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As much as we all like him, I don't think he is at the top of the bitcoin food chain. Though I don't agree that there is no "normal person". Look at everyone a

As much as we all like him, I don't think he is at the top of the bitcoin food chain. Though I don't agree that there is no "normal person". Look at everyone at Blockstream (including Adam Back), people behind Ethereum, most old core devs (Gavin, Mike, etc). Keep in mind that Bitcoin is very much cypherpunk (especially in the early days before 2013): even Neo from the Matrix was a criminal before he got plugged out. Building a new wild west of digital money is of course going to attract certain type of people. That doesn't mean it's a scam. The US we know today was build on top of the "new frontier", and not all people were as clean as a whistle back then. The current trends in consumer tech come from Apple, a company that started with a system to hack long distance call infrastructure (blue box).

blotter_paper 8y ago
Reread the first sentence I quoted from spookthesunset. Surely Andreas is a "spokesperson," insofar as Bitcoin has any -- I can find examples of popular media calling him a "Bitcoin Evangelist," plenty of interviews with mainstream news, etc. "Top of the foodchain" is a hard to pin down moving goalpost -- only one person is at the top of the foodchain, so anyone I can name won't count if you can find a single other person higher than them by any metric. I'm not disagreeing with your more constrained claimed regarding Bitcoin and criminality, it was the broad claim of spookthesunset that I found ridiculous (which you seem to as well, perhaps for slightly different reasons -- I didn't really even want to poke at the term "normal person," given that the sort of people who work on cryptographic-Rube-Goldberg-machines aren't exactly normal by all standards, and that's okay, it's just a lot to unpack and not what spookthesunset was really getting at). In retrospect, I do feel like I should have quoted less from spookthesunset.

blotter_paper 8y ago

Reread the first sentence I quoted from spookthesunset. Surely Andreas is a "spokesperson," insofar as Bitcoin has any -- I can find examples of popular media calling him a "Bitcoin Evangelist," plenty of interviews with mainstream news, etc. "Top of the foodchain" is a hard to pin down moving goalpost -- only one person is at the top of the foodchain, so anyone I can name won't count if you can find a single other person higher than them by any metric. I'm not disagreeing with your more constrained claimed regarding Bitcoin and criminality, it was the broad claim of spookthesunset that I found ridiculous (which you seem to as well, perhaps for slightly different reasons -- I didn't really even want to poke at the term "normal person," given that the sort of people who work on cryptographic-Rube-Goldberg-machines aren't exactly normal by all standards, and that's okay, it's just a lot to unpack and not what spookthesunset was really getting at). In retrospect, I do feel like I should have quoted less from spookthesunset.