IOTA has been marketed as next generation post-blockchain ledger solution for IOT and in general - microtransactions. When scanning the team, the concept and the idea I did not have huge remarks. I was not sure on the robustness of the new Tangle ledger which is highly decoupled but the whole idea and concept made a lot of sense and the whitepaper is solid. The team background did look OK, the developer documentation was quite solid for alpha/ICO company. PoC is present with some issues in stability and quality of the wallet, but this is nothing of great concern for a startup old couple of years pushing it’s ICO this summer (2017).

I do have few questions that are not answered (and I did ask them in the dev channel few weeks ago). This is not a rant about price points of the coin on the exchanges but the practicality of the solution itself:

Wallet side PoW: IOT = CPU’s with very limited performance, memory and I/O capacity streamlined for certain application. Arduino + WiFi Board is the atomic example of what should be considered as typical IOT machine. Step up would be something in the range of Raspberry Pi Compute and similar boards from different suppliers. If this end-machine has to perform 2 proof of work calculations to run its on transaction tax-free then the challenge is obvious — why should we transfer compute power to end points which should run off batteries for days or months?

State of github: From initial browsing one thing that catches my eye is that most intensive work is focused on core Java modules. Java JVM has its own abstraction and performance price and I find it highly questionable why should the core project rely on language that is very non-typical for IOT applications. When speaking about IOT implementations I would expect core c/c++ implementation. Go and Rust might be good options as well (and more modern) but Rust especially is not stable on most of the common ARM IOT platforms, let alone running lightweight microtransaction client out of Arduino board?

Lack of clear IOT roadmap. The current site, groups and documents lack the core USP addressed down the roadmap. Future (non-cryptocoin) IOT partner projects, partnerships and implementations of IOT applications using IOTA, PoC’s using the solution.

Side-note: Premined coin budget always leaves open questions about the distribution and pricing priorities (fairness, insider trading). Having in mind that IOTA coin is imagined to be abundant as much as IPv6 address space, it is hyper-inflated in its making (by design).

So although the general perspective is quite positive, the implementation lacks strong and experienced IOT subject matter expertise. It looks like as if the coin was minted around the idea of tangle, marketing applied IOT as the buzzword of today and THEN the team tried to approximate the coin to be used for such application without core IOT experience itself.

I might be wrong but current $IOTA implementation is too resource intensive and thus too costly for typical IOT proects that need lean, low profile and fast elements.

I know that I might be off with some of these statements but consider this as an open invitation for the owners of the company to address these issues.

Unless I get some reasonable explanations why am I wrong this can be considered as Manifesto for iterative improvement and starting position for new implementation that would address these concerns.