My reply to the above rebuttals to my prior message basically can be summed up in this reply I made in another thread:
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I view Monero and Ethereum in the same light. I'm sure you would have pointed out bitcoins flaws when it was $10 per coin and said "This will never work." out of some of the same principles you are using now.
I did point out in 2013 exactly how Bitcoin would end up failing, which I said would be game theory of centralization around mining. And I was correct.
I never wrote that Bitcoin would have no utility and in fact I wrote that the utility of Bitcoin was very inspiring. Why do you reckon I am still here in crypto if I didn't think so!
Problem Monero has is that there is very little demand for an anonymity for which the reliability is unprovable. It is a marketing utility problem, which Bitcoin doesn't suffer. Even if we did implement provable anonymity (e.g. Zerocash not Zerocoin), it still not clear if markets for anonymity would be great, especially if the decentralized, permissionless attribute isn't assured, because the government can simply take control over centralized mining and force the anonymity to be stripped off. OTOH, companies are saying that privacy is very important to them and perhaps they do not mean hiding from the NSA. And public block chains using encryption are superior conceptually to private block chains using perimeters defenses because even sneakernets fail (e.g. Stuxnet). But the things corporations want privacy on are the block chain 2.0 features that Ethereum is working on. The corporations aren't interested just in crypto currency alone as that doesn't have much utility to them. Cryptonote (especially combined with Confidential Transactions that hide values) is a very technologically interesting concept, but without any significant utility in the markets.
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That is relevant to "Monero Speculation".
As for rolling up the sleeves and hiding away in development forums and chats, I find I am more productive in coding when I talk to no one. Collaborating on Cryptonote block chain designs isn't very inspiring for me. So what would I talk to your developers about, given they are not going to be interested in talking about rewriting a block chain design from scratch. So the only input I can have is to make speculators aware of the fact that Monero doesn't fix the Tragedy of the Commons around block chain economics & scaling, and also to point out the lack of utility for unprovable anonymity combined with block chain tech which does not have the decentralized, permissionless guarantee.
It is simply that I don't see the point. I have stated numerous times that I think smooth and the other Monero devs are very smart and I love to work with smart devs when attitudes and plans are aligned. I was put off by the condescending attitude of Shen-noether though. It seems that what programmers like to see are programmers talking tech shop and making open source contributions. Well me too!
You don't know me well. There is a huge distinction between trying to form a holistic view of crypto here in the forums and hiding away doing coding. Smooth seems comfortable doing both interleaved (multi-tasking). I don't. When I code, I don't talk. So if you see me talking, I am surely not coding.
As for open source and collaboration, it is highly necessary at some point forward in a project's life. But there is also another point-of-view that says that in some nascent stage it might be more efficient to avoid the communication load especially when in holistic design mode, because it is very slow to communicate all the thoughts in one's brain to another person or especially amongst group. Design by consensus is a very arduous process and not always the best for creativity. OTOH, interacting during design process is very important in order to flesh out ideas. Since I currently don't have any group to work with, I flesh out communication and explanation here in the forums.
This should not be construed as an attempt to belittle your developers and the work that has been put into the open source. Coding requires effort and is expensive in terms of opportunity costs. That is why I argue we need to have a clear design and marketing plan BEFORE we dive into massive coding effort.