fluffypony is not arrogant, he is correct.
Back in 2014, I was one of the first people ever to invest in Monero.
Can't quite remember when I dumped it but the price was around 0.008 or 0.009. i.e. 400% of what its current "pumped" price is.
The reason I dumped it was because after getting a wallet and using it, I realised what kind of product this was - a highly encrypted messaging system, nothing more. The type that have already existed in banks for decades. Except the only difference with this one was that there was no backer when your account gets hacked or when you download a dodgy wallet that sends your funds to an address that’s not the one you typed into the addressee box. Nor have you a hope in hell of checking where the “did” go because everything is just a black hole with neither "public blockchain" nor "private backer" accountability.
So, as usual, after its initial hype it crashed to a fraction of its valuation high and basically never got anywhere near it again, not even now after it’s recent 100% pump.
Despite that, the whole episode seems to have left behind a hard core of grudging, green-eyed bagholders who could never come to terms with the fact that they didn’t end up “owning” that market. It was no surprise to me but it does appear to be to them. Looking at the clown antics at the start of that video I think you can see why.
Re: “life and death” privacy I’d just say this. Regardless of their varying levels of fungibility, all cryptocurrency is anonymous. The idea that you can potentially trace from one address to another is not the difference between “life and death” and the fact that anyone is claiming it is is more a measure of their own desperation to turn a technological premium into a monetary one than any thought-through understanding of risk.
Re. “high barrier to entry masternodes”. The barrier to entry is neither high nor low. It’s set by the market. If the market didn’t want to pay you’d have no masternodes. There are 3500 and increasing. The number’s been increasing for over a year and a half so fluffypony may not like it, but the approach is successful all the same and the barrier to entry is not too high. Not only that, there is really no “barrier to entry” because the collateral threshold applies to an address balance, not people. One address will pay the return just as one gold mine will pay a return even though 2 million individuals may have shares in that goldmine.
How about you try doing the same on some funds that have been mixed first by darksend...?
