Trinary and LiFi

Protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum are considered by many to employ difficult computations which result in a very high demand for electricity – with good reason. IOTA differs greatly from these protocols not only in its unique consensus mechanism, Tangle ledger, and IoT focus, but also in the use of trinary. The cutting edge technology doesn’t stop there, as LiFi is also being experimented with.

Trinary in a nutshell

As you might have learned in school, today’s computers work with binary code. Its smallest digit is called Bit (binary + digit) and essentially means that it can have two values: 0 and I. If you combine 8 bits, you end up with a byte. This is used, for instance, whenever you type a letter via ASCII (American Standard Coode for Information Interchange): every letter is represented by a certain binary code (Base 2): So whenever you type a 5 on your computer, it is encoded as 00110101 in binary to allow the computer’s hardware to process its data. IOTA would be 01001001 01001111 01010100 01000001. With ASCII your computer can turn binary data into a message we humans can understand.

IOTA is not based on this binary system (0/1), but on a system called trinary, which means that three values (+, 0, -; 0,1,2; base 3) can be used per trit (trinary digit). So at the end of the day, trinary is just another way of coding data. The astute reader should now be asking why IOTA has decided to use it.