...
retep: Whether one is bored by Mike or not, I don't think that it is a stretch to consider him THE most critical individual in the Bitcoin universe at this point. My arguments:
is incredibly counter-productive. Even if it were true you wouldn't put that out publicly, and since it's not it just makes you (tvbconf) look like a crank that doesn't understand how the politics of Bitcoin work (hint: no-one is that important) while creating a silly flamewar about a guy that just tells outsiders "Gee, this Mike person must be important!"
Mental note: at my meeting in Maryland next week suggest the idea of creating a sock puppet army of ostensibly pro-privacy cranks obsessed with Mike and Gavin. We could haze the junior agents by forcing them to write fan-fic about the relationship...
Who's the guy who is making a credible threat to subsume Bitcoin under his personal project and is for all intents and purposes the acting 'benevolent dictator' of Bitcoin at this point? Oh right...Mike Hearn. Who could have predicted that and assigned status as appropriate???