Quote from: popshot on November 16, 2014, 09:35:34 PM

I have just returned from two day forum that took place in Riga. It was broadly about electronic money with some accents on crypto currencies.
It was actually very good with majority of audience and speakers being CEOs of mainstream companies like Visa and MasterCard Europe, yandex.money, Neteller, (former) Head of Bitcoin Foundation, lawyers etc. It basically covered the full spectrum of the topic and has been a fantastic platform for networking.
However, Im a little surprised that the technologies based on Bitcoin protocol havent been more endorsed by the mainstream players. It wasnt a question of technological inability to do so, but rather lack of trust. It made me realised how small and insignificant bitcoin really is when comparing to other means of payments. Heads of financial services were very disapproving of this technology, which reminded me of Kodak which dismissed the idea of digital camera which later on proved to be the thing that killed their business.
What one could really learn from this conference was that there is a wave of new laws designed to make bitcoin less barbaric. Ive spoken with leaders in their respective fields and they are really keen on accepting bitcoin and altcoins but lack of regulation simply prevents them from doing it.
Another thing that one could learn is that even the hard-core sceptics could not dismiss that the strength of bitcoin is based on its sheer size of a hashing power and the utility that it serves. It was great to talk to Jon Matonis and the head of Gigahash, this gave me great insight into things to come. At the same time showed how long road Diamond has to travel before becoming a real success.
The whole event left me with the sense of urgency that in order to move forward Diamond has to be bold in its actions, progressive and if necessary abandon some of the ideas it thought were right, for the sake of the greater good. In order to make any impact on anything we need to get to the top area of the market capitalisation list. We need to involve more people in the production of Diamonds success, but we would not compromise on the general plan that has been set in stone a long time ago. All we need to do (this sounds like just but hell its not) is to change our way of thinking, change our methods and create a community of creative people who will make all the difference. We are already heavily analysing possible outcomes and to be honest with you, there will be changes and there is no way around it if we dont want to stay just some small scale project on the peripheries of the altcoin scene and the scene itself might not have much time left anyway.

I'm glad to see the dev team moving forward to establishing DMD as a serious contender in the crypto-coin race. Let me throw a couple of random thoughts to this discussion:

1. Regulation. Any serious cryptocurrency will require both merchant adoption and citizen adoption. But, neither will happen on a mass scale without first regulating the scene. So, in theory, we should welcome regulation. But, in practice: who will represent the DMD community in regulation debates and by what authority? what is our (agreed) stance on regulation, e.g. things like BitLicense? To provide answers, DMD needs institutionalization (something like the Bitcoin Foundation) and more than a few people dedicated full-time to the project.

2. Infrastructure. To be seriously considered, we cannot rely on things like scarcity and a nice name (we already got those and they have taken DMD only so far). We need a robust underlying network. We need to be able to claim (to investors, adopters, regulators, etc.) that we can't even remember the last time the blockchain was forked (plus that we recovered immediately from that incident). We need to be able to show stable wallets, pools, clearing services, exchanges, etc. We also need to be able to claim (by numbers) that an external attack would be economically infeasible for someone to orchestrate and carry out. Again, we cannot show these attributes to any serious business, unless we first invest in infrastructure (hash rate) and development/maintenance effort.

So, in one word, DMD needs RESOURCES. Who will pay for them, who will provide them, and who will run them are the things we should be discussing.

For my part, I'm willing to contribute. Dev team, PM me, if interested.