Quote from: TPTB_need_war on April 19, 2016, 04:36:23 PM

I also don't understand how smooth is justifying his involvement with CC. I don't think he is being paid. I have only two theories:

1. It is a labor of love for him to be able to interface with a community, since I presume he otherwise worked a lot in FinTech. Perhaps he sees it dovetailing with FinTech down the line and is positioning himself to be an expert. If his true opportunity cost is $20 - 30K per month, then perhaps he is looking for the $millions homerun opportunity. Or just not really worried about money and doing it for other goals/interests.

2. (Wild ass theory only!) He is actually a mole of the national security agencies and is keeping tabs on everything for them. (I don't really think this, but I have a difficult time understanding why smooth is working in CC and the fact he is anonymous).

I think the business model of Monero from smooth's viewpoint is to build a superior design than Bitcoin and over the long-term have a payoff as the best alternative to Bitcoin. So it isn't just for the anonymity, but also for the ASIC-resistant hash function, the tail reward, the automatic resizing of the block size, etc..

I see. I guess it is sweat equity then. It's fine, it is not my business and he deserves it. I was just curious.

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(also because there are some technologically interesting bits in Iota, even if the overall design fails to really work without centralization, IMO).

Of course there are interesting bits in it. The idea is novel and interesting. Most implementations of a relatively novel math paper have interesting bits. There are just no IoT nor revolutionary micro-processor which were sold to the greedy crowd.

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I am not limiting my sights on just working with people from CC. I am interested in working with any great developers from outside of CC as well. I originally thought that perhaps CfB was one of those potentially talented developers, which was one of the reasons

I think you pay no attention to the details in the case of CfB. I have the unmoderated IOTA thread and I came to understand better what CfB is. Is he smart? Of course he is very smart and creative. Scams like IOTA do require a high level of intelligence and creativity.
You are not paying attention because you don't realize he is not an experienced developer. Is his skill-set good enough to sell something to those greedy idiots who subscribed to his ICO and wait for the P&D to realize the dream ROI? Yes of course, his development skill is more than good enough for the scam. However, when you check his code you realize the guy is not better than mediocre. His code clearly indicates that he never worked in serious, enterprise environment nor on a serious open source project. (That's why he never can be your LinkedIn contact). A developer must be in the business for long years by interacting with more experienced developers and facing the daily issues of software development to pick up those skills which makes him an experienced developer. There are deployment issues that you need to keep in mind when you design your software. There are interoperability requirements which a project like IOTA must address. On a serious project you must think about the modularity of the software, maintainability, build process, test and other aspects of QA. He doesn't even remotely understand these because he never gained such experience. If a developer sit out a code review - which is part of most serious projects - with a really experienced developer or even if just interact with one in a team environment, then the developer will remember forever those comments about lack of error handling, use inheritance correctly, structure of code, testability of software, etc. If you are looking for an experienced partner you need to look at somebody else than CfB.