I'm a reasonably smart guy. Not super smart. Just semi-smart. I've been a professional software engineer for over 35 years. I've written a fair amount of bitcoin software in C++ and I feel like I understand blockchains in some level of technical detail.
The current white paper is Tangle's white paper. Tangle is the distributed ledger for IOTA as blockchain for Bitcoin. I heard that a more comprehensive IOTA white paper will come out in the near future.
The team answered lots of questions at their AUA on the Reddit. You may find out some answers for yourself there -
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/6hugtq/ask_us_anything/