It’s been a crazy couple of weeks since the crypto community started sharing false information regarding IOTA (MIOTA) partnerships, questioning whether they are legit or just a “marketing trick”. Many even considered as a major problem the Chicago meetup relying their opinion on “bad camera quality” during the event. Similar stories we’ve heard before about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and even Bill Gates in the past. Does “camera quality” matters over facts? Don’t think so.

I’ve been patient and busy at the same time, realizing that most of these individuals are not even familiar with the term “IoT” or understand what it really stands for. People who are most likely to be amateur gamblers, blinded by greed, in a rush to make some numbers behind a computer screen, where obsessively spreading mud on IOTA highlights.

Self-claimed “important figures” in the blockchain scene like John McAfee who publicly stated that he would perform oral love to himself if Bitcoin’s price wouldn’t reach $300.000 is now on a desperate “attention seeking” spree in order to maintain narrow-minded individuals under the Bitcoin wing. A platform that has no legal foundations to support it’s existence, no public face, unprofessional and unhealthy team that tends to create numerous forks every couple of months, while at the same time being stubborn or smart enough, keeping their code and hardware at its first state, having 1MB blocks to support millions of transactions every day. While Bitcoin’s vision was to be the fastest, easiest, cheapest and safest platform to exchange monetary value, it surprisingly managed to be literally the opposite of all the above.

So what all of that has to do with IOTA (MIOTA)? It seems that the claims about IOTA having misinformed their clients with the so-called “fake partnerships” are generated and spread by “c grade news agencies” that provide minimal if not absent background or any kind of historical or logical basis to support their claims or even their existence in the first place. The majority of the community fell for that and willingly shut their eyes on professional public statements by Reuters, Yahoo, MSN Money, Microsoft itself (which was the main target of the “fake partnership” campaign against IOTA), Deutsche Bank (who recognized IOTA to be the solution for the future of global economy), Volkswagen, Samsung and Bosch who are already major parts of the Data Marketplace, among others.

There is a simple reason for why all that misinformation spread so massively in such a small gap of time: all these individuals who believed and helped the fake news grow belong to a small group of people who are attached to Bitcoin and Litecoin more than they’re attached to their spouses. People who still have hopes of Bitcoin changing their lives. Why do I believe that? well, i talked to a dozen of them during the last week in order to understand what exactly led them to such absurd conclusions, only to realize that they were just lazy to read, consuming minimum effort and time into adapting to modern market infrastructure, learning about what a blockchain really is instead of being certain that blockchain IS Bitcoin. Instead, they were busy playing video games and creating DragonBallZ pictures and videos indicating Bitcoin’s price, since there is literally nothing else about Bitcoin you could analyze or talk about.

Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin, wanted to throw mud on IOTA pretending he is interested in the tech behind it while posting that on twitter ironically. We all know that if he was serious about it he should contact the IOTA foundation and arrange a proper meeting or at least a short educational skype session. This character has @SatoshiLite as his @ on twitter, he is posting pictures with chicken indicating Litecoin’s price and he has literally set a “DBZ” wallpaper as his profile background. Yet Bitcoin and Litecoin supporters keep claiming that David Sonstebo and the IOTA team is “unprofessional” – when they are trying hard to travel the globe, set up real meetings, with real industrial titans and really do a pragmatic worldwide change. Their tweets are never about the price but always about news around the sphere of IOTA and IoT in general, updates regarding the technology being developed, tested and eventually used by real-life applications, future plans and in short: official statements rather than “internet troll”.

The main reason behind the anxiety volume that keeps growing day by day on traditional blockchain platforms, who until now could get away by selling nothing more than “thin air”, is generated by their understanding of how a solid and professional company works. Unlike Bitcoin, IOTA does not claim to be the best monetary system (although it already is due to the tangle technology that allows transactions being confirmed by IOTA users instead of miners, resulting to instant transactions with literally 0 fees.), it is a fintech company specializing in machine to machine payments in order to sync humanity with the IoT Era we partially experience and are about to experience in full scale soon. The same way we experience the functionality of electricity or internet itself already.

Individual units who are not aware of how a healthy market works, invest in IOTA thinking it’s something like Bitcoin, something that will suddenly make them millionaires at the expense of a few bucks. They don’t even mind reading at least the basic description of IOTA and they tend to focus strictly on IOTA’s price and chart, according to “coinmarketcap”. This is childish at least and certainly unhealthy for a growing company.

Imagine a company like Microsoft for example, who are not selling “thin air” neither it promises any millionaires made out of $100 investors. MS is a legal entity that provides hardware, software and technology solutions to the computing world. Customers around the globe trust and support MS, buying their physical or digital products, as long as the products themselves manage to satisfy the respective customer needs.

Let’s create a hypothetical scenario where customers stop buying, paying attention or following Microsoft and their products, a scenario where suddenly everyone is focused on MS’s chart and stock price in Nasdaq. Customers would now buy and sell pieces of the company every passing second in order to make money and the chart itself would be determining whether it’s a good time to buy or sell, regardless of the physical and digital success of the MS products themselves. That would eventually lead to the death of Microsoft, and that is why it’s not happening. That is why Microsoft keeps providing top quality hardware and software in order for us to put our trust on the company’s side without second thoughts like: “is it a bubble?” – “omg! the price dropped” – “should we sell our personal computers before no one would buy them?”. Same happens with IOTA, a company that generates innovative ideas that managed to evolve into global practical solutions regarding monetary transactions performed by our smart IoT devices.

At the moment, Bitcoin is supported by individuals that have no power of speech (take John McAfee as an example, mentioned in the first paragraphs) or any influence on “key” characters found in the very depths of the industrial sector as a whole. Not one single major company backs Bitcoin legally, and they wouldn’t be able to do so even if they wanted to, simply because Bitcoin is not represented by a formal legal entity. It could disappear from one moment to another (ex: btc-e.com) and no one would be able to do anything about it. I can’t say that Bitcoin is a bubble, because what isn’t a bubble before it pops? Dinosaurs were a bubble, the common Tiger will be soon a bubble, human life is a bubble when we organically step into an unknown phase of existence and the internet will be a bubble when a meteor twice the size of Earth hits us. Therefore I can certainly believe that Bitcoin fails its own destiny due to various factors pre-mentioned in this topic.

IOTA, on the other hand, is a third generation blockchain inspired platform, that not only it is modernized, managing to solve most of Bitcoin’s “issues”, but it’s actually creating a new fork in the Fintech sector in general. You take a moment to read about it, and you soon realize that it’s a totally different concept that has nothing to do with the so-called “traditional icos”. IOTA today is like Microsoft back in the 80’s, where those who were lazy to read claimed it’s a fraud, and those who could invest time into research before investing money knew it’s going to be a huge part of the future. The difference today is that we have the technology and resources to make “things happen” in less than a couple of years.

Ericsson announced that 20 billion devices, including smart transportation vehicles, smart housing, next-generation smartphones and more devices will be connected to the IoT or the Internet of Things by 2023. These devices will use IOTA to interfere with each other and determine whether you are getting into that bus or not, whether you are watching your favorite movie tonight or not. IOTA will never replace “cash”, because it’s not what it’s about, but whatever it might be that we will consider being “cash” in the near future, regardless of the platform it will be using (it could be Ethereum or Dash if we really take it to the next level with Blockchain or even if it’s still USD and Euros) it will have to be translated into IOTAs in order to support IoT Applications. You do the rest of the math.

Ross Peili for cryptogazette.com



