Cypherdoc, seeing as you were so much against 3 core developers working under the same hood at Blockstream do you have any comments about Gavin & co. setting up shop in NSA's antechamber working under a previous White House senior advisor?
i see it as a different situation.
Blockstream is a for-profit started by gmax himself in which they have equity shares which stand to appreciate enormously if SC's are successful and have specifically solicited numerous deep pocketed investors, many of whom have been anti-Bitcoin historically. not only that, i specifically have admitted to having suspicions about gmax and Luke Jr's political views and shown examples of how they have mishandled community issues in the past. plus, i don't like the entire concept of SC's in general as i don't believe moving BTC to a scBTC is a good economic idea for several reasons especially in regards to disrupting an equilibrium balanced mining industry.
as far as Gavin, Wlad, & Cory are concerned, they all were under the BF's roof all along before. they have just moved over to MIT now which in theory is not a for profit afaik and doesn't exist for political reasons. i'm only now getting a sense from some of you about concerns regarding MIT's past behaviors. all i know about Aaron Swartz is that they didn't support him in his gvt struggles, is that right? i think he was attacking/releasing some of their paywall informational archives, wasn't he? if that's the case, then it seems understandable that their would be some tension btwn them.
i read Joi Ito's statement on the Media Labs intention and so far we should give him the benefit of the doubt. of course, time will tell. i did read that article this morning about Forde. he's definitely someone worth keeping an eye on. i would not like it if he ends up trying to steer core dev direction to a significant degree away from our ideal goals that we've espoused ad nauseum here in this thread. one thing that did occur to me is that Gavin, et al won't be moving to MIT under the direct roof of the Media Lab, i'm sure. they will continue to work remotely which helps shield them to a degree. but yeah, accepting pay can be influential for sure. somehow though, from what i've seen of MIT's overall contributions to tech, they seem to have libertarian leanings supportive of the Bitcoin culture and open source. and the fact that it is a research institution is comforting. do you have any evidence that it is an NSA "antechamber"?
tl;dr: i don't see it as a problem right now; in fact, i see it as a positive that those 3 are going to continue to be paid. but yeah, we have to keep an eye out.