Quote from: Luke-Jr on April 09, 2014, 02:05:26 PM

The Foundation contributes financially to Bitcoin development in general.
It doesn't (or at least, isn't supposed to) favour or control any given implementation.

I'm sorry, and I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, when you have a board comprised of people running businesses based on Bitcoin it becomes very difficult to assert that their own positions and goals do not drive decision making about the core.

I honestly don't know any members of the board personally, and am not trying to throw anyone under the bus here, but I think we need to be realistic about "how it works"....

Quote from: wumpus on April 09, 2014, 02:23:51 PM

It would be interesting if the authors of other* (SPV) wallets made it possible to run and manage a walletless bitcoind in the background, so that their users can optionally contribute to the network by running a full node.

*Armory does this, but only because it needs to, it cannot work in SPV mode

100% agreed, I run 2 full nodes. 1 on my day-to-day computer (with Armory), and a second on a dedicated server that we pull data from for our site (http://162.242.245.151/).

I feel both obligated and proud to support the network, and can't see a reason that anyone involved with Bitcoin would not, would be nice if all wallet software had this option.