Mat Yarger (♻️, ♻️) Profile picture
Dec 24, 2020 24 tweets 4 min read Read on X
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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More from @Mat_Yarger

Dec 7, 2023
After almost a year of discussion with @HBAR_foundation on how we could work together, we're finally at a point where we will. Thank you @geisenbergerwes @ElaineSong7 and all the others at the HBAR Foundation.
You all truly helped me understand how we can be stronger together, and I'm more excited than ever about what the future holds for @_Demia, @iota, and now @hedera. We're bringing our ecosystems together to build the best solution stack possible for transparent carbon markets.
Together we'll be able to leverage the work we've done with @Dell, @intel, and others on @ProjectAlvarium to enable measurable data confidence in climate data. We're using Demia's Zero-Trust Data Model, Zero-Knowledge File System, and Secure data wallets for project to leverage.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 24, 2022
I feel like we should have a discussion on growth, capturing opportunities, and how the #IOTA ecosystem is professionalizing.

Time for a thread

/🧵
Growth - Over the past two years, we’ve solved some amazing difficult questions around the technology and what our focus as a foundation should be. We as a foundation have grown by leaps and bounds with almost 200 employees now. And more so, our community has grown even more.
Just in the past months, we’ve seen dozens of new companies announced in the community, many from other ecosystems starting to build on IOTA, and the benefit of building in public and shifting our focus to tooling and core protocol enhancements for the community to harness
Read 17 tweets
Sep 15, 2021
So excited for the upcoming enhancements for Streams and Identity. With the next releases, you'll start seeing the two interoperate. Allowing you to govern streams with identity. And allowing you to tie decentralized data streams to a decentralized identity.
This will serve as the fundamental basis for advancements on data ownership and content creation. Allowing a whole host of new solutions to spring into the market around identity wallets, and IoT device governance and data selling.
For data selling, payment streams will start to come onto the roadmap and tied into the Streams and identity aspects. Allowing fully decentralized, peer to peer data marketplaces to finally be realized. Utilizing a massively secure and scalable infrastructure.
Read 7 tweets
May 28, 2021
Something has been bothering me about the crypto space lately. I see often statements like, "Yeah cool, but will they use the token for that?"

It just shows that people forget to ask the simplest question.

Why?

Why should they?

Whats the point?
With most crypto projects, the token use cases are so amorphous that the "Why" is almost nonexistent, outside of, it makes a few people a lot of money. You inevitably get to a point where the answer is, "for payments!"

But payments for what?
Reprogramming the financial sector is great, I will not negate that. The efficiency increases, the transparency and accountability that can come into play create massive unforseen impacts at scale, if solutions ever scale to the level to accomplish that.

But there can be more.
Read 13 tweets
Dec 24, 2020
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
Read 34 tweets
May 30, 2019
1/ For clarity, MANA will not be assigned or transferred by users. It is NOT a token. It can NOT be traded. And it should NOT be considered an implementation of DPoS, but an evolution as @hus_qy says(TaPoS). MANA is a metadata ability linked directly to VALUE transactions. #IOTA
2/ In a technical sense, it will be more like a protocol wrapper or header once implemented with the purpose of saying that a fund transfer is reputable because the node sending the funds is within its threshold.
3/ Then verifying that it's within that threshold by tying the underlying MANA to the value transaction and associating that MANA with the decentralized identifier(Node ID) tied to the node. This process is fully asynchronous and autonomous between nodes.
Read 10 tweets

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