Glossary

Tangle: A directed acyclic graph (DAG) as a distributed ledger which stores all transaction data of the IOTA network. It is a Blockchain without the blocks and the chain (so is it really a Blockchain?). The Tangle is the first distributed ledger to achieve scalability, no fee transactions, data integrity and transmission as well as quantum-computing protection. Contrary to today’s Blockchains, consensus is no-longer decoupled but instead an intrinsic part of the system, leading to a completely decentralized and self-regulating peer-to-peer network.

Tips: transactions which have no other transactions referencing them.

Curl

• The main hash function used in IOTA, Curl is based on well-studied sponge construction invented by the Keccak creators (SHA-3), and is specifically tailored for IoT, that also happens to be the world’s first trinary hash function.

Kerl

• as Curl is a young hash function, IOTA currently uses Keccak (SHA-3) for signing.

• Kerl is Keccek-384, with additional conversion of its input and output from/to 243 trits to 48 bytes using basic two’s complement.

Winternitz one-time signature (W-OTS)

• a Post Quantum Signature scheme, that is used to authorize spending from an address in IOTA (sign with your private key). Due to its one-time nature, the security of funds in an address decreases rapidly if you sign multiple transactions using the same key. Therefore, in IOTA you never re-use an address that has been spent from (as one signature has already been shared with the network).

IOTA the token

• Total supply

  • There are 2,779,530,283,277,761 IOTAs

• Units

  • IOTA notation follow SI units.

    Pi, Ti, Gi, Mi, Ki, i

IRI

• The IOTA Reference Implementation (IRI) is written in Java and is the IOTA's core client (node). it communicates with the IOTA network to relay transactions and to provide a, rather limited, API to users - this is largely for security reasons, making it possible to connect to a remote node.