most importantly though, IOTA allows for very flexible infrastructure, meaning that it will be very useful in edge cases where infrastructure is unstable.
What is your definition of "internet of things" and how does it differ from the Ethereum project?
My definition of Internet-of-Things is basically how we go from having primarily one or two devices connected to the internet to having virtually everything connected to the internet. Ethereum is a great platform with a lot of potential, but it is our contention that it is way too ‘heavy weight’ to serve as a pure transactive token for most IoT devices, espeially in the outter edge of the IoT ecosystem. Most IoT devices will be tiny sensors with very little infrastructural support and so they will require an economy that can accomodate that.
What is IOTA's relationship with the NXT asset JINN and what is the current progress of JINN?
There is no intrinsic relationship per se, but we allowed people to purchase IOTA with JINN tokens at their original value because it was a win-win for both parties. Jinn is still in stealth mode, but under intense development. We’ve had some hardware components created and tested and came up with some new novel approaches that we are currently exploring. With the additional funding we now got, we will be able to boost the production immensly.
With David Sønstebø