I continue to have a gut sense that you sell him short (though the evidence that he thought he might win his sham bet has yet to be explored...)
There is some grain of truth in my feeling he could start a religion. He has many of the requirements: he's delusional, charismatic, manipulative, energetic, intelligent and I believe there's some mental issue at play that I don't know the definition of. And he does have that background in religion ostensibly. I don't think he's physically harmful, or odd enough to be "sociopathic" or whatever, but he does have delusions of grandeur at a young age. But I have a soft spot for that. There's nothing really wrong with aiming high.
With you and the infamous thread, I continue to hold the opinion that I came away with: that he always intended to pay but momentarily forgot that he had no fucking clue about how to even obtain a BTC...though in his mind he knew how to put together a datacenter full of GPU mining rigs...
This must be something akin to Stockholm Syndrome but for scammers, where people see the scam come completely to light and still say, "aw, he's a good guy, he's just a little mixed up." And then they give him their money. Again. Maybe he's not a serial murderer, but it should have been apparent to anyone who read that thread and then learned about his school and other claims, that he wasn't to be trusted. I will say he worked hard to earn trust after that but isn't that exactly how a scam works? I guess people are just eager to believe others easily change for the better.
I do think this recent scam was mostly harmless. But it again reveals his nature. He either does not understand, or cares not to choose between, right and wrong. He skirts the edge of it until those edges blur and disappear.
I think that he probably did have every intention of being a real, valuable, upstanding citizen when he donned the Matthew N. Wright tag and tried (amusingly) to start the Bitcoin Better Business Bureau thing. Unfortunately for him the reality of our world and neuro-physics smacked him upside the head...within days iirc...
it wasn't until the magazine that I thought he might have been headed in a not-so-scammy direction, but then it kept stalling. When folks started receiving it I was pleasantly surprised.
Matthew, like Bruce, has actually done some actually valuable things for the Bitcoin ecosystem and it would be immature to completely ignore these though it does not excuse their various malfeasance. (Atlas, OTOH, has not done a damn thing of value that I can think of.)
One thing's for sure, Bitmole's done more for bitcoin than me. I have no claim aside from buying and selling some and telling a few friends about it.
I have considered a bitcoin business but I use Drupal and the last I checked the bitcoin module was buggy. And frankly its asking a bit much to have to run some bitcoin client on the server as well. Maybe if BitPay makes an Ubercart payment module I'd reconsider.
I also have it in my email sig that I accept it for my design work, however it is something I seem to reconsider from day to day. Bitcoin is so tied to scamming I'm concerned that advertising I'm involved could have negative impact on me.
Will Matthew be back? I could see it going both ways. If I were a betting man, I...um...wouldn't bet one way or another. As far as I know he's not banished as Matthew N. Wright on this forum so there would be no reason to use a sock puppet. For Matthew's sake, I hope he explores some other things before the negative aspects of his condition(s) outweigh the benefits of his energy level. I suspect that what achievements he had in the Bitcoin world were valuable to him and potentially to others.
I was always pretty certain he had sock puppets but then one day it occurred to me that might just be impossible since he seems to spend nearly every waking moment posting under his own name, or working up a project.