Nebula Tangle

Since there were a lot of comments to my last post and I cannot really answer all of them individually, I want to take the time to reply to the most common remarks / questions in a separate thread. 1. When I said that we were informed about this decision a few weeks before being done with IOTA 2.0, I meant the time in march shortly before releasing IOTA 2.0 in april earlier this year. 2. Would it be an option to roll out IOTA 2.0 on shimmer instead? I proposed and asked for exactly that back in march but was told that the IF had no interest in pursuing or supporting that direction. Considering that we haven't worked on the code for several months and lost a number of people that were part of the team that built IOTA 2.0, I don't think that this is any longer a viable option (we simply lost too much time). It would take time to get back into the flow and the remaining tasks are also mostly touching on things like adjusting the wallet + tooling and integrating the Move VM which can hardly be done by a few people on the side. 3. I am not sure why the IF stated that it would take 2-3 years to integrate an existing VM as the original estimates I heard in january this year were closer to one year and it sounds somewhat unreasonable to assume that integrating existing code would take longer than the entire research and development of our own node software (and the time should be measured from the point of time where we stopped working on our code and not from the point of time where we made this decision public). 4. I think that the community should approve the vote as we simply can not afford to lose more time. If this decision would have been discussed in march, I would have voted for a different option but now there isn't really a choice. 5. If the community is serious about the idea of continuing Shimmer on their own in the pursuit of the original vision of IOTA, then a better option might be to actually build on top of IOTA's cleaned-up SUI fork. Rust is the better programming language and integrating a simplified version of IOTAs consensus into the SUI code base could actually be done by a small team with a limited amount of time and resources. Being able to piggy-back on the developments of both IOTA and SUI, would allow the network to stay competitive in respect to features without requiring a huge treasury or being constrained by the fact that things might take longer as people are only able to work on this on the side. 6. However, people need to be aware that once this work would be completed, it could easily be copied by both SUI and IOTA, which means that it would maybe make more sense to actually work on this as a community project for IOTA that explores the possibility of a future protocol upgrade that replaces the existing consensus mechanism with something that supports liveness via ebb-and flow + the eventual possibility for users to add blocks directly to the replicated datastructure again (I think liveness should be the main focus for now if people really care about a DAG that doesn't halt as this is the only thing where blockchains are still superior). This would most probably be my favored option as it not only shows that the community takes the promise of the project becoming decentralized (and therefore open to outside contributions) serious, but it would also prevent the splitting of efforts and communities across multiple projects while leaving room for the possibility to eventually return to previous ideals in the future (if shown to be practically feasible within the context of the current codebase). I am not sure if such a community driven engineering effort would be embraced by the IF as there are already ongoing efforts to improve certain aspects of the existing consensus mechanism but it would surely send a strong message about not only the quality and strength of our community but also about its commitment to crypto ideals. Let's not forget that Hornet (our previous mainnet node) originally also started as a community project. Maybe it is time for the community to reconsider their role in this entire endavour and take back some responsibility - not by rejecting the path forward out of protest or by getting bitter, but by taking initiative and by trying to think about ways to constructively work together to propose tangible solutions for possible protocol improvements that can then be considered to be integrated into the protocol. Let's just try to make IOTA a success instead of dwelling on negative thoughts - that's really the only thing that matters as software can always be updated and improved over time (and you actually no longer need the approval of the IF to build things - that's the beauty of permissionless innovation).