In recent performance transaction processing blockchain IOTA Tangle began to fall, which caused concern users. The head of the IOTA Foundation Lewis Freiberg (Freiberg Lewis) tried to explain what’s going on with the network, what does parasitic cycles, and whether to worry.

The post published in the personal blog of Freiberg on the Medium, starts with the question: “What happened to Tangle?”. Most often, according to the developer, caused by uncharacteristic of visuals or the ratio of confirmed transactions to the total volume.

Partly, says Freiberg, the problem is caused by the fact that the authors of this kind of issues usually are too focused on speed of transaction processing (TPS), ignoring the factor of joining the network by new users, and share of confirmed transactions in the common array. This is due to the “desire to see how Tangle “beats” other networks”, he said, leading to “spanim transactions, stimulating the growth of TPS to the limit. It is without exception always leads from “Wow, Tangle today bright” to “Why the TPS fell?” — as soon as someone stops spamming”. People tend to underestimate the introduction, however, despite the fact that it is difficult to determine using one simple metric, it is much important to understand, “works” or not Tangle.

Before proceeding to a further explanation of Freiberg, recall the basic principle of operation of a Tangle. In fact it’s the root structure of IOTA in the form of a directed acyclic graph. Each new registry transaction randomly “chooses” the two preceding operations to confirm. The latter is used to compute the scores CTPS — the number of processed transactions per unit time.

As a rule, these indicators are significantly below the TPS. On the level of common understanding, many people believe that these metrics should be approximately equal, and this, according to Freiberg, the opinion is fundamentally wrong. He explains:

“When someone initiates a false transaction, which eventually exceed the number of normal transactions, five times the proportion of CTPS drops to 20%. Actually by itself it has not decreased, has increased the number of incorrect or inadequately related transactions. The actual network throughput remained the same”.

However, Freiberg admitted that his post was motivated by a real problem, namely cluster observed in the visualization of the “side chains”. These networks, which, according to Freiberg, the developers knew from the day of publication of the white paper, are a kind of parasites. They are formed when the spammers choose unconfirmed transactions “themselves”. As a result, there are parallel networks, or sub-trees of a graph, radically different from the original circuit.

The head of the IOTA Foundation says that the blockchain Protocol has a high resistance to unexpected interventions like side chains. As possible reasons for such influence he called “the attempts of manipulation of quotes, checking of the network response to different interventions or to attract attention”. But as he noted Freiberg, developers, like users, do not leave the incidents without attention, and furthermore, see them as positive aspects:

“Such cases provide an opportunity to learn everyone who’s worked on IRI and the other components of the network.”

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