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, I’m a little surprised that the technologies based on Bitcoin protocol haven’t been more endorsed by the mainstream players. It wasn’t 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. I’ve 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 Diamond’s 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 it’s 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 don’t 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.