I agree on much of this and just feel I need to point out. This journey has never been a straight line, It’s too big for that, but less large now with changes in the environment (tech) and more hazardous in changes in the other environment (regulators).
If we had in 2015 what we have now, the picture would be very different. Poloniex would have listed us (they said so) and we would have been up and away, but we are where we are now.
It has been a hard journey and I can tell you it’s taken a lot for me personally to keep going. The amounts of opinions you have to take on board is amazing.
To stick to the goal and move forward takes courage and it takes an awful lot of very deep introspection. Sometimes it means step back on X an push forward Y and so on.
It’s not simple and everyone in my private life wonders why I still do this, but I believe in freedom and I have investors of many kinds to repay. I don’t let folk down. That’s why some barbs seem very sharp and focussed even to the point of accusations of lying. That’s hard to take, but any scammer would say the same, so it’s hard to prove a negative.
The only thing we can say is this is 18 years, we have launched nothing that sticks and I feel now is the time to launch the network. It will be very data focussed, the data types and API will be the clear focus of work, getting those slick and correct will take devs working with them and feeding back.
In parallel the currency parts are still important, but less so. We have always had a cryptocurrency and it feels like that has been welcomed by all. The values of that are clear to me, basically no centralised data structure and very high throughput. But backed by data. Using another currency though seems like folk saying we have given up on the whole thing, that is wrong IMO.
The currency part amazes me though, just the notion of using existing tech seems like folk calling the whole thing a betrayal is a step too far in my eyes.
We are open source, if folk want to force change they can fork and do that, but it takes money, effort and plenty of time. As I have said many times in the past, we want privacy, security and freedom for all in the digital world. So I don’t care of somebody else does that, if our goal is those 3 elements why would we not be delighted they were achieved.
This step is us accepting existing tech in part of the stack, it does not change how we handle data and it should not. But when we are handling data well and folk create apps then it all changes. With that comes money, resources and time.
So, unless we do something to monetise and repay folk soon we risk the whole shebang on dying on our swords with dignity, but letting down everyone who supported us. I appreciate the shock, but I feel that we all as a community need to calm down and understand this is still the same journey with the same goals.
We just cannot keep going without having something out there and being used. We need real world feedback and use of what we are building. So start the journey, take a first step and move on from there.
Getting to a place that’s more open, more decentralised and with more builders and core dev teams is a solid short term goal from where we currently are.