IOTA had some good news for its fans and holders as it publicly announced Qubic, the platform they immediately lauded as “the most significant contribution to the IOTA stack”. This platform should be the key piece of IOTA’s future work and development on the Internet of Things. IOTA claims that Qubic will be a protocol that uses IOTA as the solution for oracle machines, smart contracts, outsourced quorum based computations and more. When this announcement was published, many were left a bit let down by the fine print which said that Qubic is still a work in progress, implying that people should have modest and long term expectations for it.
Originally envisioned as Quorum-Based Coin in this Bitcointalk thread, Qubic was seen as the medium of exchange for the Information Age. IOTA’s rendition of Qubic will not be a coin, as it only borrows the name from that concept. The IOTA announcement goes out of their way to say that Qubic isn’t some form of new IOTA-related currency and that there won’t be any ICO’s related to it. It seems that the Qubic project has evolved quite a lot from its initial days and has decided to use IOTA as the payment and messaging platform behind it.
Have a look at the current IOTA price or IOTA price prediction for 2019 & 2020.
IOTA protocol was actually created to solve many issues that Qubic originally came across. IoT messaging and payments were the main problem here and IOTA has addressed them with its Tangle technology. Qubic developers have apparently decided that they like what they see and have gone fully on board with the IOTA standard. This gives them many advantages:
- A way to safely communicate with the outside world in a trusted environment
- A powerful, distributed fog computing platform for building complex IoT applications
- A new type of smart contract, which collects micro-payments in real time as it runs
- A reward system for incentivizing honest participation in the Tangle
Qubic protocol will provide “general-purpose, cloud- or fog-based, permissionless, multiprocessing capabilities on the Tangle”. Qubic protocol will be made out of “qubics”, which will be elements of the Qubic network like oracle machines, smart contracts or outsourced computing machines. Long-term, Qubic should enable leveraging of computational capacities all over the world which will help create an IOTA-based supercomputer. The ultimate goal of the project is to “establish a global decentralized platform available for everyone to make new trustless applications, participate in new economic models and enable the broad landscape of Industry 4.0 and Web 3.0”.
Read: How to buy IOTA
Qubic is basically IOTA’s project for the future. The initial step of Qubic’ roadmap includes developing IOTA and Tangle, which has already been completed. There are other “pieces” of this roadmap with IOTA suggesting that these pieces are in “varying stages of research and experimentation”. When the experimental prototypes are completed, IOTA will begin producing proof of concepts and performing demonstrations of the Qubic protocol.
A Twitter user @CrypTomcat has shortened the somewhat confusing Qubic press release into a more understandable tl;dr.
Reacting to this tweet, user @EdvardAshbolt asked a valid question:
“How is it fixed when there is not yet a working product? Seems a bit of a premature celebration, unless they are not letting on just how far the development is”
All in all, the Qubic cat is out of the bag and many holders are very excited about the future of the IOTA project. The rest of us will wait and see how exactly will this supposed supercomputer/IoT work and if Tangle is a legitimate substitute for the blockchain technology. One of IOTA co-founders, David Sonstenbo tweeted:
“We will very soon hold an extensive #AMA about #IOTA, Qubic, strategy and so forth. I encourage healthy and constructive discussion about #Qubic (microHash is a good example), but if you are unsure etc. just wait for the AMA.”
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If the technology behind IOTA and Qubic turns out to be fully functional, we can look forward to feeless transactions based on smart contracts, powered by oracle machines and authenticated by a massive network of users that are being constantly rewarded for their contribution. IOTA is envisioned to become an “all in one” cryptocurrency that could potentially endanger and replace many cryptocurrencies out there, including giants like Ethereum. At this point people’s expectations should be measured as there is a lot of work to be done by the IOTA team before these visions and dreams come true. Check out the official Qubic website for more information.
