Agreed. But you're also not completely off the hook. There are also economic implications from offchain and voting-pools version of offchain. People also have a right to ask about that similarly. There are actually economic implications. If OpenTransactions sucks a bunch of transactions off-chain that deprives bitcoin of transaction fees, and so it lowers bitcoin security. I am not saying this is a bad tradeoff, just point out that nothing is free of implications.
Fair enough.
It is true that if Open-Transactions could be use to transact in Bitcoin substitutes, and that would suck fee revenue away from Bitcoin.
It is also true that outcome is 100% avoidable.
The only reason OT would suck transaction fee revenue away from Bitcoin is if the Bitcoin blockchain is forbidden for processing those transaction.
If Bitcoin won't process the transactions, they'll be processed somewhere else.
It's up to the core developers and Bitcoin community at large whether or not OT ends up sucking fee revenue away from Bitcoin mining.
I'm not a core developer, so I can't stop them from making changes to Bitcoin that would increase the blockchain's transaction processing capability.
In fact, it would be extremely out of character for me to even argue against such a change given that I've spent three years arguing for more transactions to happen on chain, to the point of saying that's the only way Bitcoin can economically survive in the long term.
It's also a perfectly viable future for OT to handle financial instrument contracts (BTC-denominated and otherwise) that aren't appropriate for the blockchain anyway while leaving all monetary transactions to the blockchain. It might even be the case that a high percentage of OT transactions end up causing a blockchain transaction anyway so that OT transaction volume helps drives Bitcoin transaction volume.
But if real monetary transactions aren't allowed to happen on the Bitcoin blockchain, then Bitcoin substitutes will trade in OT.
As far as the voting pool concept itself goes, I've always thought (and said many times) that people shouldn't leave their Bitcoins in the custody of a third party such as an exchange.
However, since they're going to do it anyway no matter how many times I say that you don't own Bitcoins if you don't control the private key, and since I'm tired of seeing people lose money to incompetent and/or corrupt exchanges, I guess I have to fix the exchanges.