I think stopping the airdrops was a good decision for the simple reason that it is good for investors. And I think most people holding byteball today are investors and this is absolutely natural and unavoidable. Why? Because there is simply no other reason to hold bytes in the moment: you cannot purchase anything with it, you cannot use it as a matter to transfer money between exchanges. Sure you can argue, many people (me included) would like to see it suceeed as an everyday payment method, but this is pretty far in the future. But why should I hold bytes now, if I want to use it to buy a beer in a couple of years. The answer is because I think it goes up in price in the meantime and that makes me an investor.
Therefore I think Tony needs to care for investors, because this are the only people holding bytes for the time beeing. Even if that is not Tonys intended target audience, but it is definetely the audience he has to deal with, if the project shall gain more adoption.

But as I wrote before, the uncertainty what will happen with the undistributed funds is a killer argument for all investors. Nobody knows how many will be distributed over which time periods, therefore the price could crash completely, if too many new bytes become available. How about putting the undistributed funds into smart contracts, that lock them up for predefined periods of time, so everybody knows how much new bytes can be distributed per time period?

One more comment on exchanges: everybody wants to see Byteball adopted, so why don't we try to get it to more of the big exchanges in order to establish it as a way to transfer money between exchanges? Byteball has fast confirmation times and low fees, so this is a good use case that could be estabished in a reasonable time frame. There are not that many use cases for a new cryptocurrency and this is a obvious one that can help drive adoption.

I also agree with cryptohunter.

It is tonychs project and he has done a great job on the technical side. I can fully understand that he wants to stay in control. But Byteball currently is not a decentralized currency which is run by a community like Bitcoin was from the very beginning. My impression is it is more or less run by a single person.

A community does not come out of nowhere just by doing airdrops. You need to give people the chance to get involved.

I am here since quite a while but under a different account which I lost. I was mining bitcoin on CPU, lost some to the first MtGox hack in 2010 or so and unfortunately did not really believe in bitcoins success Whatever...

But even in that times bitcoin transfers have always been  reliable and I understood the crypto behind it good enough to know the funds cannot get lost once they are in the blockchain. In the moment I do no have the same trust in IOTA. If it would work, the concept is great, but I do not see that it works like it should. And I am not sure if the current problems can be overcome or if it is a more general problem of the concept, not the implementation.

Do you think whales trust their big money to alpha level technologie that might take weeks to transfer to an exchange if at all?

I have no access to the Slack. Is there any other way to check if a node is synced?

I have a transaction to bitfinex stuck since 20hrs now. I used the latest wallet and have already promoted 2 times. No idea what is wrong. But somehow nobody even seems to care that it is just not working. Everybody seems to just buy on exchanges and never withdraw.

All in all IOTA currently to me is not a system that seems ready for the end user with all the problems of the wallet and the tangle itsself (long transaction times, some transactions never confirm, reattach, promote (looks like a work around by sending a zero transaction as first confirmation?), address reuse, slow buggy wallet).

In the moment I do not dare to move my IOTA off the exchange into the tangle because is seems there is a real risk that the IOTA get lost. Leaving it on an exchange for longer durations is also risky. The only option is selling it for something else.

Has anybody lately tried to withdraw iota off an exchange? Does it still take around a week?

I tried yesterday to send a transaction between 2 of my own adresses, still not confirmed. Does this depend on the amount that is sent?

I am watching Byteball for almost a year now, technically it is superior to most other currencies and I would like to be successful!

However as an ouside observer I have a few comments to improve marketing and community building. Do not take it personally, just my feedback of what I think. I think with a few changes the perception by outsiders can be improved a lot, leading to more people willing to trust and use it.

• stop airdrops on BTC holders! Most of them just seem to dump it directly thereby destroying the price. A coin without value is beneficial for nobody.
• make distribution predictable using a clear algorithm. One (or a few) persons deciding how to distribute the remaining coins kills the price. Why should I buy coins now knowing that the decision of one person can completely destroy the price when he decides to start the next airdrop. This situation is worse than what can be done with Fiat money by central banks. I think e.g. Bitcoin was sucessful because the money distribution algorithm was very clear and inflation no issue.
• do not market sports betting as main selling point for smart contracts. ICOs, ok, insurance ok, but not betting. For ousiders like me that just sounds not legitimate for a system that wants to be a currency.
• redesign the website. The content is good, but the color scheme is not very attractive. Hire a proffesional designer for this task.
• redesing the logo. Just a white ball is not easy to recognize as a logo at all. It has probably been done by someone who cares more about software than design (like me). Maybe keep the ball but add some structure. Pay a professional designer.