Quote from: memvola on August 16, 2011, 11:41:54 PM

Quote from: nrd525 on August 16, 2011, 11:13:40 PM

An interesting parallel question: Would you invest in gold or silver if you knew a couple people, who refused to reveal their names, had cornered 20% of the market?

Yes, it's an interesting question. But I don't get what would change if they revealed their names. You only get political when you are in the public eye, it doesn't help the validity of information flow. You can find cleaner information about what kind of people early adopters are from this forum's archives than you can ever find about publicly known wealthy people. Is it enough? Well of course it wouldn't be enough if I wanted to invest in them directly (MyBitcoin anyone?), but the currency has enough use value for me to not have to ponder about it. Investing in Bitcoin has lots of risks in it, and early adopters coming and crushing it down is a minuscule one. Do I care what they will do with the money otherwise? No, not really...

Quote from: the joint on August 16, 2011, 11:33:10 PM

If I had the programming skills, I'd do it.

I have programming skills, arguably better than his, and I didn't do it. Neither did millions of other programmers. It's absurd to say that inventing an arbitrary thing successfully can be considered an ordinary purposeful undertaking. Let's invent fusion energy, shall we then? I know a few good physicists.

Quote from: the joint on August 16, 2011, 11:33:10 PM

Being 'novel' has something to do with it...'technologically' novel is irrelevant.

Yes it is. I used that phrase to compare Bitcoin with Linden dollars. (EDIT: i.e. Linden dollars are novel as well, but there is not much innovation behind it technology-wise.)

The true novelty of Bitcoin lies in the math, not in the programming (as the programming is a reflection and implementation of the math). That's why the programmers (and you) didn't do it.