Thus it seems you are betting that BCX is lying. What caused you to place the odds higher that he is lying than not? It is very suspicious that he won't commit to reveal what he knows later if the exploit hasn't been sold and used by such a date in the future.
...This is a multi-faceted issue. The admittedly quite clever campaign that used the fake pro-Monero trolls may have influenced BCX's initial reaction.
Now we are already in a point where everyone actually involved wants to move on, and only the consumers of sensation media still want to dig deeper.
I agree, it appears BCX may have gotten suckered into something and wasn't prepared to take a hunch all the way to implementation.
And now they managed to suck me in too and want to see if my wild hunch has any merit.
P.S. Hope you noticed I have called the decline in the BTC correct twice now when you vehemently disagreed with me. Both times falling from $500s to the $300s. I helped the people in my group get out of BTC at $485. I actually told them in the $500s because I didn't pound the table hard enough.
On the larger (longer) cycle, has any one figured out how to scale CN's ring signatures to 200 million users?
Yes we have. No we aren't going to tell you how.
I don't even know that people want that though, which makes it a questionable focus. I'm sure you feel differently, so best of luck trying to create this mass scale consumer-driven solution you seem to envision (and I mean that sincerely -- I hope you succeed).
Honestly most are pretty happy with credit cards (would be better with a bit stronger security but that is an implementation detail), Apple Pay, Paypal, etc. Decentralization is interesting and has compelling advantages, but getting ordinary people to actually care about that difference seems an uphill battle, and the natural market for this technology seems elsewhere.
You won't get the developed world to take an interest as a currency, rather only as an investment.
The developing world doesn't have credit cards. They also are interested in $5 a day in extra income.
Did you know filipinos spend more feeding their pigs than they sell for thus no profit? Yet they still raise pigs. Why? Because it is a savings account.