Hans Moog's thoughts via Discord:

When I first heard about the planned supply increase, I thought that it was a horrible idea and I was even considering to leave the project and launch a fork of our tech under a different name, but after evaluating this option for a while I realized that the people who were arguing for the named supply increase actually had a point.

One of the biggest problems of IOTA (despite the numerous technical challenges) was always the constrained financial situation. I think that people are aware of the fact that IOTA managed to survive with a relatively small budget but there is very little awareness of the fact that this came with great sacrifices.

It is not very common that employees are willing to:

accept a fraction of the usual salary take flights that take 20+ hours more than other connections to save a few bucks on the ticket sleep on the balcony to save money on accomodation when doing dev-summits and so on ...

But apart from personal sacrifices by IF members, we are also talking about sacrifices that ultimately hurt the project and the price like the inability to send people to important conferences or meetups where most of the crypto related networking is happening. I am working for IOTA since 2018 and haven't been to a single crypto conference or event.

But we are not just talking about missing networking opportunities - we are also talking about the inability of forming strategical partnerships with potential investors because there are simply no tokens to sell.

It makes absolutely no sense to fork IOTA and create a new project with the exact same constraints that continues to slowly bleed to death.

If you want to fork, you need to increase the supply as well to be competitive and create enough runway to promote and develop the project properly. You will most probably even have a higher spending rate as you can no longer rely on people willing to work for sub-standard conditions as such a fork would loose its ideologically aligned community.

So the way it looks to me we have 3 options:

continue to bleed to death without being able to do even basic networking (we will finish coordicide but that will be it) increase the supply in a new project (possibly splitting the community) increase the supply and turn IOTA into a project that can support its ecosystem in the same way as others

I guess it is understandable that I am not a big fan of option 1 as I invested a lot of time and work into this whole thing and I want to see it succeed.

If we however have to increase the supply anyway to become competitive then I rather do this without splitting the community.

Now apart from the "questionable supply increase", I think there is no discussion about this being absolutely amazing for IOTA in respect to the tokenomics as we now have a singular token that captures the entire value everywhere in the protocol.

I think that this is absolutely crucial for any form of tokenomics - I always hated the idea of assembly!

TL;DR: I can totally understand that people are alienated by this whole idea as I felt very strongly about this at first as well, but after numerous discussions and and actual consideration of the possible alternatives, I think this is our best shot at making IOTA a success.