Greg, if you are reading this, let us know where we might keep tabs on your thoughts and plans. I, for one, am with you...although given the makeup of the ecosystem that might be taken as faint praise..
+1
+1
The influence of the reddit XT fanatics and their venom should not be overestimated though. Its just a very small but vocal part of community. Most average users just want some reasonable compromise and do not have any of these extreme views. They like all devs and their contributions.
Most of the fanatics dont run nodes, dont have many coins, dont contribute much and therefore their influence in Bitcoin is minimal. They are just loud.
The tiny popularity of XT nodes, hashing power, development is evidence for their low influence.
To be honest I consider myself a 'fanatic' but this is mostly because of the minority views I hold.
The single most important thing to me is that the actual core of the system is defensible against extreme attacks. I'm sure I've stated this 1000 times so forgive me, but the reasons are simple. If/when Bitcoin is
actually needed (which would correspond to huge value increases) it is utterly certain to be attacked with everything the world can throw at it. At that time the global internet itself will go through abrupt and startling changes (if not before.) This is a environment where Bitcoin (or some related backing store) will need every advantage it can get, and being 'lite and tight' would be a primary one of these.
As I always say, PayPal 2.0 is not something which interests me at all. The threat of Bitcoin being shoved into that slot has been demoralizing enough that I've not even run the software for some time. If/when an effort to get serious about defensibly gets legs I'm fairly likely to lend support of various types. I kind of hoped that Blockstream would make this a focus in addition to their work on the very critical subordinate chains solutions which make Bitcoin actually usable and scalable. I actually don't know how serious they are on such a thing in part because I've been busy with non-related things and not following them all that closely.
From what Maxwell and Back have said here and there I take it that they are fairly aware of some of the potential future threats. Peter Todd also. I'm sure that all of the main devs are cognizant of them with the possible exception of Gavin who seems to be a starry-eyed imbecile, and maybe lukedashjr who doesn't seem to have an eye for such things. Certainly Hearn understands these things well...and builds his attack strategies on Bitcoin around them.