Several years have passed since the launch of IOTA but people still do not fully understand some things about this technology, so I have decided to list nuances which are important.

The Internet-of-Things is not about things communicating over the Internet. This misconception was created by companies trying to sell already existing solutions for the Internet under another name. The things will form their own network, much larger than the Internet. Such the network cannot scale by using the architecture where all traffic goes through a handful of servers controlled by few organizations.

The Tangle is one and only. Even if we run several IOTA forks they all will still work with the single Tangle and theoretically could merge together later. Different clusters running IOTA will form different subtangles intertwined into the Tangle. This is a useful feature for mobile things moving from one cluster to another.

The network of nodes running IOTA is a system where failure of less than 1/3 of the elements is not critical. And if so the node software should be developed with this feature in mind. Particularly, if a glitch happens the node can be rebooted and the storage cleared if required. Software built on top of IOTA should not assume that the node will work reliably all the time, the software should connect to at least 3 nodes and rely on the information provided by their quorum (67%+).

The IOTA protocol will be set in stone. It does not need versioning, all improvements must be done on top of the protocol otherwise IOTA cannot be adopted by things many of which physically cannot be upgraded.

IOTA is not for data storage, it is for data delivery. If something is stored on the Tangle do not expect to find it there in 24 hours. Use tricks like a constantly updated root of a Merkle tree containing hashes of data pieces which later can be requested from the data owners or specialized services (so-called permanodes).

IOTA enables nanopayments and this should be used to its full potential. Whatever is sold for iotas, it should be sold in small chunks and delivered as quickly as some assurance that the payment will be accepted by the network is got. Very few will bother with doublespending of few cents, even if they succeed the competitive advantage over “slower” sellers will allow to earn more.

P.S. Officially IOTA is not an acronym, but I have always been saying that it stands for “Internet-Of-Things Apocalypse” where “apocalypse” means “revelation”.