The developers provided three names at the top of the thread.  Perhaps those are pseudonyms (although that is doubtful) but they should not feel obligated to declare personal info.  Privacy seems to have certain benefits... consider, for instance that celebrities have to deal with paparazzi and security concerns that a person who isn't a publically-recognized persona doesn't need to bother with.  In some instances, individuals can also be subject to unwarranted or unjustified scrutiny by the state that they live in (particularly in corrupt or despotic countries).  It shouldn't matter to anyone besides yourself if you think the devs have nefarious motivations because they may (or may not) choose to be private.  A person can be anonymous and beneficial **or** be public and be a total good-for-nothing cretin.  Actions and intentions are what count.  You've presented a false dichotomy.

Maybe we all want to hold assets that are good stores of value, effective means of exchange, and are useful units of account (or "make money" as you put it).  We are taking a rationally-calculated risk based on evidence, our individual predictions of future outcomes arising from our present actions and predictions of the actions of others (as much as we can anticipate these anyway).

You cannot or should not expect to always please everybody.



I'm encountering similar behaviour in the daemon since booting this computer up tonight too,  I hadn't encountered this issue before and I'm unsure that it's a firewall problem in my case.  I'm planning on saving my wallets and reinstalling the software.   Jusf for a check I loaded the Aeon daemon (another cryptonote-based one) and that synced properly. (It's sort of annoying because I wanted to open up one of the wallets  .)