Not to mention all of the mining/arbitrage opportunities. As I said, surely these people must have millions worth of BTC. Not saying they should work for nothing, but sheesh, it doesn't take much brain power to find a way to get paid in this game...
Eh, if they were busy with trading, mining and arbitraging like a good obsessive-compulsive daytrader all day, there would be very little development... Bitcoin could really use some more devs that are paid full time to work on the code (and testing!).
I don't buy it - Let's hope that surely any core dev has been mining continuously for the last 3 years? Any self-respecting geek has a rig running somewhere that really only requires paying the ISP/electric bills after the up-front work and expense? All I can say is that any core bitcoin dev who doesn't have money right now must've made some REALLY BAD financial decisions...
Are you geeks unable to think outside of the "must have cubicle and salary" mentality?
Not really. But that is one of the few ways to get more dev hours to be spent on Bitcoin. Specialization is important. If, for example, devs were to start their own companies, a lot of their time will be spent on organizational issues and not developing.
This is the same kind of question as "why doesn't Gavin become the face and press contact of Bitcoin". Right, if he were to talk to press all day he couldn't do the thing that's currently most beneficial to Bitcoin anymore.
Not what I said at all. If I had the money I would pay Gavin to do WHATEVER HE WANTS ALL DAY as long as he occasionally helped me with my bitcoin exchange business... Just having the guy onboard gives credibility and security to any company. Remember when Linus worked for the Crusoe processor guys?