Thanks Risto, naka, mac.  These are good thoughts.  They remind us why we are here.

At the very beginning of my interest in Monero one lightbulb went on which led me to take a stake.  It was the idea that Monero offered the cleanest version of a solution to bitcoins privacy problem.   Or put another way Monero offered a utility that bitcoin could never really offer and remain bitcoin.

My first impressions of Monero's utility were not as the currency of the black markets as some have seemed to think, but as a private store of value.  Monero offered the potential of a private store of value that bitcoin has difficulty doing, and arguably cannot do.  I thought of Monero in the anaolgy of being a "private offshore account".  A place people could find the freedom of privacy with finances in the realm of crypto currency.

If anyone can guess how many monero I hold at a specific address I will give them all of it.

Good luck.

I liked that the devs saw Monero addresses as "accounts" as opposed to wallets since I think it better implies this functionality.

The other key aspect for me has been the fact that Monero is not "feature rich".  It does not try to add a bunch of whiz-bang features to the bitcoin base.  It just implements simple, strong, peer reviewed cryptography.  A kind of cryptography which offers functionality that, like I said, bitcoin probably never will.