There are a lot of negative comments on this thread. I think a lot of the criticism is valid, but also somewhat out of date. I've followed this project for quite some time and it's true that the original version of IOTA in 2017 was deeply flawed, used some questionable (to say the least) design decisions like winternitz one time signatures and trinary. Some of the founders acted in really ugly ways online when people identified the many real problems with the protocol.<p>But in the last year or so the project has made a lot of interesting developments, redesigned the protocol to remove the 'exotic' design decisions, parted ways with some of the controversial founders and developed into a more mature research project. To solve the issue of double spends, they developed a consensus protocol called Fast Probabilistic Consensus, a leaderless voting protocol, that draws on the "voter models" introduced in the 70s by Holley and Liggett and Clifford and Sudbury. The research has been published and peer reviewed, and is implemented in a test-net which is open source and currently running without a central coordinator.<p>The paper is here: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10895" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10895</a><p>and the testnet codebase is here
<a href="https://github.com/iotaledger/goshimmer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iotaledger/goshimmer</a><p>And without going too far down the rabbit hole, it seems in the more recent versions of the decentralized test net, the FPC works alongside a kind of consensus which might be described as "Nakamoto Consensus on the DAG" where writing ledger updates is the same as voting on conflicting transactions, so that the behavior of updating the ledger also communicates node opinions on a given conflict set without additional message overhead.<p>I can understand why there is a lot of distrust of this project - there were many bad decisions in the past, and bad communication on top. But, in my personal opinion, if you dig a bit deeper into the research they are doing there is some very interesting stuff going on.