One last attempt to explain how I see that the rich buys club is incongruent with the future.
I could summarize all my posts in this thread with the following outcome in the movie Braveheart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdlL65LD6I4You really should watch that and see the unexpected SWAN impale the rich boys British at the end.
Sorry that is just a constant size reduction and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that ring-signatures can't be pruned, except by some other restrictions such as an expiry on coins.
We start with swans, then it gets interesting, and hard.
There
IS an obliterating black swan (i.e.
Taleb's unexpected long-tail statistic event) they don't see, whilst they be doing busy-bee grunt work of fixing databases for a broken design, making a gui, etc..
I am also a business angel, funding people's things ever since 2004.
And this produced how many million user products?
I have produced (one as a co-developer) three separate "million user" level products since 1980s. With a lot of goofing off vacation time in between (mea culpa).
I am fine if you don't want to come to my castle but that is the necessary condition if you want to deal with me.
I suppose this was directed to me as well as any others who aspire.
This is analogous to the inefficiency of saying that anyone who wants to buy french fries needs to travel to Belgium.
Those who are truly capable don't need any money. There will be too much money trying to be rammed down their throat.
Money is the weak thing to hold. Knowledge is strength.
My suggestion to you was to be more friendly and spread an insignificant (for you) investments around on all promising endeavors in order to be respected for your 1% instead of resented by the community. Also to give yourself more chance on not missing the swan boat when it comes. Your "Rpietila's Altcoin" thread instead of being a jovial and spirited discussion of exciting developments, should be renamed "Rpietila's Monero Membership Club". I am not upset about it, I am just relaying to you how it appears to others who are not brainwashed by "Monero is the answer".
You've already been friendly to me and you even gifted me 2 BTC. There is no problem between you and I. I am writing to gift you feedback, because in my analysis you are in the process of committing a fail and possibly a mega-fail.
Expecting busy hackers to go through personal interviews with you is I am sorry to tell from the perspective of a hacker insulting. I am not insulted, but I am telling you what sort of actions and attitude breed animosity. We build our reputations by our code, not our talking.
"Talk is cheap, show me the code"— Linus Torvalds
"Those who can't build, talk"— Eric Raymond
Your stance is fundamentally incongruent with the open source movement. Open source projects will spawn more and more granularly (smaller teams) and stored capital and top-down organization will become more and more irrelevant.
This is a virtual new economy; we only need to click a button to make an investment. We don't need to travel across the world. And we don't need to invest everything in one thing or two things, thus we don't need to know all the answers before the questions can even be asked. Creativity spawns serendipitously not as planned (even my own work lately proves this is true, because I didn't plan all the ideas I discovered along the way).
Open source is the odds of large numbers.
"Given enough eye balls, all bugs are shallow"— Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds
"Given enough experiments, all possibilities are achievable"— Shelby Moore III paraphrasing Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds
Eric Raymond noted that is the only known positive-scaling law in software engineering, i.e. that efficiency improves the more
autonomous N actors involved. Design by top-down grouping or committee is not the same scaling law.
We don't have time to waste on top-down bureaucracy.
Warren Buffett doesn't do angel investing, because he wants to evaluate companies based on
well established metrics. Angel investing is a game of more risky probabilities. Thus efficiency of scattershot is more important. Angel investing will become less and less like an exhaustive evaluation and more and more spontaneous and small, e.g. KickStarter. Everyone gives a little bit, not one big whale slowing everything down.
The Knowledge Age is the end of the road for large stored capital. The power-law distribution of wealth will shift to stored knowledge. Actionable knowledge will be power-law distributed. It already is. Which is why when you are searching for a needle in a haystack, don't tell the needle to jump to your castle.
P.S. I do want to have friendships and vacation in nice resorts such as castles. But that is vacation time. I can't mix business with vacation, it doesn't work. When I am coding, I need to be where ever I already am where I can code now, not tomorrow, not after a conversation, not after a glass of wine, not after ... Procrastination is the bane of software development. My best work has come when I didn't have material comforts.
I have not taken a shower in 2 months. I haven't washed my clothes, they are stink like a pig pen. I have not been outside of my room nor seen the sunshine except to restock on food.
Time is of the essence.
It doesn't matter if Paypal accepts Bitcoin because users who are not investors (e.g. especially females and the billions of impoverished) have no incentive to convert from their unit-of-account (dollars) to BTC just to pay for something. They might as well just fund their Paypal transactions with their credit card or bank account. Bitcoin will not become the unit-of-account without the blessing of the government, because it has no distribution scale.
Most of the impoverished don't have a credit card nor bank account.
The Paypal plan.
The reason Paypal couldn't just issue everyone in the developing world an account is because of jealousy thus legal and political risk. Governments would resist take over of their financial control by an overtly fascist corporation.
Peter Thiel et al are more clever.
Issue everyone a supranational digital account that is "decentralized and controlled by no one", when in fact it is centralized and controlled by the fascist powers-that-be.
Use this to force other countries into submission when they attempt to offer their own top-down centralized digital currencies, e.g. Ecuador.
The people are trapped either way in a fully traceable block chain and NWO Technocracy.
Monero (portmanteau of money+dying euro?) offers no hope of scaling to avert this rapidly developing fascist outcome.
C'est la vie. Fait accompli.
And the competing and equally devastating
Apple Plan.
