IOTA is trash for this and other reasons. You should short it. Issues:
1. Double spends are devastating and easy, since they permanently split the tangle.
2. With no transaction limit, syncing from the beginning of time will take forever.
3. With no transaction limit, keeping up with network traffic will be impossible. (Especially on IoT devices.
4a. Nobody is going to use power and die space on IoT devices for the PoW chip.
4b. Or, alternately, if, as they claim, the PoW chip will take very little die space and very little power, the network will be destroyed outright by non-IoT PoW chips spamming the network.
5. There is currently a coordinator which confirms transactions. It is not P2P. If they remove the coordinator, I could write code that destroys the network by issuing TiB of transactions per day, making it impossible to sync/keep up.
6. Mesh networks of the type that they envisage deploying IOTA on are not widely deployed, and it's not clear that they will ever be widely deployed.
Even if you're correct on all fronts, there is an unfortunate expectation in the cryptocurrency world that this sort of shit is expected, and it makes the product stronger.
Pretty much every exchange has been hacked at one time or another. Ethereum itself had a vulnerability, and they just forked it. Parity, the ethereum wallet software, had a vulnerability that put millions up for grabs .. the equivalent of a function like 'transferCoin' was made public instead of private.
I think that Iota is different here. Ethereum has a lot of issues, but it is not unfixably broken in any fundamental way. Iota is unfixably broken in multiple fundamental ways.
IOTA is traded on Bitfinex, which I think allows shorting, although I've never done it.
One thing to keep in mind though is that the market is not particularly rational, so even though I think IOTA is doomed in the long term, in the short term it could go up, because markets. So if you do decide to short, make sure to figure out what degree of leverage is important, and what your appetite for risk is.
1. Double spends are devastating and easy, since they permanently split the tangle.
2. With no transaction limit, syncing from the beginning of time will take forever.
3. With no transaction limit, keeping up with network traffic will be impossible. (Especially on IoT devices.
4a. Nobody is going to use power and die space on IoT devices for the PoW chip.
4b. Or, alternately, if, as they claim, the PoW chip will take very little die space and very little power, the network will be destroyed outright by non-IoT PoW chips spamming the network.
5. There is currently a coordinator which confirms transactions. It is not P2P. If they remove the coordinator, I could write code that destroys the network by issuing TiB of transactions per day, making it impossible to sync/keep up.
6. Mesh networks of the type that they envisage deploying IOTA on are not widely deployed, and it's not clear that they will ever be widely deployed.
7. Tip selection does not converge.