It would have harmed the long term success to do another airdrop?? Really? By that logic Tony should have done no airdrops and HODL'd 100% of the coins to avoid harming the long term success. Your argument has no logic. Have you seen the price of byteball lately? That extra value of distributing small amounts isn't working so far.
The airdrop worked in the beginning as it went to bitcoin holders that were not byteball holders. So first airdrop boarded all new users.
However, subsequent airdrops also gave to not only bitcoin holders but also byteball holders, who were already onboarded.
This was chosen to reward early adopters, but I think was overdone, too high a reward compared to bitcoin linkers.
This started a strong buying pressure to have more bytes, as they also earned a big dividend, pushing up the price rapidly in the first few months.
This attracted again more bitcoiners linking their address, and so new users also continued to come in, albeit at a slower and slower pace as most linked bitcoins were already linked in the airdrop before.
The peak was reached somewhere in the middle of 2017 when unsustainable price acceleration collapsed and amount of bitcoins linked started to go down peaking at 1.3 million.
Since then amount on newly installs of the client slowed down a lot, and so the evidence was in that the airdrops did not longer work well, but still continued to cost a fortune.
Roadmaps change as results come in. Goal has always been adoption.
We clearly disagree so I will leave it be.
Yes we do clearly disagree. If you want to increase the user base one of the first things you do is try to keep your existing users not lose them.
