IOTA is a really nice project and I love it for the idea of decentralizing proof of work by not incentivizing it financially. This idea will save the planet. In fact I believe that IOTA will be the only proof of work coin that will be still in existence after a general government ban of mining which has to be expected later this year due to the skyrocketing energy consumption.
But looking at the chart its just a mess. You could argue that it is still early. I can tell you that the wales are not touching it. They stay away, most likely because the tangle does not even allow them to transact balances securely without being afraid to loose your funds. There is a lot of fud going around regarding IOTA, but the biggest point that critics make is that it is not usable as a currency since the tools are flawed, the protocol is currently centralized and the tangle didn't yet proof that is reliable enough to replace the blockchain consensus mechanisms.
This is all true but from my understanding nothing of this is inherently unsolvable and from a developers perspective I get the feeling that IOTA has currently the most traction in the field, second only to Ethereum. While Ethereum is solving philosophical questions that help scaling solutions and privacy, IOTA is still on the way to get the system off the ground. It is focussing on IoT devices and is encouraging "transaction spam" by making it cheap to write to the tangle for sensors to leave their sensor data on the global ledger to use by everyone in the world for free. This transaction spam helps to secure the network. While in every other ledger this kind of usage would lead to congestion and high fees, IOTA gets faster and more reliable. If the tangle is widely used by IoT devices it will be possible to phase out the centralization point and the network turns into the most decentralized ledger that is employing proof of work as consensus mechanism.
This will take time. But I predict IOTA will be still up and running in 10 years from now. I would not assume that to be true for many of the other coins. As with the Internet bubble it can be expected that at least 95% of the projects out there will vanish completely. Therefore that is a lot and comes close to a guarantee that investors will make money with IOTA.
Up or down? I don't know. The situation can only get better. The fud will disappear. But the market cap around 5 billion USD feels to high to make a early investment. The chart doesn't tell a story. People using this coin will loose money trough stupidity and the early stage that the tools like wallets are in. IOTA just had a rollback. Every good coin (bitcoin, Ethereum) had a rollback due to early problems. All factors that lead me to the advise to keep that coin on your radar and throw small money in from time to time to average your price. IOTA will get smart contracts, but first it will get assets that can be used for ICOs. Both are in active development by people that I actually met. It has unlimited transaction throughput. It could take a third of the combined market cap of currently 400 billion USD. From that perspective a price per token of 20 USD can be justified. But before that happens the crypto market as a whole will consolidate and that might give better entry prices.
But looking at the chart its just a mess. You could argue that it is still early. I can tell you that the wales are not touching it. They stay away, most likely because the tangle does not even allow them to transact balances securely without being afraid to loose your funds. There is a lot of fud going around regarding IOTA, but the biggest point that critics make is that it is not usable as a currency since the tools are flawed, the protocol is currently centralized and the tangle didn't yet proof that is reliable enough to replace the blockchain consensus mechanisms.
This is all true but from my understanding nothing of this is inherently unsolvable and from a developers perspective I get the feeling that IOTA has currently the most traction in the field, second only to Ethereum. While Ethereum is solving philosophical questions that help scaling solutions and privacy, IOTA is still on the way to get the system off the ground. It is focussing on IoT devices and is encouraging "transaction spam" by making it cheap to write to the tangle for sensors to leave their sensor data on the global ledger to use by everyone in the world for free. This transaction spam helps to secure the network. While in every other ledger this kind of usage would lead to congestion and high fees, IOTA gets faster and more reliable. If the tangle is widely used by IoT devices it will be possible to phase out the centralization point and the network turns into the most decentralized ledger that is employing proof of work as consensus mechanism.
This will take time. But I predict IOTA will be still up and running in 10 years from now. I would not assume that to be true for many of the other coins. As with the Internet bubble it can be expected that at least 95% of the projects out there will vanish completely. Therefore that is a lot and comes close to a guarantee that investors will make money with IOTA.
Up or down? I don't know. The situation can only get better. The fud will disappear. But the market cap around 5 billion USD feels to high to make a early investment. The chart doesn't tell a story. People using this coin will loose money trough stupidity and the early stage that the tools like wallets are in. IOTA just had a rollback. Every good coin (bitcoin, Ethereum) had a rollback due to early problems. All factors that lead me to the advise to keep that coin on your radar and throw small money in from time to time to average your price. IOTA will get smart contracts, but first it will get assets that can be used for ICOs. Both are in active development by people that I actually met. It has unlimited transaction throughput. It could take a third of the combined market cap of currently 400 billion USD. From that perspective a price per token of 20 USD can be justified. But before that happens the crypto market as a whole will consolidate and that might give better entry prices.