sounds really like a bad joke when you´ve heard Sønstebø´s official noble statements like "I´ve sold almost nothing", "here for the tech, not for the money", (overdrawn) "frozen pizza 4ever" etc., and then see his shady "behind the scenes"-palaver/behavior.
That's true. David seems to have very different public and private discourses regarding his motivation. Here is a summary:
David Sønstebø in privateOn
29 March 2018 David Sønstebø said privately:
Well I see one reason: we lose total control of IOTA, all the work we've done, all the strategy I've had since day 1 will be lost in an instance [sic] as we no longer control the board. Jinn will not sell millions upon millions of chips and become a household name, it will die. I will quit instantly as I am no longer able to carry out any master plan. This has been our strategy since before we even started Jinn, but in order to carry it out the two of us MUST be on the same page and we MUST have the majority in the board.
I genuinely suggest reading up on the strategy of the roman generals both in the battlefield and in the senate
This is no game
On
13 September 2018 David Sønstebø said privately:
I will take this here rather than IF Slack
With this our entire strategy for Jinn is gone
I will be selling most of my iotas at the next bull run and then reconsider Jinn's purpose, as we no longer have a path to market
On
6 December 2019 David Sønstebø said privately:
I refuse to be fucked over by you suddenly announcing a fork and crashing all my value after you cashed out.
It will be a fork meaning 1) The market will crash
that’s a fork that affects my iotas and our Jinn iotas.
Oh, I can? So I should sell now, at 20 cents. Right that’s fair. Since you seem hellbent on not giving a fuck, the only fair road forward is then that you announce your fork post-Coordicide (and all the other major events upcoming in IOTA), when the price presumably goes high. We split Jinn funds and make a joint-announcement. I refuse to be fucked over anymore and have literally years of my life go to waste.
Nowhere close. In those 5 years I could easily have had much, much more (than $30 millions), even without IOTA; so **until the price of IOTA goes back to 60 cents fuck that**.
But don’t touch those iotas, don’t liquidate anything. Remember the goal here is to boost their value and there are some major, major things going on right now that will assist in that
David Sønstebø in publicOn
4 February 2020 David Sønstebø said publicly:
Fuck sake, me and Dom (and others in IF and the community) live this shit. We could just cash out years ago, be multimillionaires and chill in some extravagant mansion at some tropical seashore somewhere posting stupid instagram photos with lavish toys and scantily clad women. All with a clean conscience knowing we made everyone who believed in us millionaires. Instead **we are exhausting ourselves in front of computers to make our vision a reality**.
On
3 July 2020 David Sønstebø said publicly:
One of the things that you learn coming into this distributed crypto space is that a lot of the people are essentially just out for money. They’re not out for the technology. They’re not out for the ethos, or vision or whatever you want to call it. And if you trust those people, you will get burned.
On
16 July 2020 David Sønstebø said:
Zero regrets. I much prefer to have a clean conscience and know that everyone that believed in me got a historical payoff. You can't put a price on liberty. I keep working on my IOTA vision out of passion and conviction, not money.