IOTA - Introduction To The Tangle Technology (Crypto currencies, #3)

What is IOTA? In some forums and weblogs it can be read that IOTA wants to enable a backbone for the Internet of Things, but also that it wants to enable communication and exchanges between smart machines and devices. What is behind all this?

IOTA is primarily a protocol, a distributed application that enables all this. Its foundational technology is called Tangle, which is a distributed database, but not a Blockchain. It is surely inspired from cryptocurrencies, but enables different functi...