It's amazing to see the support from everywhere for this - this grant shows how we multiply our influence as we spread the word and value any and every contribution, whether in money, effort or just getting others involved.  Go team!

I'm so glad this project will definitely go forward now. The world needs people to care for our future by caring for each other. Anything that helps make that happen can change the world.

I really like this project using token economics to bootstrap "good" projects and add value to worthwhile projects that don't have enough intrinsic economic incentive makes so much sense.  Even if the token doesn't dramatically increase in value, just having this mechanism both serves the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency and provides an anchor to charitable projects, but in a decentralized way.

More about Filament. Venture backed and also has a hardware offering powered by a software stack.

http://www.coindesk.com/filament-nets-5-million-for-blockchain-based-internet-of-things-hardware/

I think Filament is a potential partner as it uses IBM ADEPT as its "blockchain", itself based on bitcoin/ethereum.

Here is a good article I haven't seen posted here that refers to it and also has several good biz dev/PR-awareness targets in it:

https://newsroom.cisco.com/feature-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1756804

- Alex Tapscott, coauthor with his father, Don Tapscott, of the "Blockchain Revolution" forthcoming book

- Filament (Reno, NV) http://filament.com/

- LO3 Lawrence Orsini, founder http://lo3energy.com/

- Transactive Grid  an open energy platform that will enable real-time smart metering of local energy generation which is a joint venture of LO3 and Consensus Systems (which seems to be a dev shop)

How is IOTA approaching biz dev?  I don't believe in decentralized biz dev, so someone needs to manage and prioritize outreach (target lists, status, goals, offers, manage technical resources, etc). Decentralized lead gen is fine, but then someone needs to followup with the latest materials and support, etc.  Be glad to help initially organize or do more as effort expands.

I hope this isn't a repeat of a question previously asked, but has anyone with a test version running been able to model confirmation times? I am not a developer so I am just guessing but it seems confirmations are probabilistic, maybe based on aging of open nodes being merged to rule out doublespends.

Because there is always the possibility of receiving a double spent token, one strategy is to immediately respend the token and hope to receive value before the transaction is potentially invalidated.  If a merge fails because of a conflicting transaction, is the doublespend flagged so future spends aren't mistakenly accepted?

Is there a simple way to explain how the system optimizes merging open nodes to miminize probablistic confirmation?

Sorry it this doesn't make sense but very interested in understanding how it works.

Thanks!

More coverage of Iota and Tangle. Pardon the large chunk of text:

http://bitcoinist.net/vanbex-report-tangle-blockchain/

Mar. 14, 2016 — Has the conversation evolved already? Amid the blockchain technological push, another variation has emerged — the “tangle.”

The Vanbex Report is a periodic summary of the blockchain industry’s top news stories from the biggest companies, as well as the most promising newcomers.

The Tangle and the Blockchain

The Tangle or Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) chain essentially means a collection of nodes or vertices, while allowing connectivity between nodes but with no circular edgings. In other words, you cannot start at one vertex and eventually loop back to that same vertex via a sequence of edges (connections).

A blockchain can be loosely defined as a ledger of transactions shared by participating nodes in the system operating under some kind of consensus protocol.

While blockchain technology will help automate contracts, the insurance industry, accounting, financial and others, there are critics that say such a robust framework is not ideal for machine-to-machine payments on a smaller scale.

Enter Iota, a micro-transaction cryptotoken said to be designed for the Internet-of-Things (IoT).

At a Bitcoin Talk, Iota stated: “Unlike the complex and heavy blockchains of Bitcoin and the like, which were designed with other uses in mind, Iota is created to be as lightweight as possible, hence the name “Iota” with emphasis on the ‘IoT’ part.”

IoT wrote further, “these connected IoT devices must be able to automatically pay miniscule amounts to one another in a frictionless manner without having to compromise on product design by introducing additional hardware.”

But will blockchain technology hinder this?

The IoT will permeate electronics, household items, bringing inanimate objects to life in a manner of semantics, granting selfless interaction to an estimated 20 billion connected devices by 2020.

IBM and Samsung’s vision of appliances of the future sounds like something out of a Pixar film.

They see appliances, objects of the future as being connected instruments, able to retrieve updates, trigger self-diagnoses for debugging and various other functions. This is something they call the Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry (ADEPT) system, a concept which surfaced in 2015.

The ADEPT system would be connected to blockchains that provide the backbone of the system, using a mix of proof-of-work and proof-of-stake to secure transactions.

The issue of scalability and the cumbersome aspects seen within cryptocurrency networks was addressed by ADEPT, with the team stating in 2015: “Multiple efforts like sidechains, treechains, and mini-blockchains are ongoing to address this problem.”

“While each approach has its merits and demerits we are yet to see consensus on a common approach across the board. A blockchain to cater to hundreds of billions of devices needs to be scalable.”

Queue Iota. The company stated it isn’t seeking to replace the blockchain entirely.

Their technology will “also act as a supplementation to the current blockchain ecosystem by acting as an oracle for smart contract platforms like Ethereum and Rootstock.”

Further, Iota claims since its technology enables the ability to include checkpoints for transactions it will increase the security of blockchains.

These “value-added” aspects are pivotal.

Bitcoinist.net published an article titled, “IOTA: Internet of Things Without the Blockchain?” Security Ledger, a different piece, “Blockchain or Tangle? Securing Transactions on the IoT.”

The headlines suggest a one-or-the-other scenario.

Maybe Iota’s perspective is currently accurate, that blockchains are too complex for micro-transactions of the IoT world system, but blockchains are also malleable and as projects like Tendermint exhibit, the goal is agnostic programming for versatile use case applications.

It’s not the tangle versus the blockchain. It simply can’t be.

As the projection of billions of connected devices within the next decade are tossed around, it seems most practical Iota, as a micro-transaction cryptotoken, must operate in conjunction with the myriad blockchains that will connect the myriad devices belonging to a diverse corporate world of things.

Questions on Iota starting to pop up in Bitcoin subreddits. Not sure how to answer questions though. Could someone who knows better tackle it?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4a15gm/how_can_iota_crypto_currency_work_without_a/

IOTA needs its own Slock.it.  Interesting video on their progress:

http://livestream.com/liftconference/events/4805866/videos/112057104

Still learning about IoT but seems to me that a necessary step is adoption on capable hardware, so how can it be integrated into existing and developing platforms like this:

Cisco To Buy Jasper Technologies For $1.4 Billion

http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/03/cisco-buys-jasper-technologies-for-1-4-billion/

Meanwhile the Bitfury private pool at http://ghash.io is over 170TH

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy

Took me long enough to put it all together but finally realized that Bitfury is the next Asicminer, not Lab or Active or Garden:

1. ASIC chips based on 55nm

2. Chips already shipping and miners shipping or soon to ship

3. Self mining at 78Th/s, blowing away AM's 48Th/s right now

Plus, as an added bonus, no pesky public shareholders who pester for more information or with whom to share dividends.

It would be reassuring if the 100/200TH sponsors could reveal if they have any interest in the https://ghash.io/
mine. Should be crossing 100TH in days.

This is great for customers buying miners, but it's still not clear how many THs are being shipped before getting to 100/200TH and an estimated date for them to be fully deployed.

Many unanswered questions on top of major delays. . .

Yes. Network hash has doubled from 200TH to 400TH in the last 5 weeks so it could turn out to be just a breakeven. Given the intended hash rates for the various IPOs (even the stub Garden) these delays are major concerns.

To do the numbers we need a date for the full 200TH to be live. Can you provide an estimate?

Just to understand this, you are putting retail deliveries before 100th which will cause a month of additional delay, but doubling ultimate capacity to 200th.  Exactly how much hashing power will be delivered to retail before us and can you promise that additional retail orders won't further subordinate our delivery?

Will do. Wouldn't give my creds if you added it this way anyways. Thx.

Any chance of adding CampBX?

Thx

Prob should focus on alt coins (Litecoin) if you're GPU mining.