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.
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