David Sønstebø [8:33 PM]
As everyone is aware, IOTA has been the focal point of an influx of clickbaity headlines, fabricated narratives and pure FUD in the recent days. I am happy to let you all know that an independent neuroscientist and author (published in New York Times, HuffPost, Psychology Today etc.) has been writing an in-depth article on how FUD is being used to manipulate the crypto market. Bobby Azarian identified IOTA as the main victim of this in recent months and thus use it as the main example in his elucidating article.

Make sure this piece of high quality journalism spreads everyhere. This is important for crypto in general, but also directly tied to counter the incesssant onslaught of FUD IOTA in particular has been met with. I also highly encourage you all to read it as well if you want to have a good comprehensive timeline and grasp of some of what IOTA is up againt. This highlights the absolute pivotal role that the grassroots need to play in order to fight the overwhelming amount of FUD with facts out in the field constantly.

https://twitter.com/BobbyAzarian/status/941390149400834048

David Sønstebø [11:56 AM]

The latest academic preprint on Tangle is on arXiv. We will publish a non-PhD requiring blog post that summarize these findings and proofs in the next few days.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05385

Dominik Schiener [3:00 PM]
clarifying the public relations situation surrounding the data marketplace: https://blog.iota.org/iotas-data-marketplace-setting-the-record-straight-576fbf0b4513

Dominik Schiener:
all full nodes: please upgrade to the latest IRI version https://github.com/iotaledger/iri/releases/tag/v1.4.1.4

Wallet to follow soon

Today we have two exciting announcements that are intertwined and has been in the making for a long time.

BOSCH's venture capital arm Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC)) has decided to acquire a sizable amount of IOTA tokens for holding, as a strategic step towards enabling the Machine-2-Machine economy.

Additionally RBVC partner and BOSCH veteran Hongquan Jiang is officially joining the IOTA Foundation as an advisor.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/19/robert-bosch-venture-capital-bets-on-iota-as-it-invests-in-the-future-of-iot/

As promised, please download the latest wallet from here: https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/releases/tag/v2.5.5

This new wallet introduces some major changes, such as moving away from Reattachements, to Transaction Promotion, which after further analysis, has proven to significantly increase transaction confirmations and the Tangle reliability.