A perspective from an economist
Secondary markets like the current IOTA/BTC market are essential to the primary market of the ICO. If there was no secondary market, the primary market would struggle. Imagine an ICO where investors know they will later not be able to sell their shares.
This link between primary and secondary market is not binary -- linked or not linked -- but instead very gradual: the more liquid a secondary market (and/or the higher the price), the better for for the primary market. If you think of the ICO as the initial primary market and today's market as the secondary market: without the expectation of the market today at the time of the ICO, the initial ICO market would not have existed (are much less of it).
In the nex step, you can think of today's market as the primary market and tomorrow's market as the secondary market. The logic is the same: the more liquid we expect the future market to be, the better for today's market (--> higher price today). This link is present from today to the (infinite) future.
The main lesson here is: any investor at any time always adds value to a project. Investors play an essential role for crypto projects in general, invluding IOTA. Of course, the coding is much more important. But the code would never come to its full potetnial wthout investors. Investors provide the financial incentive for all the devs in a project. Granted, there are incentives at work other than the financial one. But the financial incentive is rather important: after all, people have to eat from time to time.
Investors and developers live in a symbiosis.
Your logic is correct, but the company behind IOTA sold 'software', so the value of the token is not relevant to them. The metric to ultimately judge their performance is nodes in the field, not token value. As long as they're consistent I think they can continue to tell speculators to 'fuck off' (i.e. they can't claim credit for any x20 returns). David has chosen to reject the relevance of your analysis to IOTA, and as long as he doesn't claim credit for later secondary market values he's being consistent.
Despite agreeing with the validity of your economic explanation, with IOTA I am now using node numbers as the barometer to measure the success of this project. I changed my opinion from the start.
edit: I think a better analogy to use with IOTA is that of a creative pursuits like music, art, writing etc The sincere artist always prefers to measure success using the metric of 'users' or 'consumers' or 'viewers' of their work, the financial metrics of success (i.e sales) is an emergent phenomenon arising from the number of users/viewers/readers etc. Any artist who focuses on the financial metric first will generally produce bad art, but the ones who focus on reching the widest audience generally make better art, and as a side-effect sometimes make money
Of course we can, and do, claim credit for the ROI. This is a non-starter. The difference lies in 2 things:
1) We never
PROMISED anyone
ANY ROI, so anyone complaining about anything related to it is worthless
2) The
GOAL of the project is a genuine paradigm shift in the zeitgeist of technology. We are bringing about a new realm of economics through 'real time on demand' services which for the first time ever is enabled by zero fees, a machine-to-machine economy to open up interoperability of IoT and data integrity. These are all revolutionary concepts that a minority of IOTA holders seem to grasp in its entirety. Therefore this is our focus, money is easy, we are offered millions weekly to go into the private sector exclusively, not interesting. Changing a whole ecosystem is a worthy challenge, with a way better long term 'ROI'
You argue like a politician on ROI - if it looks good, I'll take the credit, when it looks bad, 'not my problem, I made no promises, I'm not responsible'. This is how every major political leader rationalises the world.
edit:
The relationship between ICO price, liquidity provided by speculators/investors in secondary market, and ROI is very clear. IOTA has not launched yet, so any ROI of x20 is due 100% to speculators in the secondary market, there has been no direct demand for the token from actual usage yet. Claiming credit for the x20 ROI is not correct logic, especially before IOTA is actually being used machine-to-machine as intended. Anyone who argues otherwise looks very foolish. The only metric that you should use to sing your own praises is number of nodes. All price related success is down to the speculators so far, and you tell them to 'fuck off' repeatedly. Stick with node numbers as your yardstick and you wont end up looking like a dick.
You are a parody of a person, if I was half as dumb as you I'd officially end it and be an organ donor.
Wow, you prefer to use extreme insults rather than debate ideas, that's very sad. Your approach is more suited to the alcohol fuelled world of pubs & bars & fist fighting. It is perfectly acceptable to ignore me, or attack my ideas & opinions with logic - that is the usual approach in the arenas of ideas and opinions - but to use personal abuse as you do so easily is really quite amazing.
This is the basic 'idea/opinion' that generated David's abuse, I'll let the readers decide if it proves I am so dumb I should end my life.
While it has been common practice to use financial metrics to judge performance of crypto projects to date (e.g. trading price, trading volume, ROI etc), there exists another paradigm that may be better suited to tech development, namely 'creative pursuits' like art, music, literature. With creative pursuits the artist cares little about the financial metrics of their work (sales volume, ticket prices, tour profits etc), rather, they focus on user based metrics as a measure of success (best seller lists, album charts). Their goal is to reach the widest possible audience, and any financial success is an emergent phenomenon out of the user numbers, but the true artist will rarely care about the money itself, and many would gladly give away their work and performances cheaply, or even for free if it meant their work influenced a large audience. This same approach (focus on users, ignore financial metrics) is also clearly observable in the software dev world also. That's basically the open source approach.
My point with regard to IOTA is there has been some ongoing criticism and concern raised by some IOTA investors about financial issues like exchange listings and lite wallets etc, and my point to those critics would be to remind them that devs like CfB probably aren't interested in these 'financial' issues very much, same as a musician or writer isn't interested in things like ROI either. Most creative people want their work used as widely as possible, and if you ever hear an artist claiming they're work is 'good' because of ROI to backers then they're heart probably isn't really in the right place, but they might use a usage based metric to judge their success though, but that might include paid & unpaid users, but to the true artist they probably don't care that much whether users paid or didn't pay, as long as they make enough money to continue doing what they love doing, they just want an audience.
I think most of the best alt coin devs of 2013-16 fit into this description (i.e. think of them more like artists than business people), and CfB is clearly in this mold.
My point to David is he risks arguing like a politician though if he claims credit for financial metrics like current ROI , but continues to abuse 'speculators' repeatedly for even raising similar related issues like exchange listings & access to lite wallets. The link between ICO price, speculators & liquidity, secondary market price, and thus ROI is very clear cut. The ROI to date is due to speculators in IOTA. So my point to David was don't portray yourself like a politician and claim ROI as your achievement when it's clear to everyone you have no effect on secondary market price (IOTA token secondary market price is pure speculation so far), think like an artist, and focus on user numbers to measure your success (i.e. node numbers). You should just never speak of ROI at all. If you claim the credit, you MUST accept some responsibility for the downside too. You claiming credit for ROI makes about as much sense as Justin Bieber's agent claiming he should get the next Nobel Prize for literature because he made more profits from downloads than Bob Dillon.
If you weren't so immature you might have detected some good advice above, and a compliment too, but you instead chose a childish macho display of abuse, which is totally out of context in this environment. Despite what some might think Bitcointalk forum is the alt coin world at this moment in time, and this is where people come to research projects, exchange ideas, form agreements, do business. Wall St. and Silicon Valley are cesspools too, but anybody operating in those worlds does not damage their reputation by thinking because there are 'crazy' elements around, they can conduct themselves as they would on a drunken night out and abuse people, dismiss ideas & opinions so casually, without later consequences.
Anyway, I will not post again here, I am invested in IOTA because I respect CfB, and as long as he is involved all should be OK.
