On the 20th december 2017, 120 people from beginners to IOTA enthusiasts, met for the first German IOTA Meetup. It took place in the starting place in Cologne and started around 19:00. In order to create a basis for the following Meetups, the basics of IOTA were first explained in a lecture by Darius Torabian and our CEO & CTO Patrick Hütter. The presentation started with a few short questions in which the speakers wanted to get to know the audience better. Surprisingly, for example, few responded to the question of whether they had already read the IOTA white paper.

Summary of the technology behind IOTA

After the IOTA protocol was explained, the speakers explained what problems a “conventional” blockchain has, such as the limited transactions per second or the problem that occurs when miners are needed.
This was followed by some practical use cases from IOTA. Of course the M2M, i.e. Machine to Machine Economy, was in the focus.

Overview of the foundation and interfaces of IOTA

Patrick and Darius also introduced the IOTA Foundation. They focused on the tasks of the individual members. IOTA is not structured like other crypto currencies, but was created in the form of a foundation and is also recognized as such in Germany. This could become a clear advantage over other crypto currencies in the future.
The comparison of the TPS, i.e. transactions per second, made clear that the potential of IOTA is very high. While Bitcoin generates about 15 Tps, IOTA becomes more and more efficient with each additional transaction.
They then explained IOTA’s interfaces. The so-called client libraries have the advantage that you can use them in common programming languages and don’t have to learn your own language for IOTA.

In the end, IOTA’s weaknesses and the operation of its own full node followed.

In addition to all its strengths, IOTA of course still has weaknesses, such as the coordinator who was still needed. In addition, IOTA’s problem is that too few transactions are carried out and the network is therefore still very slow in certain situations.
In order to compensate for these and other weaknesses, the two explained the possibility of operating a full node and thus supporting IOTA’s network.

Finally Q&A

In order to clarify the remaining questions of the audience, a Q&A session followed at the end, during which uncertainties such as the size of a transaction were partially clarified, but also some questions remained unanswered due to the in-depth answers.
In summary, a very informative and helpful Meetup, which already created anticipation for the next Meetup in January.