Just to clear this up - you don't have to attach your address to the Tangle in order to receive a payment.

We're just hours away from a historic time in the history of IOTA. Bitfinex launch in t minus ~6 hours.

Let's make sure that the onboarding process for newcomers is as smooth as possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h09z2N0MtuQ&t

Here's a rough introduction to IOTA

https://youtu.be/Babe7yiScNw

Discover IOTA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h09z2N0MtuQ

It's totally okay that you haven't been following these projects, and it actually helps to provide an opportunity for community members to offer valuable information on the subject.

IOTA: The IOTA Foundation has refused to allow IOTA to be listed on public exchanges for nearly an entire year. They launched the public beta last July, and the community has been begging to be listed ever since last summer. A few whales who were hoping to quickly exit upon exchange listing squirmed for months, and finally begrudgingly sold OTC because they couldn't stand waiting for exchanges. This project was VERY clear from the beginning that they didn't want any "investors" involved, and that anyone who didn't want to actively engage in the project should not join. The devs have chosen to rigorously focus on development of the actual software in lieu of the typical ICO hype-mania garbage. So much so that any price speculation or trading talk has resulted in swift bans in the Slack and forum. They have all but actively discouraged anyone from buying IOTA. This is one of the many unbelievable strengths of this project and team.

Jinn: See above. Plus they literally took their website down, offered to buy Jinn tokens from anyone who didn't fully understand the project, and have been in stealth mode ever since. They have pretty much begged people not to invest, and even said after the initial Jinn crowdfund event that they regretted doing the crowdfund (would have rather kept it to private and VC style funding I guess).

No funding or efforts have been spent on marketing. No regard has been given to price whatsoever.

If these projects are too focused on price and not on product, I don't know what to tell you.  

The deadline is July 17th (I may be off by a couple of days now that I think about it. Not sure exactly on the date, but it's definitely middle of July), so there's still a month and a half left. The IOTA Foundation seems to be fully focused on the project right now, but I'm sure they'll get back to you once this hectic period is done. Be sure to check on the status of your claim in the IOTA slack at least once a week to make sure things get sorted out by July.

Could be. Just make sure to stay up to date on developments.

I suspect that one last claim will be required after the impending snapshot, but not yet. Try to check in periodically to keep up with things as they progress.

This is a common misconception, but one that I don't mind perpetuating.

It's important to keep things in perspective. Everyone treats BTC as the leader in this space, but there's still no big money (institutional investors) in BTC yet. It remains a niche speculative technology. ETH is the same way.

All block chains are basically a waiting game to see if payment channels are even capable of scaling. This is a huge risk proposition. Appreciate the fact that almost all of the money in the DLT space is a speculative play on the lottery of one DLT actually working in the next 10 years.

Take all of that into account and realize that the total crypto cap is around $100B. It's most likely still in the early adopter phase. Wait until a winning technology (something that actually works) comes along that has real world applicability.

I'm not saying IOTA is this, just trying to give perspective to where we are on the timeline of DLTs in general.

Total supply is completely arbitrary and meaningless as far as value impact is concerned. Value is influenced by changes in supply.
Let's build up an understanding of the supply curve. Supply vs. quantity supplied
http://econperspectives.blogspot.com/2008/05/supply-vs-quantity-supplied.html

Now let's tie it together with inelasticity. Scroll down to 'perfectly inelastic supply'
http://www.economicshelp.org/concepts/inelastic-supply/

With a fixed supply that has a perfectly inelastic supply curve, there are no changes in supply to influence prices from the supply side. In other words, at all prices supply will remain the same. Additionally, the total supply (location on the X axis) is unchangeable, so the curve will not shift in relation to the demand curve, which WOULD impact prices in the future.

EDIT: I don't want to risk being ambiguous here: The supply of IOTAs is forever fixed at 2,779 Ti. That makes it perfectly inelastic while also being fixed in place on the X axis.



Hopefully enough to be fully incentivized for project success. Considering that no token allotment was held for the devs or founders and 100% of the tokens were distributed in the crowdsale, the more he has, the more it cost him. Incentive alignment from the top down is important, so the community has donated an unprecedented amount of money to the IOTA Foundation and various other fundraising efforts.

Alas, the well known hard and fast rule of 2x to 3x gains has been eschewed to all but guarantee failure.

Again, so generous as to give away free advice. A true gentleman and a scholar.

Better check your numbers. You're off by many orders of magnitude.

Besides that, really solid post. Flawless analysis of the fundamentals that shows a great understanding of the underlying technology, willingness to think critically, and a selfless attitude that puts others needs ahead of one's own. On top of all that, the impeccable display of chart interpretation is elite in quality. The wonderful crypto community is lucky to count you amongst their ranks. You're selling yourself short if you're not charging a premium for this insight.

Check out some introductory reading:
http://iotasupport.com/whatisiota.shtml
https://iota.readme.io/docs/what-is-iota

That should be enough to let you form your own opinion on your first two questions and your last question.

Exchange launch will happen sometime between tomorrow and the end of 2019.

If all else fails, join the IOTA slack and I can walk you through the process step-by-step.