IOTA’s Tangle Is Faced With Transaction Issues After Spammers Develop Parasite Chains

Lewis Freiberg, Head of Ecosystem at IOTA Foundation posted an article called What’s up with the Tangle?

The explanation is part counseling, and it’s basically teaching enthusiasts how to view the project’s success and issues as well emotionally. The other part of the post is practically a tech analysis.

Freiberg describes the essay’s title as “a common question,” and he makes sure to highlight how such queries “about the state of the Tangle usually stem from the way it is represented in a visualizer or due to a high/low confirmation rate.”

He also notes that whenever “these questions are asked in the community, we are asking them ourselves. We are all as intrigued as everyone, if not we’d be doing something else. These events present learning opportunities for those working on IRI and other aspects of the network.”

The Tangle is seen as IOTA’s answer to various blockchain related issues. Tangle is a directed graph structure underneath IOTA.

Adoption vs. TPS

Freiberg’s opinion is that questioners are currently too focused on transactions per second (TPS) instead of adoption issues and confirmed transactions per second (CTPS).

He believes that this is due to the team’s desire to see Tangle outperforming other networks.

He says that this whole thing leads them to “spam the main net to push the TPS as high as it can go. Without fail this results in ‘Wow, the tangle is flying today,’ and then ‘Why did the TPS suddenly drop’ after someone turns off a spammer.”

Warnings regarding the protocol

He also says that the protocol has been designed to be resilient to strange things that could be happening and when “someone started spamming transactions with a low likelihood of confirmation,” the metrics “took a nosedive.”

He continues saying that “reasons could include: attempts at price manipulation, testing network response to different things, or just to get attention.”

You can read the entire blog post here to find out more details.

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