how is iota different from bitcoin 
iota s solution to bitcoin s problems is to do away with several key concepts and topographical constraints of a blockchain miota iota s cryptocurrency is premined and consensus of transactions occurs differently compared to a blockchain iota developers have proposed a new data structure a way to organize numeric representations within a computer s memory known as tangle tangle is a decentralized acyclic graph dag a system of nodes that is not sequential thus each node can be connected to multiple other nodes in a tangle but they are connected only in a particular direction meaning that a node cannot refer back to itself a standard blockchain is also a dag because it is a sequential linked set but iota s tangle is a parallel system in which transactions can be processed simultaneously instead of sequentially as more systems are attached to it the tangle becomes more secure and efficient at processing transactions in bitcoin a group of systems running full nodes that contain the entire history of transactions for a ledger are required for confirmations and consensus this process is energy and computation intensive full node miners are not required in tangle each new transaction is confirmed by referencing two previous transactions reducing the amount of time and memory needed to verify a transaction an easily solvable and straightforward proof of work pow puzzle is added to the transaction as a final step the two transactions that are chosen are referred to as tips iota s system uses a tip selection algorithm with confidence as a measure to approve the transaction suppose a transaction has been approved 97 times in the past then there is 97 confidence that a node will approve it in the future related to the concept of confidence is a transaction s weight as it moves through tangle a transaction gathers weight a transaction s weight increases with the number of approvals once a transaction is confirmed it is broadcast to the entire network then another unconfirmed transaction can choose the newly confirmed transaction as one of the tips to confirm itself this method of confirming a transaction results in no fees and low power consumption enabling miota to be used across a wide variety of devices and machines with different power requirements 