The Origins of Jinn and IOTA
Since its emergence at the end of 2017, many people have heard about IOTA as being an innovative payment technology. What most people do not know is how it evolved and what difficulties the developers have already dealt with in the past. This article seeks to shed light on the history of IOTA and JINN, and examine whether the developers have delivered on their stated goals.
IOTA as a by-product of JINN
They key figure in the history of JINN and IOTA is Sergey Ivancheglo. He is also known as BCNext, the inventor of Proof of Stake and NXT, and writes under the pseudonym Come-from-Beyond (CfB) on forums, chats and Twitter. |||
September 2012: Qubic is announced
In a Bitcointalk forum post, CfB announced Qubic (Quorum-Based Coin). The latter part of the original announcement seems to foreshadow IOTA:
– No fees
[…]
– No need to download gigs of data from “a blockchain”, every miner is allowed to handle only fraction of the Qubic network
– Transfer of money in Qubic is supposed to be much faster than in Bitcoin
– Qubic is more eco-friendly as it doesn’t require a lot of electricity to be spent
September 2014: Ternary processors come into play
CfB wrote, that in order to realize Qubic he needed a solution based on JINN (a ternary processor). Moreover, he would need emulations first before the processor could be designed. In another post, he revealed that development would probably take until September 2018.
January 2015: Prototyping the hardware
It was revealed that “basic ternary elements with transistors” would be needed for the processor to operate and that the prototypes would be manufactured in Belarus.
Later that month, David (Sonstebo) explained some setbacks:
