Detailed response to yesterday’s false claims and misinformation regarding IOTA

Yesterday's false claims and misinformation regarding IOTA

This Reddit thread was posted yesterday, not only did the title alone violate 4 of Reddit's core principles, but the entire post was full of harassment, false claims, and misinformation. In this post I will thoroughly debunk yesterday's false claims and misinformation regarding IOTA.

Proof that post is riddled with misinformation and false claims

Here is a list of quotes from that post, which shows you just how full of harassment, misinformation, and false claims it is:

I am making this post for one reason. To stop newbies who don't know about IOTA history from getting scammed by the IOTA ads from Linus Naumann who is a MOD of official IOTA sub.

They claim the reason for their post is to stop newbies from getting scammed, but browsing through their Reddit history it's super obvious that this user holds some kind of grudge against IOTA. Holding a grudge is fine of course, but spreading misinformation and false claims is not. IOTA is definitely not a scam (I'll go into detail later in this post), and people in this sub are smart enough to come to this conclusion doing their own research. Yes, Linus is one of the 15 mods of the official IOTA sub, that doesn't make it illegal for him to post things in this sub, plenty of moderators from other crypto subs create regular posts in here.

As soon as he makes these advertisement posts for IOTA, it gets brigaded within just a few minutes to hot with upvotes and awards for a coin which is pretty much dead and almost nobody cares about.

First of all, the last part of these statements once again violate the core principles of this sub. Second of all, there is no brigading going on. Just like any other post covering a specific coin, fans and supporters show up to give it upvotes and awards to get more visibility, that is literally the core of how this sub works. Linus' posts don't even get that many upvotes, less than 200 in 3 hours and less than 500 in total, while an arguably lower quality post about Cardano recently got over 750 upvotes in 3 hours and over 3000 in total, just to show you an example.

If you write any critical comment then it will get instantly downvoted to hide them by the IOTA brigaders who come here with him.

Critical comments do not get downvoted, anyone who doesn't believe this can browse through the comment sections of Linus' posts and see that fair criticism is met with discussion based on facts and sources. False claims and hateful comments that violate the core principles of this sub do get downvoted, obviously.

Every reply from Linus gets instant 5-10 upvotes.

This is once again just a false claim, getting 5+ upvotes over a timespan of several hours is not instant.

if you ask tough questions or disagree they will attack or try to silence you.

Disproving misinformation and false claims with facts is not the same as attacking someone. Also, you make this claim without giving any evidence, just as most of your other claims.

Linus Naumann probably gets paid by IOTA foundation to make these IOTA shill posts in this sub full of lies, empty hype and false promises.

Again, violating core principles. Linus is not part of the IOTA Foundation, nor getting paid by them. His posts contain no lies, and he even provides sources of information. His posts are high quality educational content compared to the sea of moon-farming posts in this sub.

Someone who invested in this scam is asking a critical question and see how the IOTA sub MOD shuts that person down in the top comment.

That person literally posted the exact same post 6 days prior and people already discussed and answered their question in there. Shutting someone down for re-posting something is normal. You are really grasping at straws here.

In 2017 during bull market, IOTA started doing heavy marketing with fake partnership announcements with Microsoft etc.

Another false claim. First of all, the IOTA Foundation has never done any (heavy) marketing. Second, they never announced a partnership with Microsoft. As you can read in this article, IOTA just listed Microsoft as a participant in their marketplace, which is true. The wide misinterpretation came from a Microsoft Blockchain specialist, Omkar Naik, who wrongly used the word "partner" in a comment regarding their involvement in the IOTA data marketplace I mentioned earlier. Then social media did their thing and blew it up out of proportion.

During the following bear market there wasn't any serious development till the current bull market and now the marketing train is back with brigading tactics but still no working product.

The opposite is true, there has actually been heavy development and they have re-written the entire core protocol and released it April 28th. The IOTA foundation is a non-profit organization based in Germany, and they don't do any of the marketing that you keep mentioning. No working product? One look at their mainnet visualizer will show you otherwise. The live mainnet has confirmation times under 10 seconds, can sustain up to 5000 TPS, has feeless transactions, and supports separation of data and value transactions. If you don't consider that a working product then not a single project in this entire space has a working project.

The MIT Tech Review ran a scathing review of the IOTA protocol’s insecurities 4 years ago. The founders constantly harrassed and attacked the person who wrote that review.

They are referring to a 4 year old FUD article that was largely (not entirely!) full of flaws and misinformation. The founders didn't constantly harass or attack anyone, this is just another one of those false claims. Disproving misinformation with facts and sources is not the same as attacking someone! Also, the people you are referring to are not part of the IOTA Foundation anymore.

IOTA is a centralized scam without working product, gets repeatedly hacked

Once again, making false claims:

• IOTA has never been hacked, the only thing that has been hacked was a 3rd party module in the old Trinity wallet.
• Data transactions are already decentralized, only value transactions are still centralized, but the IOTA Foundation is close to releasing the Coordicide update which will make IOTA the most decentralized DLT in the entire crypto space. They already have a live functioning testnet.

IOTA is not a scam, does this look like a scam to you? Take a good look:

• They are working with Dell and Intel on project Alvarium to develop a data confidence framework.
• They are working with Zebra Technologies, the world leader in the barcode scanning industry, on supply chain and other data centric solutions.
• They are working with STMicroelectronics, one of the world's largest semiconductor companies (who supply to customers such as: Apple, Bosch, Cisco, HP, Samsung and Sony), on IoT solutions.
• Project ALFRIED, one of Germany's largest publicly funded roadside infrastructure projects is being built on top of IOTA.
• I could name a dozen other partnership projects, or government grants, but that's besides the point. Just let it be clear once and for all: IOTA is a legitimate project that is innovative, heavily backed by research and is pushing the boundaries of the entire crypto space.

IOTA has suffered attack after attack and network outages as a result of bugs in the coordinator and it is proven to be insecure to DDos attacks.

Both of these claims are very exaggerated, and where is the evidence? Like any crypto network, IOTA has suffered from attacks in the past, these were generally minor attacks which didn't hurt the network, with a few exceptions. The current live network protocol has been re-written from the core and has not suffered from any major attack or security issues.

the third founder who is Dominik Schiener claimed that he “single-handedly conceived” the IOTA brand

Another false claim, where is the proof? It's honestly pathetic, this entire post consists of false claims without evidence.

Now since bull market is back IOTA is saying they are doing tests without coordinator. Thats the DevNet testnet. Guess what? It didn't come to fruition. Another false promise. Now IOTA foundation is claiming they have a new solution to replace coordinator. IOTA is full of claimed research and pilots but no working product and there are no clients using the protocol.

Lie, after lie, after lie… Already disproved all of these false claims earlier in this post.

Now we have all these selfish scammers doing empty social hype for projects without even working product for over 6 years.

Again, violating the core principles of this sub and making false claims.

Research, education, and honest discussion

Doing your own research is very important, and so is educating each other. Honest discussion should revolve around arguments based on facts and sources, not around misinformation and hate campaigns. It's totally fine to point out other project's shortcomings, as long as it's factual stuff. IOTA isn't flawless in its current state, just as any other crypto project has its flaws. The reality is that there is no perfect crypto solution out there today, but boundaries are being pushed and progress is being made. Hopefully this post will have cleared up any misinformation, so we can now focus on education and collaboration.