Vision

This article is a translation of the German IOTA Beginner’s Guide by .

Vision

The number of connected devices in the Internet of Everything (IoE) that will be in use is currently estimated at 75 billion by 2025. From tiny sensors on roads, in cars or in industry to portable electronics and more – the world is becoming more and more connected every day.

But as the number of connected devices increases, a problem is becoming more and more of an issue. Traditional server-client architectures are massively overloading the existing network infrastructure. It will not be possible for all these devices to continuously connect to centralized clouds for all the data they will produce, nor will it be possible for analytical machines in these clouds to act on the external actors and respond to the data in real time. In addition, current centralized cloud systems do not provide security for devices or sensors in the IoE. Since data is currently stored in owner-managed databases, it is difficult to share this data with others without the ability to change/manipulate it.

In addition, there are hundreds or even thousands of stakeholders today who do not trust each other and therefore use their own centralized technologies, which prevents a truly free Internet of Everything and data trading, lacking a standardized highly scalable and trusted communication protocol.

The goal of the IOTA Foundation is to provide this missing standardized communication protocol and thus a trust layer for the IoE, which allows the devices in the IoE to exchange immutable data and values with each other (peer-to-peer).

An extensive use of IOTA Distributed-Ledger-Technology would initiate a paradigm shift and has the potential to become the backbone for large-scale automation and data acquisition by intelligent machines. For the first time a real machine economy (machine-to-machine, M2M) would be possible, which leading experts believe has great potential in the future. Connected intelligent machines will become autonomous market participants who will be able to manage their own assets in their own accounts in order to autonomously trade services, goods and data in digital marketplaces. For the first time in history a machine or device will be able to earn and spend money on its own; this is one of the greatest revolutions of mankind.

In the past, in addition to the lack of trust, the volatile and relatively high costs of transactions were an obstacle to the emergence of a true M2M economy, because micro-payments were not possible. The open free-of-charge IOTA technology could thus be the starting signal for a disruptive machine economy.

IOTA technology is expected to play a central role in the next industrial revolution that will enable economic relationships between machines and connect the economy of people and machines.

“The ultimate vision is to become an impartial, unbiased, decentralized communications layer for this next generation infrastructure that is being developed right before our eyes. We need a resilient network that can support the exchange of data and values (IOTA tokens) between billions of people and devices. Ideally, this will be something like a “public good” that the world can be responsible for, but no single company owns. In this way, we could reduce many of the problems that plague the current “big tech” in terms of privacy, security and trust”.
Dan Simerman, Director of Financial Relations at the IOTA Foundation

“Our vision is to make the machine economy a reality. The big problem with the Internet of Things is that machines often speak different languages because the protocols are not compatible. IOTA should become the protocol of the machine economy. Through the tangle you can send not only money but also data. For example from a sensor, or even from intelligent contracts like Ethereum.” 
Dominik Schiener, co-founder of the IOTA Foundation

“IOTA is the obvious solution, and standardization will make it stronger. There will be an IOTA standard from the OMG and finally from the International Organization for Standardization / ISO by the end of next year (2020)”.
Dr Richard Mark Soley, CEO Object Management Group, CEO Industrial Internet Consortium, IOTA Supervisory Board Member

Sources

https://www.iota.org/

Original source

https://iota-einsteiger-guide.de/iota-vision.html

Last Updated on 16. February 2021