Iota - either this or die.How long will iota be thus cheap?
Enabling the true Internet-of-Things through the Machine Economy.
The number of connected devices that will be in use is estimated to reach 75 billion by 2025. From tiny sensors on roads and bridges to wearable electronics, mobile phones, and more, every day the world is becoming more and more interconnected. The amount of data being produced and consumed by all these devices is already astronomical. By the end of 2016, the run rate of IP traffic was 1.2 zettabytes per year - or enough data to fill over 9 billion of the highest storage capacity iPhone's available at the time. Over the next five years, global IP traffic is expected to increase five-fold whereby 2021, monthly IP traffic will reach a staggering 31 Gigabytes per capita.
But there is a significant problem. During the same period, broadband speeds are expected only to double, and the electromagnetic spectrum is a fundamental limit for wireless communication. The global data pipelines are becoming congested. It will not be possible for all these devices to continuously connect to centralized cloud silos for all the data they will produce, nor will it be possible for analytic engines in these clouds to respond back to the actuators to act on the data in real time. This is where 'Fog' and 'Mist' computing, storage, bandwidth, electricity enters the picture. One has to distribute these resources all across the landscape, which immediately brings up the question of how to do this in practice with all the red tape in place when there are 10s, 100s or even 1000s of stakeholders involved in this new Machine Economy. This conundrum was the cause of the inception of IOTA. Through zero fee transactions, these devices can share these technological resources amongst one another in real time locally in a distributed network, thus avoiding the centralized points of failure, unclogging the resource infrastructure and abide by the laws of physics.
