They are trying to push the ternary to see if adoption can take off. All it needs is a few thousand logic gates on any traditional chip.if it doesn’t get adopted,they said they can always go back to binary.
Considering this, it doesn’t really make sense that the Iota founders made a decision to not only introduce a novel cryptocurrency system (the tangle), but to also try to push ternary adoption. That’s a monolithic amount of work from a research and business perspective, and it strains credulity that they could engage in this with a full understanding of what they’re doing. Their work is completely divorced from the rest of the academic community, which has many well-respected researchers with a vetted track record already.
Innovation usually happens in incremental steps forward, building from the (recent) work of others. Much more rarely, it manifests as a large leap forward without significant cumulative work. But it approximately never happens that a new state of the art combines several large and orthogonal leaps forward. It’s not impossible, but my outlook is strongly pesimisstic.
When you combine this with the frankly odd (and potentially unethical) behavior the founders are showing - rolling their own cryptography out of ignorance or to attempt to sabotage other open source projects - it becomes extremely hard to take the work seriously.
They're claiming this, for what operation? And similar question for the 10% usage claim.
I suspect storage will be the same when you get done packing into machine words and storing those, yes? Unless they're not using all the bits in a word...
Any independent references for ternary efficiencies for any operation?
8x efficiency _of_what_compared_to_what_?For all these applications IOTA is not feasible. It is not feasible because the ternary logic needs to be emulated on a processor that itself has not even enough beef to do cryptographic functions by itself. If they have cryptographic support like the e.g. the SE series from STM with a Cortex M0 as used in the Ledger Nano S, then this is optimized for standard cryptographic algorithms and not for some newly invented stuff.
Also if we talk about IOT sensor networking with LPWAN (LoRa, SigFox, ...) than bandwith is a real issue. That means collecting transactions from others and doing PoW on that before sending of your own transaction is completely unrealistic. The remote sensor just wants to transmit its data. But that would mean the LPWAN Gateway needs to be a full node doing the PoW. But LPWAN works, that everybody can listen to transaction request and so we are back to the collisions problem.
One of the reasons I wouldn't trust IOTA any farther than I could personally throw the entire development team is that writing a strong cryptocurrency requires a deep understanding of mathematics, and theirs is the sort of shallow I'd expect from a high schooler. They appear to be operating under the misapprehension that numbers come with their base built into them, as if they are operating in a mathematics regime where "10 != 0xa != 012(octal) != 1010(binary)", and anyone that confused about mathematics is not someone you want designing your CSS stylesheets ("no, that's rgb(255, 255, 255), you really want #fff. Or maybe #ffffff."), let alone your cryptocurrency.
It is possible to sit down and work it all out on paper, and you can work out how many trits using logarithms you can pack into a given number of bits, etc etc., but all the terms will cancel and the math will tell you that you just end up with binary again. You can end up with quite the table explaining how to add "binary-encoded base-3" numbers together if you insist on holding on to the idea that base-3 numbers somehow exist separately from base-2 numbers, but in the end it'll all just cancel out. You can get some idea of what it would look like, and how silly it would be, if we trained people to add numbers together by first converting them into binary, adding them in binary, and then converting back to decimal, since that would be the same thing, just with different bases, but does capture how inconvenient it is to do math that way when your bases can't be translated via lookup table (i.e., hexadecimal <-> binary can be done mechanically on a string basis for the number, unlike 2 <-> 3 or 2 <-> 10 (thanks to the factor of 5 in the 10)). And then imagine that as we are teaching people that maneuver that we are telling them that the binary-encoded representation is the real number, and the base-10 encoding is a fake number that can't be trusted or used the same way.
Totally forgot about it, and never put two and two together(three and three? :P) to link it to IOTA. Now that they are quite wealthy, I wonder if it will become a reality. I'm highly skeptical, but I really don't know enough to form a real opinion. Definitely one of those things that make you go 'huh?' though.