After the stealth ICO raising only 500BTC (mostly to insiders and themselves)
cryptohunter, with all the due respect (and I indeed value your input on many threads here), your statement above is completely false.
The ICO was not stealth, it was announced properly and was held for about one month if I remember right. There wasn't advertisement campaign with all the bounty whores and meaningless signatures, but it was not such a common practice at the time as it became now. There was an announcement, which was noticed by most of the active members of this forum (who were checking for new coins/opportunities), lots of discussions in the thread, and a lot of time to invest.
I would even tell more: the founders of IOTA, while clearly hating Bitcointalk forum, opened the announcement here, because this place had the biggest crypto community at the time (and maybe still does, I don't know).
I have personally bought few IOTA tokens at the time (really small amount, unfortunately), but I am far from being "IOTA supporter" - though I like the project, I strongly dislike the leadership and communication style of one of IOTA founders, and by that single reason I stopped following that project. However when checking from time to time, I cannot deny the huge work done AFTER ICO by founders and the community. That project differs from everything I have seen here on BCT. It has completely different level of community involvement and real-world out-of-crypto propagation. I could compare it only to Ethereum (disclaimer: I don't follow all crypto projects, so my opinion here could be not that well-grounded).
So I call everybody do what I am trying to do - be objective and unbiased, regardless of our personal likes/dislikes and our financial involvement.
P.S. And thanks for reminding me about IOTA - I actually tired of waiting for exchange, and nearly forgot about this small investment. Was not aware it is already listed...
I believe you believe I am incorrect but it is not a matter of debate it is a simple matter of research.
1. these worthless sig campaigns and promoting on the main alt board are not so worthless and certainly were not worthless back then when they enabled other projects of that time that I have listed many times here to raise magnitudes more through greater awareness. Why would iota only want 500 btc when lisk and others are raising 20x that? there is but 1 obvious reason. They are smart and know that the more narrow the initial distribution the greater the opportunity for collusion and market manipulation.
2. If everyone knew about it like they did lisk,amp,maid,eth, etc etc etc why days after the end of the ico when they finally did come to the main board(spamming the shit out of it now the ico is over) to start building the fomo did the otc market have prices x30 ? did suddenly all the people that knew about it decide they wanted to pay 30x more? please be serious.
3. why when i called cfb on using sock puppets did he say so what he didnt care since this board is not important since they will simply market to people outside the board who did not know about it.
As i said the only people that will claim the iota ico was not stealthy are those that got in on it.
Days after their ico ended and they came to the main board I told them open up the ico for another month to raise more dev funding since they raised nothing compared to other big icos and people were showing a lot of interest that had not heard of it. They refused. When i asked why not more advertising on this board they said didn't want to waste tokens on it. Yeah because devs want less dev funding by 20x?? no because the plan was 2000x ico by collusion and hoarding supply to a few people then ransoming it off for 2000x more.
I said it this would happen days after their ico ended (as it happened with NXT that he was involved with before) and they started spamming the main board. It is happening.
End of story.
The history is there for anyone to research.
Iota is not the only one trying this. In fact their method is not as fool proof as the insta ico method which is practically fool proof 100% premine.