Why you can start using IOTA for decentralized data exchange today!
My personal takeaway from the Blockchain Mobility Hackathon
During the Blockchain mobility hackathon, I had lots of great discussions with different people about IOTA. However, I sometimes got the feeling that most people still believe it will take like 5 or 10 years for IOTA to be used in real-world applications. I definitely can’t predict the future, but I think that a lot of problems, which were mentioned around IOTA can be solved today. For example, the project we developed during the hackathon “Pac-Man on wheels” (see our project on Github) can in my opinion easily be used in a real-world application right now.
In this article, I will list some of the problems mentioned during the hackathon as well as possible solutions.
MAM isn’t finished and therefore you can’t exchange data securely
MAM (Masked Authenticated Messaging) is in an early stage. It’s not proven to be completely secure and it’s missing some key components like a key exchange. However, there are plenty of secure asymmetric cryptography systems out there, like RSA and all of them can be used together with IOTA. So, if you completely trust these systems you can start using them right now!
The reason why we decided to use NTRU in our project “Pac-Man on wheels” is simply that we wanted to use a quantum secure encryption. We believe anyone who is currently using an encryption systems should think about applying a quantum secure systems no matter what technology or cryptocurrency you are using. See for example “How secure will our data be in the post-quantum era? It’s the end of modern cryptography as we know it, and we feel fine.“
You can’t exchange huge amounts of data efficiently with IOTA
t’s true that you need to do multiple proof-of-works for uploading a huge amount of data and that this process is inefficient compared to the current state. But why would you want to upload your complete data to the tangle? It’s enough to upload just a link to your data and if you use IPFS to upload a unique hash instead of the link this solution is also completely decentralized and future-proof.
