They had Mark as a gold member......

I think the core devs should have their own donation fund, managed say by Gavin. What do we need the Bitcoin Foundation for?

Mark, Vessenes, Shrem - they're all a bunch of crooks.

Why don't those who honestly believe in bitcoin go together and distance themselves from these thiefs and conmen?

Heh. Well, tBF is hardly the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church had (and has, to a much, much, much lesser degree) a ton of influence. tBF is a central place lazy press members sometimes go when they want quotes from "a Bitcoin person." It doesn't appear to mount legal defenses or otherwise uniquely assist users (if you just want to talk to Marco Santori, you can shoot him a PM through the forum), but is more of an "elite"-shared microphone with a decent amplifier. They do host and maybe funded some unique online bitcoin tools (they host information from a node crawler I can't remember the name of). If they wanted to impress me, I should've been made aware of efforts to help Casascius fight the threat letter, filings to challenge government laws banning (in full or in part) bitcoin transactions and exchanges, and education projects along with tangible results of those projects. I've neither seen nor heard about these, so I can only assume they didn't happen, true or not.

I can understand why relatively large businesses would want something to share together, both for funding and speaking, but there appears to be no benefit to regular users and small business operators who join. Maybe there's intent, but I haven't noticed results in its year and a half of existence. After losing some of their big corporate names (Shrem & Karpeles), it seems plausible that tBF will organically lose steam without any community efforts to knock it down, for better or worse.... maybe it just turns into the Roger Ver Foundation.

Why do you even care? Make up your own mind who you think is "credible" and who you trust. If some group calls themselves the "Bitcoin Foundation" says something - why do you care if it's any different than "Mr. Bitcoin God"? If they failed you or you disagree, don't listen to them.

Just like if a new bitcoin client is released and you don't like or agree with the changes - stay on the old one and mine your own fork, hope that others agree.

yes, I would potentially do that. But following your logic, I would not be able to promote my reasoning for forking on here, thus how would I get anyone else to agree? I am essentially trying to add weight to the "thought-fork" away from tolerance of so called figure heads and protective entities within our community.

Just to weigh in with some positives:

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/752-the-good-and-useful-things-the-foundation-has-done-for-us-members-compiled-by-dr-brian-goss/

It's easy to just criticize.

Well...get to coding folks?
I appreciate the foundation.

It's interesting to not that the debacle with MtGox, a foundation gold member, has spured no preemptive action from the foundation, with the result of the apparent loss of substantional monetary value  for many members of the community.

However, when the business interests of the most resourceful members of the foundation is threatened, they act very swiftly:

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=484

This is a bit sad, as resourceful people really should help and look after those less resourceful. While the foundation is not legally obliged to intervene with situations like MtGox, I'm sure that exactly such situation is where we'd like to have a foundation with various expertise intervene and help.

While there were many warning signals in regards to MtGox, there were a lot of naive users caught out in this situation. If The Foundation had agressively approached MtGox demanding clarification on central issues, the deficit could've been noticed earlier, and the whole current situation could've been avoided.

Perhaps this is the time to draft a set of best business practises for exchanges in the bitcoin community. It could then be voluntary for exchanges to follow this, and for those who did, they could be listed as 'approved exchanges' or similar.

This would not be failsafe, but it could be a step in the right direction.

As a minimum:

- Independent audits on infrastructure security (hw/sw)
- Indepdent financial audits
- Ringfencing of client funds.
- No frontrunning or otherwise unethical manipulation of inhouse trading engine.

There could as well be various grades of compliance. Ie. compliance level 1, 2 and 3. Where a 3-star compliance level ensured that the exchange operated according to the highest standards set forth in the 'regulative draft'.

I think the bitcoin community is able to 'self police' and do not need governmental regulation apart from the existing AML/KYC procedures.

I was listening to Charlie Shrem on Let's Talk Bitcoin and he was badmouthing the foundation too.  It seems like some people of poor character on there..not all of them, but far too many.