IOTA at the Crossroads (3)
(and not a word about David and Sergey)
You can safely skip the first part in which I write about my own crypto history and offer some musings over the whole crypto developments and scroll down to the second part below, titled “IOTA at the Crossroads.”
REAL TIME EDIT: After the Tangle EE initiative I was thinking of not publishing this, for me the game is over: IOTA will win. And it will win big. On September 2017, two months before the IOTA Foundation was chartered we published “IOTA — The Winner Takes it All” article, but what we/I have envisioned then is now coming into the reality. After mulling over the IOTA developments I’ve decided to go out with this, not really finished article, nevertheless. It would have a historic value, at least for us in the Satoshi Watch, for we’re feeling truly proud that we have found a true gem, a project that would help create a whole new economy, the Industry 4.0 and be its bloodstream, well before many even heard about it.
Trygve, my most valuable friend:
You know better than anyone — this world is bleak, grotesque, and
beyond vile. How anyone could argue otherwise? Why we never listened
to Denis Diderot and did not “strangle the last king with the guts of the last
priest,” is beyond me. What a shameful monument to the cowardice of that
bloody mass we call humanity. The heroes are gone and despised in the
muck of political correctness of the 21st century’s agendas, and all that’s left
is a flat-out insane mass of deranged, zombie-like lunatics voting for equally
corrupt, stinking political parties all over the world.
The above is a quote from my book on insanity (not the crypto madness though) I quoted while responding to a reader’s private message. I was able to have the time put aside in order to write that book and travel around the world, to all the locations mentioned in it, thanks to the profit IOTA had made me back in the 2017. The profits also went into paying the college tuition for some women in Kenya and Uganda, to the Ryan’s Well Foundation, as donations and, to an orphanage in Subukia, also in Kenya, again as donations, etc. Yes, I might be bragging a bit but I was contributing in a manner the IF was going to contribute to the world. What is the fucking point of living if you do not want to, at least try, to make life easier and more wonderful for someone else, even if for just a little bit?
Incidentally, the money was firstly meant for an IOTA documentary, “The Paradigm Shift” I wanted to make with the monies but the co-founders were too busy (the IF was chartered on November 3rd, 2017, at the very same time I had the idea) to really consider my proposal. So I embarked on circling the world instead.
On the Shoulders of Giants
Well before the hysterical crypto gluttons of today, hooked onto the shallow “Lambo” dreams while unwilling to put a single effort themselves in order to contribute anything of value to the world, locked into their own respective tribes (so all the “others” would be the “enemies”), we had serious people mulling over dare issues the humanity faces.
Those were intellectuals and visionaries, people such as Eric Hughes, a mathematician from University of California, Berkeley, also an author of A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto; Nick Szabo, a computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer, also a creator of the Bitgold; Tim May, who worked for Intel as a senior scientist but also wrote The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, back in 1992; John Gilmore a computer scientist and also one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Wei Dai, a computer engineer and a cypherpunk best known as creator of b-money; Hal Finney, a late legend who had created Reusable Proofs of Work back in 2004. There are others I could not squeeze here.
Some of the biggest problems we’ve been facing are the privacy, powers to be are taking away from us in huge chunks, daily, and the control the banks have over our lives, seemingly since forever.
“If you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money.”
Sir Josiah Stamp (1880–1941), President of the Bank of England
The Squid, the Greed and the Crypto
In 2009 Matt Taibbi wrote about Goldman Sachs, the world’s most powerful investment bank, describing it as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” No one had better described the fucked up world we let those Financial Crime Cartel crooks create for us than Taibbi.
Sir Josiah Stamp, quoted above, wasn’t some bleary-eyed blogger, he was a powerful man of his era who also said: “Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again,” so there we were (are), the willing, albeit oblivious slaves of the vile system.
Mammon-worshiping, money-grubbing psychopaths mindlessly ravage faraway lands, spy on us all taking away our privacy and maim the Earth for their profits. And we have been almost hopeless and helpless, facing the Behemoths swallowing lives and fortunes alike.
Ascent of cryptocurrencies was a whiff of fresh air. IMO, also the first real hope for us, outside the political system designed to perpetually bamboozle us. Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg a founder and director of educational services for The Center for Nonviolent Communication once wrote: “Get very clear about the kind of world we would like and then start living that way.” It finally seemed we were given a chance to start creating a parallel, better world for all of us. So I dug into that new world of hope.
A Naïveté Phase
Alas, it took me less than two years to go from a fervent crypto enthusiast to someone utterly disgusted over most of the characters and so called projects in the whole damn space. You can’t blame me; I once met Brock Price, back in Amsterdam. I’ve known Darkcoin/DASH people, closely. A “revolutionary tech” met closed mindedness of intellectual midgets whose only qualification was sheer luck; they were dumb-lucky to be early enough and make a profit out of Evan’s idea. (masternodes)
Alas, that idea — as much as any other “mining” also meant that the crypto is doing the same as the Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. or any other central bank in any other country were doing: print money for the privileged few. The rest can go and fuck themselves. I closed my masternodes, sold DASH and never looked back.
The bullshit crept in, rather it was coming in devastating waves and ridiculous propaganda started to overwhelm the masses. Bitcoin was going to “stop the wars” (Roger Ver), “destroy the banks” (Max Kaiser) and on its way to $1,000,000.00 or so “bank the unbanked.” What the fucking nonsense! Let us “empower the poor,” those living on a $2.00 per day by teaching them how to get a rig for $10,000.00++ and “mine” that “digital gold.” All they’d need is to work, without eating or sleeping for a decade or so and they are all set. I started to doubt all of that.
In the meantime I was briefly thrilled by The DAO, invested, and even made a small profit despite its fiasco. That idea, decentralized autonomous organization(s), failed gloriously. I don’t recall when I discovered PIVX but at that time, no matter the profits made, it started to be clear to me that the technology or societal improvements mean near to nothing to the maddened masses thinking only about the moon and such BS. I also learned my lesson by losing money with V-CASH when the scammer creator dumped everything on its naïve supporters.
Damn, this is Wild West and everyone is allowed to shoot to kill. Morons and crooks were coming out of the woodwork but everyone was making money so no one was giving a flying fuck about societies anymore. Some were giving a lip service to the ideal that was since long gone and were blathering propaganda platitudes while incessantly screaming moon and “Lambo.”
Bitconneeeect!!
Further along, the One came, but even a one glance at the Vitalik’s writings made me cower in dread.
“The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.”
― Albert Einstein
That man Buterin is absolutely unable to produce one damn simple sentence about one simple or complex point. But the cult deemed him a genius. Fucking fuck!? I mean, really?
I guessed he does not understand what is he talking about for the most of the time. It’s a small wonder his “world computer” crushed under the weight of those moronic CryptoKitties. But, by far, his biggest sin were ERC-20 tokens whose existence Ethereum enabled. If ever was a tool for fraudsters, that’s ERC-20. For shits and giggles we once created an ERC-20 token, titled “Greta Coin” (symbol: “GREEN”) in less than five minutes so to mock another hysterical BS. We abandoned that, unwilling to pay some service used or to continue with such a stupid game.
The Crypto seemed dead to me. Sure, once the Financial Crime Cartel entered the game ( Bitcoin futures opened for trading on the CBOE Futures Exchange, LLC on December 10, 2017) it was clear, the BTC is from now an asset, like pork belies or soybean, so Bitcoin is not going away anytime soon, but it would be a subject of manipulative market games, like any other ‘asset.’ It was clear to me the ideals might never come back.
On November 4, 2017 — without having an idea that IOTA had morphed into the IOTA Foundation (IF) around that very date, I’ve published “Bitcoin Frenzy: We’re All Wolfs of Wall Street Now” article. I could’ve adopted my quote and write about “a flat-out insane mass of deranged, zombie-like lunatics shilling for equally corrupt, stinking crypto coins all over the world,” all those trolls shilling about BTC at a million.
To me, over all that time, only IOTA was providing some sort of hope there might be an honest player with a true vision, in all that bloody mess of greed and tribal stupidity.
IOTA at the Crossroads
NOTE to a reader: I apologize.
Since the Tangle EE initiative came to life while I was writing a long insight into IOTA, its past and its future I realized this is the true game changer that ushers us into a new era:
Dell Technologies and STMicroelectronics are among the founding members of the new working group, along with 13 other member organizations: Software AG, Object Management Group, accessec, Energinet, BiiLabs, Calypso Network Association, ENGIE Lab CRIGEN, RWTH Aachen University, AKITA, Geometric Energy Corporation, TMForum, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and IoTIFY .
One day I might write an essay on the IOTA and a difficult path it has taken up to this point, but today it would make no sense. The path toward the future that has been obvious for many for quite some time is now clear for everyone else to see:
“This (Tangle EE) means that we as the IOTA Foundation will not be the single point of failure, as a single developer, and be a benevolent dictator of the development. Instead under the governance structure of Eclipse, a streamlined and shared development process is created. This means that the participants have as much to say about the direction of these projects as the IOTA Foundation. It also makes adoption much easier as the resulting software is already co-developed with the target audience.”
(Jelle Millenaar, IOTA Software Engineer — Digital Identity)
This is what he also wrote:
“As you might have been reading today, the Tangle EE working group, hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, has been launched. The development of the Unified Identity Protocol will be part of the Working Group. This means that we are not going to develop an identity solution alone, nor should we. The signed up parties will all take part in the governance of the open-source software and together decide in what direction the protocol will be developed.
A Self Sovereign Identity solution requires three major hurdles to be resolved: Software, Corporate Adoption and User Adoption. The software we normally take care of within the IOTA Foundation, but adoption is always a massive challenge. Corporate and User Adoption creates a classic chicken-egg problem where corporate will adopt something with a lot of users, while users will start using something if a lot of corporates support it. Tangle EE helps us break through the chicken and egg problem. In close collaboration with our partners we will not only develop an excellent software solution, but we will also work towards creating an easy path to corporate adoption. —
Through the development of tooling we create an easier experience for corporates to adopt the Unified Identity protocol. — Through tutorials and code samples we create everything needed for developers to experiment and implement the protocol into their businesses. — We will explore use cases per industry to show the corporate world what the Unified Identity Protocol has to offer.
How does this impact our community? Tangle EE is a perfect place to make a name for yourself as open-source developer. Providing large contributions to a Tangle EE project is possible, which means you’ll be listed as committer under the Eclipse project. Your suggested changes will be discussed by the partners of the working group and you can directly start to interact with their subject matter experts about the project.”
I think I will stop here now.
Take a look at a sober, balanced and detailed introduction & of the Tangle EE by Chris Mueller of Hello IOTA. He did a great work:
Conclusion
There’s a lot to be done yet.
IOTA has to be standardized, the Coordicide needs to be finalized but it is clear that the IOTA Foundation and all its people, all its partners and all its contributors, the whole of the community, after having navigated rough waters and after all sorts of hurdles been thrown at them had created a fantastic new platform, something to be truly proud of.
I myself am happy again, like I had been while back when the crypto was in its infancy. One day all the bullshit of the crypto sewer would subside and the real stuff would take over. The IOTA Foundation gave me the hope back; a better world is indeed possible. They are one in million, those crazy lunatics who dared to dream and to dream big.
So, thank you guys, truly, and Godspeed.
