IOTA Growing Pains: Fake Wallets and Angry Community

It has been quite a tough few months for IOTA.

Firstly you had the public disagreements that the project had from researchers at MIT who dismissed its hashing function. Then you had the large scale seed generation scams that stole new user's funds.

Yet, there are still more issues that the coin has to confront as some people have questioned the sustainability of the tech or the underlying use case. The response from those in the community was less than stellar.

There has also been a fake IOTA wallet app that was released for the purposes of harvesting private keys. So what is the current state of the IOTA project and how did we get here?

Outrage at Opinions

When it comes to making sure that a cryptocurrency's technology is sustainable for the long run, it is important to take constructive criticism from those in the broader cryptocurrency community.

This is apparently not something that those in the IOTA community can do. A researcher wrote a blog post about the potential loss of funds that users faced as well as a number of other concerns.

However, this resulted in members of the IOTA community reporting him to twitter. He posted a tweet that had a copy of the email that he had received from the twitter admin.

There are many who claimed that the post by Andreas was causing "FUD" in the community and may have wanted to silence him. Unfortunately, when it comes to censorship of opposing opinions, that is where people tend to operate in an echo chamber with 0 introspection.

Fake Wallet Crops Up

Despite these issues at IOTA it still remains a really popular coin and as such, users are really excited to download the latest wallet software as current options lead to potential loss of funds on the network.

The Trinity wallet has been in development for some time and the users have constantly been updated by the IOTA foundation as to the progress. The below tweet was the latest update as it came through on twitter.

https://twitter.com/iotatoken/status/963145104859971584

Of course, the scammers were also keenly watching the announcements of the release. They jumped on the opportunity to create a fake wallet. The trinitywallet.co website was up for some time no doubt fooling users until a reddit post alerted them to the scam.

"Laboratory Technology"

There are a number of other concerns that have been raised about IOTA and the underlying use case for the technology. Many view IOTA as nothing more than a hypothetical proposition that is mostly thought out in a laboratory.

Indeed there have been a number of large partnerships that have been formed with IOTA from companies such as Volkswagen, Bosch and Microsoft. While these are no doubt promising developments for those IOTA Hodlers, they are unlikely to calm the critics.

Many see these agreements as nothing more than simple collaborations that have been overhyped by those in the community as well as the foundation. They also point out that there is a lack of IoT devices that could operate within the IOTA Tangle.

Moreover, without working wallet technology for IOTA transactions to safely take place, people have mostly been sending the coins to themselves off of the exchanges.

Mere Growing Pains?

Even though IOTA is currently facing a number of issues which has kept the price considerably below its recent $5 highs, many see this as mere growing pains of a revolutionary technology.

https://twitter.com/Rnb010/status/963163186173300741

Indeed, many detractors would have been saying the same things about Bitcoin a few years ago when they could not really appreciate the use case for a decentralized Peer-to-Peer currency.

If the IOTA community is able to take the criticism and use it constructively to refine the technology, perhaps they could indeed change the way we think about the IoT a few years down the line.

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