Ternary computation does reduce the number of operations for things like multiplication, that’s correct. But if the rest of the modern world isn’t also ternary,

Ternary computation does reduce the number of operations for things like multiplication, that’s correct. But if the rest of the modern world isn’t also ternary, you actually introduce performance overhead that reduces your overall efficiency. A bit-based computation has two states, and a trit-based computation has three. Since 3 isn’t a power of 2 (or even, for that matter), you’ll have a remainder when you convert your ternary multiplication to binary. Considering this, it doesn’t really make sense that the Iota founders made a decision to not only introduce a novel cryptocurrency system (the tangle), but to also try to push ternary adoption. That’s a monolithic amount of work from a research and business perspective, and it strains credulity that they could engage in this with a full understanding of what they’re doing. Their work is completely divorced from the rest of the academic community, which has many well-respected researchers with a vetted track record already. Innovation usually happens in incremental steps forward, building from the (recent) work of others. Much more rarely, it manifests as a large leap forward without significant cumulative work. But it approximately never happens that a new state of the art combines several large and orthogonal leaps forward. It’s not impossible, but my outlook is strongly pesimisstic. When you combine this with the frankly odd (and potentially unethical) behavior the founders are showing - rolling their own cryptography out of ignorance or to attempt to sabotage other open source projects - it becomes extremely hard to take the work seriously.