Shelby; If you would need to assess the relative seniority of me and Mircea Popescu, which criteria would you use?
Assuming your the real MP what are your thoughts on the wacky Finnish 'supernode' guy?
Pretty good job.
Mircea Popescu is the owner of MPEX which is pretty much the buttcoin stock exchange, he's famous for lasting longer than most bitcoin businesses without failing and hiring an ex-spammer to do PR on bitcointalk despite her having the same level of charm and interpersonal skills as Josh.
No, actually, most recently I'm famous for fixing the price of Bitcoin back in early April, muchly humiliating Max Keiser in the process, and for leading the MtGox collapse by about two months. The rumour du jour at the Google I/O sloppy seconds conference thing they're doing currently is that in fact Gox' demise was pre-arranged and then announced privately to a secret group during my private and at the time secret conference last month.
Before that I was famous for calling various other "news" and "shocking & surprising developments" a month or two in advance, the girls are keeping a list somewhere.
I work with poor people from a third world, Spanish speaking island called "Holyoke, Massachusetts". If they have Internet, it's through their phones, because they can't afford that and a modern pc, cable Internet, or a car, etc. How the hell are they supposed to download a 10 gigabyte block chain? I guess they could give out the block chain on DVD or Blu-Ray. Ok, to use this currency, first you need a copy of every transaction anybody has ever made...
I'm pretty sure nobody involved actually cares about these guys you work with, or poor people in general. This is a little like asking "but how are the thirld worlders from Holyoke Mass going to handle their own private jets". Well... they aren't.
1) Butts don't scale up at all.
2) Because of 1, decreasing mining rewards, greed and mining being ruled by an oligopoly transaction fees will skyrocket.
3) Butts are inconvenient.
4) Butts are insecure.
Why bitcoins will ultimately go down:
2) Exchanges are run by idiots. This is where the government already intervened.
3) Everyone who uses butts is either an idiot (largest proportion), scammer or otherwise criminal and oftentimes both at the same time. This is the case because non-dumbs and people with legal transactions can easily use other services.
4) This is a long shot, but I believe in the future all transactions will have names attached to them and cash will be phased out. It's just a matter of adoption and convenience now.
Apparently you're unaware who exactly you're talking to, which is chuckle worthy. Here's a thought : at the last count I was worth something north of 3/4 million Butts. Now what ?
(Yes, your numbered list consists of nonsense, most of it self-defeating, some of it self contradictory etc. But that's neither here nor there, what's a list these days, anyone's got one.)
What do you think about the developers frequently receiving threats by bitcoiners? Or the guild and certain developers trying to push for a centralised validation services?
Bitcointalk is a collection of mostly poor, mostly uneducated, mostly bizarre folk you wouldn't have on your lawn/daughter/whatever. The various shit they do is representative of Bitcoin in the sense Jeremiah Wright is representative of xtians or Cornel West is representative of academia. Specifically about threaths... I get threatened all the time on teh Interwebs. I've never managed to care (yes I'm aware "the FBI takes internet threats very seriously", but I've never managed to care about that, either).
People will always try to push for centralised something or the other as long as they figure they'll have more market share of the centralised thing than they do now. As various failures are pushed aside to rot into irrelevance they're certain to try and find some sympathetic ear to enforce protectionist measures for them too (que Winklewhoever doods ranting about "regulation"). That topic is best served here.
In short I don't think either are suprising or important.