I would like to address some concerns posed by some community members as to our announcement of our Gold sponsorship of the Miami Bitcoin Conference.
First, the miami bitcoin conference is a prestigious conference. It served as a launching pad for many projects like dash, monero, eth, eos and a few others. This conference is attended by many industry leaders from across the world. Speakers from Peter Todd (Bitcoin Developer), Michael Terpin (co-founded BitAngels), Charlie Lee (Creator of Litecoin) among others have attended and given their perspective in Blockchain. Over the years, I have personally attended this conference and have always wondered if we would ever get an invitation to speak about I/O Coin. Well, this year we have been honored with the opportunity do just that. Sharing the same stage that past speakers such as, Vitalik Buterin, Jeff Garzick, Reggie Middleton, have spoken about their projects, ideas and insights. This folks is a big deal, we finally get to tell our story and some of our amazing work. Aside from this great opportunity, we have doubled down with the help of the Awareness Team; funding our Gold Sponsorship of the event giving us further exposure throughout the Blockchain community. With this, the I/O Digital Foundation will have a booth to showcase our blockchain features for 2 days. This will include marketing and promotion within official booklets, website and handouts. Our gratious community member Cohnhead will be donating t-shirts, pens, lanyards and other promo giveaways for these purposes. All in all there will be countless hours and efforts to make a great showing of our open source project.
I/O Digital is a foundation that was put together to push awareness of the I/O Coin open source project. This is not a business, this was not an ICO, this is not in any away a corporation or at any time were coins premined held by a few people and other coins sold to customers. Since the project was a fair launch, as in bitcoin, peercoin or litecoin, the project was never structured as an ICO. I/O Coin was launched as a Proof of Work X11 blockchain in 2014. The blockchain was minable for a period of 2 weeks in order to switch to Proof of Stake. During that period of time 16 million IOC were mined by miners and the miners exchanged IOC for BTC in the exchanges, where many got a chance to buy and also later sell. As the founder of the project, I’ve never received any “PRE Mined IOC” just like everyone else, I bought my IOC. I have donated IOC, BTC, USD over the years. This to further the chain awareness. I have had to rebuy IOC after paying many contributers from my own wallet in order to continue and push development of the IOC blockchain. I’ve been working non stop for little over 3 years now. Since the genesis block, I have not been compensated, paid a salary or received any funding or refund for my efforts. I’ve had to even go as far as to sell my business to fund my long hours of work and give even more hours of work to this project. This has also been a massive burden on my personal life with my family. I have missed many vacations, birthdates and many other personal activities. This has not been easy while having to read about trading activities that at times have given people gains and others losses. And for this reason, I wanted to take the time to once again set the record straight.
This is a community driven project, where the open source community helps to push development of the chain along with the I/O Digital dev team and we all as a whole look after the best interests of the chain. With this said, nothing being done comes for free, and nothing being spent comes from profits from the dev team, as we never had a pre-mine to fund this project. If you are in the misunderstanding that IOC is a business, please be advised that it is not.
The I/O Digital dev team is here to further enhance the open source blockchain and enhance it with features. These advancements, in our view, will enable parties to use the chain in any way shape or form to then advance third party apps or connect as a platform such as the linux operating system serves as code base for OSX. The IOC wallet enables on chain services for IOC, that then rewards stakers for maintaining the security of the ledger. After many hours of hard work with DIONS, we delivered a more user friendly platform to give access to the services offered by the I/O Digital Blockchain. Although the wallet system is still in its infancy, we envision continued developmental growth of the wallet and support for our community.
For these reasons, as we see a steady increase in malicious technical attacks to the chain and FUD being communicated to our community via our various chat methods; the development team will not tolerate misrepresentation of the project’s structure and or goals in order for people to create fear or doubt in the users of the I/O Digital Blockchain.
With this write up, I’m once again making it very clear for the users to do their due diligence. Investigate the I/O Coin open source project, to the fullest, before placing your dollars into buying IOC. Do all the research and ask questions. If at any time you or anyone feels that the project does not follow the core beliefs or a direction that you envision, you’re always free to sell, trade or disengage, from this community. In the end our goal and job is to develop, curate and push for a better blockchain system and also to enhance the services offered by the I/O Digital Blockchain. We’ve made a long term commitment to it and we will see it through.
With these efforts and in the spirit of maintaining proper communication with our community, announcements will come when they are possible to be made. Please be advised that at times, NDA’s, contracts or agreements may impede us from disclosing information immediately. So we must all be patient and careful with over speculating.
In closing, I would like to express my gratitude to every single person that has extended their hand in helping the team and the foundation. Some of you are putting aside family, salaries or profits to help this community grow. Our upgrade to DIONS has been extremely challenging, but it hasn’t been an impossible task. Our team has faced many setbacks and we have stood up stronger to conquer many challenging roadblocks. This won’t be the first time or the last time where we might see hiccups. What counts is exactly what we set ourselves to do back in our genesis block. This was to advance the push of the Public Blockchain decentralization and innovate within the Fintech space. We won’t give into fear from pushing the boundaries, we will be successful and we will surpass our preset goals as we have always done in the past.
I end by quoting Aleksandr Bulkin “Application currencies will be tied to their own blockchain instances and will dominate the space.”
Joel
Ps. And yes we will have more announcements at the Miami Bitcoin conference…….
Thank You
