...
...or am I just getting trolled here? (not kidding).
Ok, I figured it out. Here are some quotes from Wendell, from the following interview:
https://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb22
[1:45]
I...got a little bit obsessed with bitcoin starting in 2009...
Well, I mean, the unfortunate part is that I simply followed it as a curiosity, and not not so much as like oh well this is a great investment opportunity.
...
So I missed an opportunity to be one of those guys who like, you know, 300,000+ or what have you. But...I, you know, just didn't have the vision, I suppose, to see that it would really become something real.
[3:25]
I didn't think for a minute that it would actually be successful.
There it is... No matter what he's consciously/sub-consciously convinced himself in the last 5 years about whether or not bitcoin deserves to have most of the crypto value, the fact that he so thoroughly missed the boat has gotta eat at him. He was one of the few lucky enough to be on Metz-Dowd in 2009 and actually see the discussion as it happened. He had the technical know-how and intellectual curiosity to appreciate it. Yet he didn't act. He could've been set for life. He's an entrepreneur - he could've self-funded whatever projects truly interested him... Or he could've launched his own fund... The scale of that regret has got to bother him, so he's constructed this weird belief system to negate it. It probably happened slowly and sub-consciously over time, which means it's really ingrained.
It's funny, I got the sense from his response to me that he was fighting another battle, and was pissed about something else. That sentence of his where he f-bombed was just too needlessly aggressive and vengeful to make any sense in context. Now I understand him a little better.
he's not alone.
look at Adam Back and Austin Hill. Adam invented the concept of POW yet he admittedly didn't get Bitcoin and never got in. now he's trying to use his influence to make up for it with sidechains which by all initial indications requires a change to the main protocol. they claim it doesn't but I'll bet there's at least some ugly hack required that allows it to function. we'll see.
anyone who has a stake in Bitcoin has to be suspicious of anyone who has a low to no stake wanting to change the protocol especially when they're operating a for profit company with core devs (gmax and Luke) who aren't drawing a paycheck yet from Bitcoin.