Read on Twitter
1/ Hey @coiner_lol I can see you’re passionate about the protocol, and you see that it has potential, but have suffered losses through the token performance. I understand that, and I know how losses are never something someone looks forward to.
2/ You have a few things right. The key among them being the need for simplicity. The crypto/blockchain/DLT space is highly complex and difficult to bring non-technical people into due to the level of depth and breadth that some of the work entails.
3/ For most, making that simple and telling the “So What?”, can be just as hard as building the tech. We at the IOTA Foundation have not done well at this traditionally.
4/ We started as a far spread-out group of believers that wanted to dedicate ourselves to making the vision of what the IOTA protocol can accomplish a reality.
5/ We came from an eclectic background, almost entirely of technical peoples, and focused on Build first, talk later. And many of us got heated in our public conversations, and handled things that were far from graceful, and often times quite the opposite.
6/ I’ve been working with the Foundation since December 2017. I was not involved in the beginning of the protocol or the leadership of the Foundation early on. I have not been savvy to any of the internal conversations of the original members of the Foundation that preceded me.
7/ I came from a US Military and federal government background working in cyber security, signals analysis, and operations.
8/ I was used to structure, leadership, efficient and informed decision making, and an effort to be pragmatic, and realistic, and to take every step with purpose and enough information to trust in the decisions you’re making.
9/ I discovered IOTA while doing research for how to design efficient chain of custody processes and how to create more secure holistic systems. I gained interest in the protocol around one specific capability that it offers, that I didn’t see with anything else.
10/ Value, and Data are treated as equal. I highlight this in an effort to do what you ask, and explain simply, why you, and others, should care. When I looked at every other DLT on the market, I had a problem seeing how they could actually DO anything.
11/ They all suffered from the same problems. They tied everything to value, or the token, that formed the basis of their DLT. And all they cared about was who had control over that token and decentralizing it.
12/ This hit huge barriers from my perspective, because scaling BTC to 8 billion people wasn’t feasible, and the time to transfer funds if everyone was using it were not realistic for a product that aimed at going into production with global adoption.
13/ Or as you say about IOTA, BTC was not a working product that could reach global adoption based on its original goals.
14/ And I will argue this is still true, hence it’s narrative transitioning to a store of value replacing gold, and not that of being the currency the world needs to ensure things like the financial crisis of 2008 doesn’t happen again.
15/ I agree with its current narrative. It’s taken a strong pivot from the purpose it was originally designed for. And I think using it as a store of value makes perfect sense.
16/ From my perspective, that’s why it’s gotten traction. Because the “So What?” for BTC is finally simple, and finally makes sense. 11+ years later.
17/ Now, for IOTA, I saw that it answered a question that was a major barrier for BTC, ETH, and pretty much every other option in the space aside from NANO
18/ How can build something, that can accomplish the goals of what blockchain technology and Bitcoin was supposed to do but design it in a way that can achieve scale and potentially reach global adoption.
19/ Second to that, going back to my key interest, value and data are treated equal. So, can we build something that scales, that runs on the first principles of blockchain, and enable it to actually do something MORE.
20/ It has to do something GREATER, than just send value over a network in a trusted way with no central authority to restrict your freedoms or personal rights. This is great, but it's not enough.
21/ If all we’re concerned with is sending money to each other, and BTC can’t do that at a global scale, then it’s all pointless and a waste of resources.
22/ And is all we hope for in life really the ability to send others money? Is that the impact you want to dedicate your life to in the world and the stake you put in the ground?
23/ With my past, this didn’t interest me. I didn’t care about financial systems, because from my eyes, when I paid for something, it was paid for, and when I needed money, it was available. But doing something more. Something that could really make an impact interested me. ALOT
24/ So much so, that I quit a highly secure job working in an industry with a salary that would provide my family and I with comfort for as long as I needed. A job, that I am sure I could never go back to due to the restrictions put in place to even get there in the first place.
1/ Hey @coiner_lol I can see you’re passionate about the protocol, and you see that it has potential, but have suffered losses through the token performance. I understand that, and I know how losses are never something someone looks forward to.
2/ You have a few things right. The key among them being the need for simplicity. The crypto/blockchain/DLT space is highly complex and difficult to bring non-technical people into due to the level of depth and breadth that some of the work entails.
3/ For most, making that simple and telling the “So What?”, can be just as hard as building the tech. We at the IOTA Foundation have not done well at this traditionally.
4/ We started as a far spread-out group of believers that wanted to dedicate ourselves to making the vision of what the IOTA protocol can accomplish a reality.
5/ We came from an eclectic background, almost entirely of technical peoples, and focused on Build first, talk later. And many of us got heated in our public conversations, and handled things that were far from graceful, and often times quite the opposite.
6/ I’ve been working with the Foundation since December 2017. I was not involved in the beginning of the protocol or the leadership of the Foundation early on. I have not been savvy to any of the internal conversations of the original members of the Foundation that preceded me.
7/ I came from a US Military and federal government background working in cyber security, signals analysis, and operations.
8/ I was used to structure, leadership, efficient and informed decision making, and an effort to be pragmatic, and realistic, and to take every step with purpose and enough information to trust in the decisions you’re making.
9/ I discovered IOTA while doing research for how to design efficient chain of custody processes and how to create more secure holistic systems. I gained interest in the protocol around one specific capability that it offers, that I didn’t see with anything else.
10/ Value, and Data are treated as equal. I highlight this in an effort to do what you ask, and explain simply, why you, and others, should care. When I looked at every other DLT on the market, I had a problem seeing how they could actually DO anything.
11/ They all suffered from the same problems. They tied everything to value, or the token, that formed the basis of their DLT. And all they cared about was who had control over that token and decentralizing it.
12/ This hit huge barriers from my perspective, because scaling BTC to 8 billion people wasn’t feasible, and the time to transfer funds if everyone was using it were not realistic for a product that aimed at going into production with global adoption.
13/ Or as you say about IOTA, BTC was not a working product that could reach global adoption based on its original goals.
14/ And I will argue this is still true, hence it’s narrative transitioning to a store of value replacing gold, and not that of being the currency the world needs to ensure things like the financial crisis of 2008 doesn’t happen again.
15/ I agree with its current narrative. It’s taken a strong pivot from the purpose it was originally designed for. And I think using it as a store of value makes perfect sense.
16/ From my perspective, that’s why it’s gotten traction. Because the “So What?” for BTC is finally simple, and finally makes sense. 11+ years later.
17/ Now, for IOTA, I saw that it answered a question that was a major barrier for BTC, ETH, and pretty much every other option in the space aside from NANO
18/ How can build something, that can accomplish the goals of what blockchain technology and Bitcoin was supposed to do but design it in a way that can achieve scale and potentially reach global adoption.
19/ Second to that, going back to my key interest, value and data are treated equal. So, can we build something that scales, that runs on the first principles of blockchain, and enable it to actually do something MORE.
20/ It has to do something GREATER, than just send value over a network in a trusted way with no central authority to restrict your freedoms or personal rights. This is great, but it's not enough.
21/ If all we’re concerned with is sending money to each other, and BTC can’t do that at a global scale, then it’s all pointless and a waste of resources.
22/ And is all we hope for in life really the ability to send others money? Is that the impact you want to dedicate your life to in the world and the stake you put in the ground?
23/ With my past, this didn’t interest me. I didn’t care about financial systems, because from my eyes, when I paid for something, it was paid for, and when I needed money, it was available. But doing something more. Something that could really make an impact interested me. ALOT
24/ So much so, that I quit a highly secure job working in an industry with a salary that would provide my family and I with comfort for as long as I needed. A job, that I am sure I could never go back to due to the restrictions put in place to even get there in the first place.
25/ / I, and others working at the Foundation have sacrificed magnitudes more in value, than the losses you have suffered. I took a big pay cut, and a big benefit cut, like many others.
26/ And I did it because I wanted to do something more, and work on something that could truly make an impact on every single person if it could be done right, accomplish its vision, and do it at scale.
27/ We’re a small foundation, and we’ve worked tirelessly for years to make the absolutely monumental progress we have in the technology. We’ve rid it of inefficiencies. We’ve solved the problems we set out to. And now we’re building the last pieces we need to bring it to reality
28/ I personally have worked multiple weeks with over 100 hours put in, and I know MANY others that have done the same.
29/ This was not done to simply, serve our investors. We are a nonprofit foundation, that holds less than 5% of the token from which it was founded. So, to get something straight, WE DO NOT SERVE YOU.
30/ We serve a reality for a better future where trust can be implicit in how we interact with each other. And where those that take advantage of others can be held accountable.
31/ We serve and sacrifice, so that people that don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in digital money like yourself, have a better way. They can own their own identities. They can manage their own finances.
32/ They can reach audiences, have access to new opportunities, and take the steps to better their lives. We serve the world, and every person and machine in it, because we’re fucking tired of seeing people get taken advantage of.
33/ And we’re tired of people crying that they made an investment, and it didn’t work out as they planned as fast as they wanted it to. So when you say we serve you and our investors. Try to keep in mind that we don’t. We don’t have investors. We have donors.
34/ We don’t have shares. We’re a nonprofit for a reason. We don’t hold the majority of our token for a reason. I can’t speak for my predecessors, and I will not get mixed up in any of their personal matters, but I can speak for myself and this is why I’m here.
35/ Now, when you say we don’t have a working product. I'd say that you have not been looking close enough, and this is not your fault.
36/ It’s hard to understand everything we’re doing and how it all works. We’re different, we don’t fit into a predefined box of how a blockchain works and what it’s for. We Are More.
37/ Our layer 1, or core protocol, send data, and value. At the same rate. At the same cost. Which is Zero. And with as minimal resources as possible. For example, as of 2018, you could send over 5 million IOTA transactions, for the cost of 1 US Cent ($0.01 USD) in energy usage
38/ And the protocol is exponentially more efficient now. Why does it matter that we can send data and value, efficiently, in near real time, and more securely than traditional networks. Well, lets put this back into the “So What?” about blockchain in general.
39/ I wasn’t interested in others, because I didn’t see what you could do if everything were tied to value. I didn’t see why value tokens had any actual value; other than traditional simplistic concepts of economics, being supply and demand, fungibility, inflation etc.
40/ However, with IOTA, I saw something different. With the ability to do data, and value, on the same network, from the same devices, you could do more. You could use data, to give the value a purpose.
41/ I can send 1000 data transactions from a device. That data has value. And on the same network, I could very simply directly provide value, for the data.
42/ This means that the token isn’t providing the value anymore. The network is. The users are. The companies are. And they can all be fairly, and efficiently paid for that value by those that consume it.
43/ Regardless of whether they were in the US, Canada, Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, the Philippines, Kenya or Japan or wherever.
44/ If you had access to a device, and you could connect to a network for a few minutes a day, then someday, you’d be able to create value through your everyday actions to the world, and be fairly compensated for it.
45/ You could build businesses, and entire industries that are completely outside of anything we see today with these abilities, and you could take a bit of that power back, and have some control over your life, how you live it, and even where you live it.
46/ This is something that can be done TODAY. Not in 5 or 10 years. And this is something we work tirelessly on building every single day at the IOTA Foundation. Because it’s MORE. And it MATTERS. And it has the potential to make a real impact.
47/ This is why we have over a dozen grant funded projects by various governments, including Canada, Chile, multiple EU nations, Japan, Kenya, and more. This is why we have over 100 partners that we are actively working with that pay us to develop with them.
48/ This is what we can do with our layer two applications. Like IOTA Streams, Identity, Stronghold, Access, and soon Smart Contracts and our Firefly wallet. If you haven’t read the releases on them. Then I’d advise you catch up.
49/ Because they explain the so what, and it’s bigger than sending some money to someone and satisfying “investors.” We are NOT here to serve you. We are not here for Investors. We are here for MORE.
50/ We are here to make something real. That makes an IMPACT. We have multiple revenue streams. And I would predict that by the end of 2021 we will be remove any reliance on the token.
51/ But you have something right. We need to do better. We need to explain things simpler. We need to show the proof of everything we’re building.
52/ And I’ve been working on this personally over the last year with the product releases and with other IF leaders by restructuring how we do things internally from the ground up.
53/ So expect to see simplicity. I’ll be working with others to write up a “So What” on the changes we’ve made to the protocol through Chrysalis with most likely weekly releases starting the second week of January.
54/ I’ll also be working with others to write up a simplified vision document. Explaining the so what of the protocol. Why it matters. How its MORE. And how it aims to do something real and make a real IMPACT.
55/ This is not because of you, as I’ve been working toward this for some months. But I thank you for the push to talk about it publicly. This is not something I’ve been good at due to my past. But something I’ve been getting better at and will continue to do with more fervor.
56/ Now, I’m going to be spending the following days enjoying my holidays with my family. And getting ready to continue doing something more with a protocol that’s better.
57/ Working with a team that I have the highest possible regard for, and partners that are here because they believe in the same vision that I and the rest of the IF do. If you can't now see that vision, then you don't belong in our community, and we will not cater to you.
