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Also I am aware dga has a masters in computer science and he did the work on improving the PoW code. He seems fairly knowledgeable, but again I don't know if he has been in the trenches developing commercially successful client software. And in my case, successfully marketing these too.
Didn't dga just mine the **** out of Monero and then later help/invest with boolberry after he mined some of it?
LMGTFY - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/cv.pdf
It's a Ph.D. in addition to the masters, so feel free to insert the obligatory jokes about "those who can't, teach" (but I've probably heard them before.
But yes, georgehoster - that was mostly what I did. But to do so, I wrote highly-optimized code for the Monero proof-of-work function, and spent a fair amount of time analyzing it for weaknesses. My code wandered out into the rest of the world, and once it was out there, I gave permission and relinquished copyright on it, so it's part of what you're running when you run a monero daemon or miner. The bright side of having spent a lot of time trying to break it is that I'm also pretty confident that CryptoNight, as a PoW, does what it says -- it's expensive but pretty good against current GPU/FPGA/ASIC technologies.
But I have no relationship to the XMR dev team, or any other coin. I'm not quite sure why my name got pulled in here other than my comments about the PoW function.
(Also, as others noted, I do plan to hold the BBR, but as with anything I do, that should best be interpreted as an experiment, not an endorsement -- I have no clue what BBR's price will do. Realistically, I view it as a slightly long shot gamble on Zoidberg continuing to do interesting things, as, for example, he did today with a new release: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=577267.msg8645436#msg8645436 . Gotta love the built in exchange data in the wallet, and more progress on getting ring signature pruning working.)