IOTA Foundation should split if it wants to thrive into: a) the current Research and Development under the name of IOTA Foundation where they can continue their staggering progress (check out The IOTA Ecosystem Tracker and see it yourself)
b) a for-profit IOTA M2M, AG (they could have a contest to find a less idiotic name, to replace this placeholder) that would further its real life applications. Such a IOTA, AG would than be able to reach the audience and the investors from all over the world. As a publicly traded corporation it could be listed on The Frankfurt Stock Exchange and soon-after worldwide. (think NASDAQ, Shanghai Stock Exchange, Tokyo Stock Exchange) It is the time for the IOTA Foundation to leave the kindergarten bickering the greedy idiots in mostly unregulated markets live on. What’s the point of being a really serious, regulated, transparent and honest Foundation if you dwell with the Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? What’s the point of worrying over the Reddit bias, MIT lies (a serious company should’ve sue to bankruptcy, given the harmful, libelous lies) or the Bitcoin obsessed exchanges, filled with idiots and mired in crime or at least crime-like activities. What’s the point of not being able to really be present in the United States precisely because so many, anyway mostly crooked, entities there are not legalized there? This greedy, cult-ish like feeble-minded bloody mess that is so-called crypto-currencies world is a joke. What’s the point of keep being associated with “exchanges” that list Dogecoin? Or that have listed Bit-connect? IOTA is on its way to create a damn miracle, the Industry 4.0, a wholly new Machine to Machine economy for grown-ups so what’s the point of staying in the environment that had its five minutes of fame but is doomed to fail in the 5 – 10 years time span? IOTA Foundation could also find a way to reward its current IOTA tokens by converting IOTA holdings into IOTA AG shares (IOTA tokens would stay in the hands of current holders), a relatively easy process, and sell the rest, be it 10%, 49% or more to the institutional investors all over the world. A win-win for everyone. It is maddening to see a serious, honest project compared with the grotesque the Bitcoin promise has became, to see it being dragged through the mud by the petty criminals or greedy bastards, to see it associated by so many dishonest or botched or delusional project in the sphere whose only remaining value is the fiat money equivalent of the coin(s) whose main purpose was to replace that same crooked fiat money. It is sad to see the IOTA Foundation being associated with the sewer. It is time for the IOTA Foundation to start moving away from the crypto-currencies waste pipe and find its place where it rightfully belongs – among the real business creating the real projects and a promising future. Satoshi Watch’s Editorial Board
(a voice from the retirement) # # # # # #
NOTE: We’ve given up on the crypto-currencies given how discussing it became, a sewer that had attracted so many crooks and thugs that we stopped working on the Satoshi Watch. The criminal enterprises rule the public faces of the niche etc. Below is our last — unpublished, unedited and unfinished text that still has some valuable, relevant data in it. You can take a quick glance or shrug it off completely. Our apologies for such a draft. Even when the change is happening in front of our eyes it’s difficult to grasp how overwhelmingly different the future, such a change is creating, would look like. Arguably one of the most important developments in human history was that of the printing press. Developed around 1,440 in Mainz, Germany by Johannes Gutenberg, the printing press took away the huge advantage royalties and other elites have had for ages — access to knowledge. Forty (40) years later, there were presses in 110 cities in 6 different countries. Fifty (50) years after the press was invented, more than 8 million books had been printed, almost all of them filed with information that had previously been unavailable to the average person. Suddenly, there were books on law, agriculture, politics, exploration, metallurgy, botany, linguistics, you name it. As the power of knowledge had been unleashed to the masses yearned to be educated, the world was changed forever.

Fast Forward to the Data Explosion

“Data is the seed from which information, knowledge and wisdom sprouts and blossoms,” wrote David Sønstebø. The research group IDC predicted that the world will be creating 163 zettabytes of data a year by 2025. (check out their infographic) All that data needs protection. “Information wants to be free” crowd might adjust their unofficial motto into “information wants to be protected,” or else. This new world will see the emergence of a whole new economy, Industry 4.0! McKinsey Insights defines Industry 4.0 “as the next phase in the digitization of the manufacturing sector, driven by four disruptions: the astonishing rise in data volumes, computational power, and connectivity, especially new low-power wide-area networks; the emergence of analytics and business-intelligence capabilities; new forms of human-machine interaction such as touch interfaces and augmented-reality systems; and improvements in transferring digital instructions to the physical world, such as advanced robotics and 3-D printing.” Industry 4.0 will be powered by the data & values exchanges flows but it can’t exist without the data having its integrity secured, i.e. being protected from tampering and falsifying. Herein comes IOTA as the protocol for the Industry 4.0 and as its sentinel. “Blockchains where it costs money to send/store data,” are vastly inferior to the IOTA network where storing the data is entirely fee. Similarly, Sønstebø writes, “in the old blockchain architecture data transfers bloats and slows down the network, in IOTA’s Tangle it actually strengthens the security of the network and makes it even more efficient.” It’s obvious, if one wants to honestly mull over the whole crypto currencies sphere, that IOTA greatly diverges from the already old and, botched it seems, experiment of “peer-to-peer money” the Bitcoin represents (and its numerous clones pretend to mimic) and that it represents a whole new paradigm, almost an entry point into the Fourth Industrial Revolution needed for the Industry 4.0 to flourish and reach its full potential. Alas, given the current crypto currencies environment, it seems that for IOTA to (really) thrive the Bitcoin (mania) needs to die. Let us take a closer look at the Bitcoin’s path toward oblivion.

The King is dead, long live the King!

The original Bitcoin idea was of a great societal value but it has never been really realistic to expect that “peer-to-peer electronic cash” would replace world currencies any time soon. Some bleary-eyed bloggers or nerdy Pollyanna geeks might have dreamt of a better world in which it would be no governments and no fiat money criminals sold to us as “The Committee to Save the World” (just look at these bozos) but stop for a moment and ask yourself how would that world be organized? Who is going to build the bridges and highways and subways, once the governments are gone? Who is going to pave the roads or provide emergency services and pay for it once the fiat is gone? Who is going to build The China-Europe Railways, where only its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), aiming to bind the world with Beijing through $1 trillion of new infrastructure, once the Chinese communists are replaced by the blockchain technocrats? The Bitmain’s mining facility in Yunnan, perhaps? Who’s going to pay for free education in Germany or Norway once the governments are gone and fiat money has withered and died? Bitcoin “hodlers”? DASH masternode owners? TRON pie in the sky dreamers? Give me a break. (and yes, governments are mostly horrid monstrosities serving the oligarchs, plutocrats & kleptocrats and fiat is a toxic tool they use to rob and enslave us, but that does not mean Chinese BTC miners are any better) The people, it should not be denied, are mostly selfish, greedy bastards that care only about themselves. Callousness brought up to the light of day by the social networks breeds so much toxicity and reveals the worst of humanity on daily basis. Crypto currencies arena, especially during the bear market, feels more toxic than hatred inflicted Twitterdom. “I made more money with my shit-coin than you with your shit-coin so my dick is bigger than yours” is what’s left in the public arena, hilariously called “crypto currencies investments,” it is its underlying motto.

“It’s for our Children and their Children’s Children”

The Bitcoin is going to “bank the unbanked” mantra (or “I am in for the tech”) sounds as phony and hollow as any politician’s platitude. Have those morons regurgitating such nonsense of banking the unbanked ever seen any part of the world in which the people live on $1.90 or less, per person per day? (source) Remind me, what’s the cost of transaction in the Bitcoin network? Ah, yes, it’s 32 times bigger than the poverty line, or $62.60 per a transaction. (on May 23, 2018 at 2:55 PM ET per this source) I can’t really see the people in Sub-Saharan Africa flocking to Bitcoin in order to have their world changed by our generosity and the Chinese miners’ magnanimity. 385 million children are living in extreme poverty in today’s disgraceful world where we pay our (Western) governments to kill left and right and some bloated, ridiculously inflated digital asset will change any of that? Give me a fucking break and let us be honest with ourselves. If we managed to amass a kopeck or two via our lucky crypto currencies investments let us get back to the drawing table and see if anything could be done for the sore state of the world affairs and let us do our best to make the world a better place. Even if for a tiny little bit. But let us stop deluding ourselves that the crypto currencies space — at the present moment — represents anything more than a speculative game we, “the people,” are going to lose anyway.

Bitcoin’s Path Toward Oblivion

Kiss of death for the crypto currencies’ childish notions about moons and woons and Lamborghinis galore was smacked on unsuspected Bitcoin communities on Sunday, December 17, 2017, a fatal day on which the Bitcoin features started to trade on the CME. Remember, the “CME Group is the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace – handling 3 billion contracts worth approximately $1 quadrillion annually.” Do you remember what was the day Bitcoin has reached all-time high of $19,783.21? It was December 17, 2017, that very same day on which the Financial Crime Cartel entered the crypto currencies world. Remember Remember The Fifth of November is unlikely outcome for the Bitcoin phony revolution. What is a societal value of trading Bitcoin? As much as the societal value of trading soybean features. Zero, zilch, nada. Yes, the IDEA behind the Bitcoin (as much as the idea behind soybean features, for it is a tool intended to protect producers against adverse price move) has all the elements of a glorified revolutionary ideals but look at it now. Bitcoin has been forked 42 times thus far. “Superbitcoin” will make “bitcoin great again,” (source); BCX is “Ideal Bitcoin System for the Future” (source); BTP is “still Bitcoin, but exceeds Bitcoin” (source) etc., etc., etc., a nonsense at best, a fraud at worst. It never stops. And than there’s is the mother of all forks, Roger Ver’s famed socked puppetry (per Nick Szabo) a.k.a. Bitcoin Cash. The crypto nouveau riche turf wars are best seen in those meaningless fights over crypto fiefdoms, a war Ver & Co. started for everyone to lose. Deceptive BS everywhere. At the same time, the Bitcoin is in the hands of a few, mostly Chinese, miners. You think they give a rat’s ass for the social revolution, for “banking the unbanked” or, should you wish to go there, for the environment with their gigantic energy consumption? It’s a rhetorical question, it’s quite obvious that almost no one in the glorious Bitcoin trading arena gives a damn about any social issues. Money is all that matters, but the fiat money they made out of the BTC games, the same fiat money they claimed BTC is here to replace. It’s a fucking grotesque, what’s going on. Ponder this nonsense for a moment, the BTC utopia that states “bitcoin is untouchable by the nation state, the lifeblood of these conventional bodies will wither and die,” a notion screechingly peddled by the likes of Max Kaiser and his ilks. We’ll get back to the poor, powerless nation state later but for now let us ponder the Bitcoin parabolic price rise idiotic propaganda. If you value Max Kaiser more than for his entertainment value, remember how he was endlessly peddling silver and gold, almost a decade ago. In November of 2010, Max Keiser predicted “that silver bullion should eventually be valued at $500 per ounce and gold at $10,000 per ounce.” (source) How that played out is obvious on a silver’s price 10-years chart. As soon as the silver price has reached $50.00 Max bailed and left his faithful followers holding the bag, as they wait for the mythical $500.00 per ounce of silver. Well, the reality bit them hard: If anyone thinks Max Kaiser would not abandon — unless he already has — his Bitcoin holdings in a heartbeat, I have Jim Cramer, a proud snake oil salesman for the Financial Crime Cartel, on sale for them. After all, Max has jumped on the DASH bandwagon, only to see its price crushing hard and he is also shamelessly peddling his own ridiculous “MaxCoin,” another fork of a fork. (Maxcoin is a Bitpay/Bitcore fork) Social revolution based on blockchain my ass. Rather U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

The Tangle to the Rescue

In this grotesquely sad world of crypto currencies of greed, stupidity and blind hatred toward any project outside our own sound chamber it is almost normal that IOTA, likely the most real and honest project to date, has been mercilessly attacked, almost daily. No lie, no libel, no FUD was spared to degrade its hard, honest work. However, the nerves of steel and determination of a hacker possessed kept pushing IOTA Foundation forward.

Information is Power

The pace of developments coming out of IOTA is mind-boggling. IOTA collaboration with the UNOPS, “a United Nations resource for services and solutions across peace and security, humanitarian, and development efforts,” was made public on May 22, 2018 (source) and is only one of the giant strides IOTA made into the real world. Porsche Digital Lab is working with IOTA (source); Bosch Venture Capital made first investment in distributed ledger technology by purchasing IOTA tokens (source); then, The Bosch ConnectedWorld hosted IOTA’s very own co-founder, Dominik Schiener, to speak on the Breakout Session: Logistic & Supply Chain 4.0; IOTA partnered with The International Transportation Innovation Center (ITIC); IOTA and Fujitsu cooperation was made public on Hannover Messe only back in April of this, 2018 year. (source) Even more so, IOTA’s Ecosystem (that is “building the future of distributed, decentralized, and permissionless technologies, together”) is creating a plethora of fascinating projects.

Smart Flood Protection

Ponder Smart Flood Protection project that helps, well, flood protection by having IOTA’s Tangle protecting the data integrity. (you might wish to read a fascinating article by IOTA’s other co-founder, David Sønstebø, “Honest Data – Ensuring Data Integrity” and get an in-depth idea about a new paradigm IOTA is creating) IOTA’s Ecosystem is already flourishing. Glance at those few examples for a moment, in order to realize the scope of what’s possible with IOTA and is utterly impossible on the blockchain (think speed, glut, scalability & fees as insurmountable obstacles on the blockchain side, none of which would be a problem on IOTA’s Tangle):

IOTA Charging Station

“On Wednesday the 18th of April ElaadNL released the first charging station in the world where charging and paying can be done with IOTA, in a machine 2 machine way. The charger is part of the new ElaadNL test site. The test site is located in business park Arnhems Buiten (former KEMA site) and contains all types of charging stations that are used in the public area in the Netherlands. This includes a fast charger, a charging island, a battery, two charging lanterns and the IOTA charger.” (source)

Taipei City Waste Management on Tangle

“Taipei city government has officially approved a proof of concept (POC) to be integrated into the first three floors of the Taipei city hall building. Effective immediately, TWO IOT will install IoT sensors that will measure the fill levels of their waste bins in real time. These IoT sensors will use the Tangle network to store the data collected by the sensors to a secure and tamperproof ledger. Biilabs inc. will provide the Tangle DLT engineering services and enable TWO IOT to use IOTA and show the world, that real world applications using IoT & Tangle are very much possible. Using IOTA’s Tangle Technology, TWO IOT will also publicize the positive effects it has and its abilities to change the world. For 2018, it has been voiced that IOTA would like its capabilities to be implemented into real world applications. TWO IOT will accomplish this mission for it by using its technology in this POC.” (source)

Streaming Data Payment Protocol

Bidirectional automatic data micro-payment channels, with data flowing in one direction and micro-payments in the other, is possible on Tangle. (source)

EU General Data Protection Regulation

In the European Union, where the IOTA Foundation is registered, data protection is a right. “The protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data is a fundamental right. Article 8(1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the ‘Charter’) and Article 16(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) provide that everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.”