Any chance CfB that you will be the V Buterin of IOTA...i.e. giving public presentations, etc?
I do agree that Iota needs a face.
I think one of the reasons nxt didn't take off as it could have, is that it didn't have a special someone like Vitalik.
If it's not cfb, how about David?
Do you think of any more candidates?
My thoughts:
I joined Nxt in 2013 and lead the first organized effort to get Nxt on the right track, this was December 2013. I, together with 2 others got over 70 volunteers to sign-up and we laid out the plans for how we could leverage Nxt's unique position as a superior technology with a great time window on other projects like Bitshares and Ethereum. What happened? The Nxt whales refused to put up bounties. Some even promised bounties, but then didn't pay when work was delivered. This created a completely toxic environment and frankly disincentivized a lot of people from helping Nxt. Why would you want to work for free to make someone else rich, someone that doesn't even care to compensate you for the work you do? This was the biggest problem in Nxt.
However I do agree that Nxt being this faceless nameless project created by an anonymous person also contributed to its lackluster growth, this is why I initiated both Nxt Foundation and Nxt Organization to remedy this and try to build a core of people who would represent the project to the real world outside of the forums. This is also why I 'enforce' a "use your real name" in Ryver, because when you bring in execs who aren't used to forum monikers it looks really odd if half the guys got nicknames that make no sense, it does not instill trust and competency.
In IOTA, as the architect and manager I am already the 'de facto' name and face of IOTA publicly and I presume that will continue to be the case as long as I lead the project and negotiations. I don't mind this, my intention was always to be public. IOTA is a project for the real world, not some esoteric 'movement' in the shadows. BUT like I have stated numerous times: it's important that IOTA does not depend on just one or a handful of guys. This is why CfB describes himself as a "simple coder", he does not want this hero status because it will lead people to draw irrational conclusions based on his activity within IOTA. You cannot have one or a couple of people be larger than the project itself, once that happens it is way too vulnerable, which makes companies weary of adopting it. The 3 founders (Me, CfB and Mtchl) will of course always have our 'position', but we're already seeing people such as Dominik, Stas, George as well as others who help out immensely with spreading the word and getting real projects from the real world on board. We'll see plenty more such people join as soon as we launch, so these positions will emerge organically IMO.
At the moment my name is all over the internet tied to IOTA due to several interviews and articles, which is good since I am in the middle of negotiating a lot of potential opportunities for IOTA, but I cannot be the sole representative, it leads to IOTA being way too reliant on me, which is very unhealthy. Another issue is the fact that travelling to tens of conferences per year cost A LOT and they usually overlap in time, and usually there is very little reason for there to be the same person at every event, the presentation itself is what matters the most, so having different representatives in different regions of the world is undoubtedly the most efficient in terms of time and cost. But don't worry, I have no plans of stepping down my involvement in ensuring IOTA's success, on the contrary, IOTA is important for our vision for our hardware start-up too.
