IOTA Faces Fresh Accusations Over Violent Response To Critics

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IOTA is facing a series of fresh allegations hurled against them according to a new report released by Financial Times earlier this week. These allegations appear to be attacking the company’s alleged “intimidation tactics and threat of violence”.

These allegations aren’t coming from one person but multiple people who are making claims about IOTA’S team members resorting to threats and violence whenever people criticiser their work or projects.

IOTA’S Ralf Rottmann hasn’t been silent either on the issue stating that he as a member of the team’s Board of Directors isn’t aware of any forms of alleged incidents. In an interview granted to one media outlet he commented that

“What I do know: IOTA Foundation continues to win renowned corporate partners and advisors, who all carefully vet whom they partner with, which to me speaks for itself. Also I’ve never personally witnessed any IOTA Foundation member to intimidate anybody. There have been heated debates on twitter, but that goes with the territory as you clearly know.”

Was There Ever A Threat, And Why

The allegations levelled against IOTA are based on an article that was published on Medium with data from a research by MIT’s Media Lab. Per the research by MIT, IOTA’S hash function had a basic flaw which could allow people to forge IOTA signatures. IOTA afterwards solved the problem but claimed that despite the error no signatures could have been forged anyway. This according to their development team was because its centralised Tangle system would have stopped any forgery.

The Financial Times report stated that Dominik Scheiner of IOTA stated on Slack that a Forbes writer who wrote on the MIT Media Lab research should “be slapped”. As to how true that is, we are ye to know.

Post Oak Labs’ Tim Swanson commented on the supposed response of violence by IOTA saying that

“Once you start threatening independent research teams that do vetting and verification…you’re not just creating ill will, but you’re actually creating an environment in which security researchers no longer feel safe to provide independent verification of claims which benefit society as a whole.”

Tim Swanson

As though the supposed “slap comment” wasn’t enough, IOTA’S CEO himself Sønstebø, David also stated that he saw himself as being “unprofessional” to the media saying in a tweet

“I am ‘blunt’ and brutally honest to people who attack IOTA, a non-profit project with pure intentions, with falsehoods, insane accusation, and general defamation, yes. If that makes me rude, I’m rude as f***.”

Quite not what you would expect from a CEO.

Could This Also Be An Attempt To Take Down IOTA

Timothy Swanson also to an extent claimed to have been intimidated by David Sønstebø in a Skype message. But Ralf Rottmann revealed otherwise. Swanson, Rottmann said,

“has been an acquaintance of David Sønstebø since 2013, they have regularly discussed different topics pertaining to the crypto realm throughout the years. David was perplexed by seeing Swanson retweet the debunked narrative of DCI and simply sent him two casual inquiring messages on Skype: ‘Hey’ and ‘Why are you retweeting fud?’. That was the entire extent of David’s communication to Swanson, Swanson proceeded to choose to take down the tweets. There was never any intimidation involved here. I saw a screenshot of the Skype conversation David was having with Timothy dated back to December 12th, 2017 and I in no way see, how anybody could potentially feel intimidated by David reaching out like he did at all.”

IOTA’S accusers appear to have a solid ground when they say they are threatened, however some people may have just taken this just a little bit way overboard in descriptions. IOTA is still in its developing stages and as is known will definitely face criticisms, but it is in our best interest that everything turns out for the better because IOTA has really got something great up their sleeves for the world at large. And oh, with Dr. Rolf Werner also joining the IOTA team we can be optimistic IOTA’S is going to have some sort of redemption in the eyes of people.

Featured Images via Coinstaker Archives , Financial Times FT,

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