Don't forget the songs on his soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/jewel-in-the-night

https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/danny-boy

https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/eleanors-song

https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/big-smoke

and of course this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvAnfi8WpVE

(He wrote or helped write all of the above except for Danny Boy obviously.)

"Someone should start a Netflixesqu mail service but for pancakes instead of DVDs."

Gold.

There certainly are those who are self-interested, but there are many more who really do care about the public good. You hear about the ones doing backdoor deals and shady stuff like that on the news because it makes a more interesting story than someone who goes to work each day trying to make their city a little nicer, or pay teachers a bit more, or cut down on crime, etc.

You can't do much public good if you don't get re-elected. Since public opinion suggests people want more services and less taxes, something is going to have to give.

> work each day trying to make their city a little nicer, or pay teachers a bit more, or cut down on crime, etc.

These are examples of very local politicians, except maybe the last one. Interesting.

As I recall from watching it he didn't even bring up the idea himself, he just agreed with someone else and said the idea made sense to him.

To get actual legislation going there needs to be public pressure. Not being an expert I don't know the best way of going about this, but I would think doing it at a local level would be more successful than trying to do it at a federal level. Then if it works well it would spread.

Out of curiosity, what makes you want to see bitcoins be successful so much? A backend programmer I'm working with wants to include bitcoin payments in a site but I'm not convinced.

why wouldn't you accept payment for soemthing? Taking payments in BTC is very easy there are a multitude of copy and paste code snippets that will do it for you. Unlike taking paypal or visa there are no hoops to jump through.

I guess my real question is how many people actually use it. I know for a lot of people it has a tendency to sound a bit scamy when you first hear about it. I feel like for those people it might be a turn off. Feel free to prove me wrong though.

plenty, have a look at bitmit.net, an ebay clone that uses bitcoins for payment, then look at bitpay - a bitcoin payment processor, they provide services to 2500 companies, reddit just adopted it so that will increase the nuber of users, it is still in early adopter stage but that is still a large volume of users.