Sage advice which I will take.
Before I go, I'll just like to say screw Gavin and the Bitcoin Foundation horse he rode in on...or at least rides into the future. I'm sorry to not be more hopeful, but at this point I see Bitcoin to be not much more than a cash cow to be milked. I'm counting on the army of mouth-breathing think-they-are-libertarians here to continue to help me line my nest with $USD and they have not let me down yet.
I do have confidence in the 'free market' and have confidence that it will eventually produce something the people of world actually need vis-a-vis distributed crypto-currencies. What we definitely don't need is some corporate controlled one-world currency solution which is exactly where this thing is headed to be blunt about it.
I hope I'm wrong and you are right that there is still some hope for Bitcoin proper, but I'm not betting on it. Were it not for Garzik and Maxwell I would have zero hope. I will participate in what efforts I might be able to in terms of experimentation and such as they will likely produce useful data and code no matter what happens.
Before I go, I'll just like to say screw Gavin and the Bitcoin Foundation horse he rode in on...or at least rides into the future. I'm sorry to not be more hopeful, but at this point I see Bitcoin to be not much more than a cash cow to be milked. I'm counting on the army of mouth-breathing think-they-are-libertarians here to continue to help me line my nest with $USD and they have not let me down yet.
I do have confidence in the 'free market' and have confidence that it will eventually produce something the people of world actually need vis-a-vis distributed crypto-currencies. What we definitely don't need is some corporate controlled one-world currency solution which is exactly where this thing is headed to be blunt about it.
I hope I'm wrong and you are right that there is still some hope for Bitcoin proper, but I'm not betting on it. Were it not for Garzik and Maxwell I would have zero hope. I will participate in what efforts I might be able to in terms of experimentation and such as they will likely produce useful data and code no matter what happens.
Remember it's still very early in this game. Even taking the abnormally high hashing rate into account blocks are barely pushing 150kB average; don't forget that at the conference there were just a dozen vendors, mostly representing internal Bitcoin businesses or investors. For all we know we'll find out that this whole payments stuff never takes off the way people keep hoping, and where it does take off is certainly going to continue to be the "bad actors" Peter Vanesse says he wants to crush.
The Bitcoin Foundation is not Bitcoin. In terms of technology all they can do is pay people to write code; open-source projects can and do fork if they have too. At the same time from what I heard at the conference the legal and lobbying strategy of the Bitcoin Foundation looks to be very much in our interests: I had a really good discussion at the conference with the foundations' chief lawyer Patrick Murck and their strategy of lobbying to make virtual currency trades unregulated. It may or may not work, but it's not going to do us any harm.
It was quite funny at the speakers dinner at the conference how I wound up sitting next to Mike Hearn... and a bunch of finance and investor types. We, well, minus Mike, talked about where Bitcoin was headed and what it's role in the world will be. At that table, and indeed at the whole conference, the finance crowd seemed to really get how what makes Bitcoin special is decentralization and freedom from authority, and how Bitcoin's future lay as a reserve currency rather than an inefficient and inconvenient payments system. You don't remake the worlds financial system by focusing on penny bets and ad-impression scams first and foremost.
Of course, I doubt the high finance crowd spend much time on troll talk...
