 Our altcoin of the week this week is iota. Bitcoin is Snow White. I mean, really. It started off small, sheltered, and then it went out into the world where it was taken care of by a bunch of short hairy men who also happened to be miners. Eventually, word got out and the banking industry came around trying to destroy her. She fell asleep for a little while, only to reemerge and become well known to the kingdom as the fairest of them all. So what does that make iota? I'll give you a minute. Yep, you guessed it. Tangled. She's quirky, spunky, and she's got a dream. Unlike Snow White and Bitcoin, iota has no interest in miners. In fact, it doesn't use mining at all. This means that iota solves some of the greatest problems of crypto trading like fees and scaling. This works because instead of being built on a blockchain, iota is built on the tangle, which is essentially this. Each time a person makes a transaction, they authenticate two other random transactions making something resembling a web. This network is so unobtrusive it can be run from any device big or small. This means that iota's transactions can be any size and get anywhere they need to be in a jiffy. Full free. This sounds great, right? Right. And this is why we saw iota's price jump from around a dollar to over five dollars in the span of a couple of weeks. But then it suddenly stopped, dropping back down to just above three dollars. Why is this? iota announced a partnership with Microsoft only to have it downgraded to a participation grade, a little while later due to media miscommunication. Since, to the crypto community, a match is a burning bush, both of these pieces of news slapped the shit out of iota's price leaving it lonely and a little confused. People have since calmed down and iota is starting to get the attention it deserves and see its value steadily climb. But iota's true target is not to allow you to buy a coffee without paying an outrageous fee waiting for it to get cold. No, iota is targeting the internet of things. The interconnectedness of technology and the machine economy. iota hopes to allow all different types of machines connected through the internet of things to communicate and transact with complete trust. So what can we say about iota? It is on target, it has a lot of investors, and as long as it doesn't find itself wrapped up in the tangled nightmare of foam, moffat, and hype, it should have a bright future. And unless you have an irrational fear of killer robots, a society handicap by the dependence on machines, or dots, then you should consider investing in iota. They had a dream once.