Thanks for sharing your views. I think you touch on a lot of very real concerns, but they aren't exactly new. I've heard them before, in various forms and especially when the price is dropping and the candles are red. For someone reason these things aren't discussed very loudly when the price is going up.

The "bitcoin is anonymous" line was always wrong and everyone I know has always pushed back against it. Media will do what media does.

basically a glorified torrent

That's an interesting way to put it, but I still think it's more than that as it does threaten the actual global ponzi system of money itself. I talked about that in 2013 here: Why Bitcoin May Be More Disruptive than the Internet. Even with the geographic centralization of ASIC mining, I still think important aspects of that talk are still true.

all the obscure cypherpunks who had anything to do with have gone dark

Maybe. Maybe they moved on to other projects like decred or raven or something else.

a bit of education towards people who think they are NOT the normies might not be a bad idea

Trying to parse this to understand... do you mean educating people who are normies but think they are technically aware?

BTC is big money now but at least its still actually de-centralized ... no one gets the deciding right and you can NEVER vote someone out of their share with 9000+ nodes across the globes

I agree, bitcoin is still the big dog when it comes to serving as money, but I also think programmable distributed systems ("decentralized" may be a trigger word for some as it's all on a spectrum and some don't get that) are valuable. Steem, for example, provides censorship resistance with an economic model to keep things alive (unlike IPFS). EOS and ETH provide distributed running programs that can't be shut down. I think this is valuable and important.

As to the point of my original post, were you making any comments about the FIO Protocol itself? What do you think of the white paper / roadmap and the problem it aims to solve regarding usability in the cryptocurrency space?