End this drama over nada Another day in crypto, another day filled with pointless drama.
Once again certain people who seem addicted to drama start the usual barrage of false accusations and logical fallacies either out of pure trolldom or cognitive deficiencies.
I am writing this post to set the record straight and to hopefully inspire people to look beyond this vacuous nonsense and instead focus their energy and enthusiasm towards productive endeavors rather than this toxic and complete waste of time.
Will IOTA potentially fork and 'leave' the current holders 'behind' ?I have seen this question in several variants in the last couple of weeks, but before we can even begin to adress this concern we must first get on the same page:
We (company that sold IOTA software) embarked on the IOTA project out of necessity, a necessity to have this technology in the tech stack of Internet-of-Things. The vision we have for Internet-of-Things requires a transactional settlement layer so that distributed technological resources can be traded between prosuming and consuming machines in the emerging 'Economy of Things'. That is why we created IOTA, not for money, not for political ideology, not for glory. This was made abundantly clear at the time of crowdsale. We sold the software as a product from the same company that is developing the hardware infrastructure for our vision of precisely this Internet-of-Things.
We had ample opportunity to forego the entire crypto-community and sell the software directly to companies if we wanted. We chose the route of involving the crypto and development community because we genuinely believe that the most efficient open-source projects got active and involved communities. This was aimed at developers / activists in the space, not speculators. Speculators are of course free to purchase and hold iotas, but we have no obligation whatsoever to even listen to them, nor will we. Everyone was 100% aware of this when purchasing IOTA software.
Now that we are very close to delivering on our sales agreement of said software, we now need to ensure that it gets adoption. Having the best tech is not sufficient for our vision. It's sufficient to do whatever task you purchased the software for, but we need global adoption of a Tangle standard for our vision of 'Ledger of Things' in 'Economy of Things' to materialize. This is why we - as community members, not company - have been
VOLUNTEERING time and effort to grow the IOTA ecosystem and work 'behind the scenes' to get company adoption. But for this to succeed (as a standard) we need at least 5% of total iotas going forward to be able to facilitate the adoption of IOTA as a IoT standard. I realize that a lot of people in crypto don't have a lot of experience with this and so it may seem obfuscated as to why this is so important, and if it's so important why didn't we just set aside the premine?
To answer this you must understand a couple of things:
a) Getting adoption for standards is notoriously hard. I implore every skeptic to do some research into how technological standards get established. TL;DR usually behemoth companies form alliances around a certain technology, strike beneficial deals together and pour millions/billions into the ecosystem. This includes travelling and participating in tons of conferences and expos, visiting companies and trying to show them why the tech is useful for their company and why they ought to adopt it etc. This costs insane amounts of money. To put into perspective we were semi-invited to an IoT conference, the only problem was they needed
40,000 dollars for us to have a proper demonstration of the tech, including speech and Q&A. This is not cheap, and this is before you calculate in travel expenses and wages for those hours.
b) Why we didn't set aside a premineWe made the choice to make IOTA completely open and community driven. We knew from years experience in this field that the
'bystander effect' kicks in quickly. This would've posed a great risk to us as a start-up if we had set aside a premine, as it would make us liable for the success of the project post-software release. This is not something we want to, and I think from the borderline slave treatment we get from certain idiots that everyone can understand why, even when we don't set aside a premine, this sort of degenerate mentality still prevails in certain people. That is not to say that premine is universally a bad thing, Ethereum did great with theirs, but they also had a fuckton more funding, a lot more devs on hand and a very different kind of vision.
So... going back to the concern at hand: we will do whatever it takes to succeed in ensuring that the IOTA technology gets adoption in the real world. We would prefer that it happens through this iteration and this community, which is why we have volunteered A LOT of time and effort to make that a reality, but if the community is not able to gather ~5% of total iotas to ensure the IOTA project's continued growth, well then we must find another route to achieve our goal. This is not only within our obvious rights, it's a no-brainer. We did not make IOTA to make money for ourselves, we made it to solve a technological problem that hinders adoption of IoT. If that means teaming up with these companies on a consortium, then of course we will do that ASAP. This is 100% the community's choice. You will still have the IOTA technology you purchased, and you can as a community do whatever you wish with it, it's 100% open source, that's the entire point of open source projects like this. And judging from those who are the most disrespectful and drama instigators, it should be no issue, you get rid of us, and you are suddenly at the helm of this ship and can show your superiority as captains.
To even utter the very notion that this is somehow a 'threat' or 'blackmailing' is so infinitely disingenous and stupid that I literally feel the tumors growing inside my brain from having to endure such vapid bullshit.
So in summary:Everyone has purchased IOTA software, we are delivering IOTA software + more. That is the WHOLE extent of our sales agreement.
We also volunteer as community members to initiate an IOTA Foundation which will be a non-profit entity that will consist of the most dedicated people with the most experience in terms of getting the right people involved to achieve the goal of establishing IOTA as a universal standard in 'Internet-of-Things' as a 'Ledger of Things'/'Economy of Things'
IF the community
CHOOSES to take another path. I.E. not fund this foundation initiative, then we are forced to also take another path to achieve our goal. This is a mutual choice and is 100% transparent, open, fair, honest, moral, ethical and above all
OBVIOUS.
The ironic thing is that IOTA is actually going very, very well and the majority of the community is engaged and rational individuals, there is actually very little drama, except when certain individuals decide to create it here on the forum. So for everyone else: please just don't buy into the drama, get active, donate to the foundation and just ignore those people, sadly I can't, as it's my responsibility to have to continuously alleviate these dishonest 'concerns'
