allegedly, in one of the first big conferences, there was a yacht excursion that was attended by the critical mass of technical folks; in open source, people often talk about "bus factor", but if that yacht had sunk, then probably the social engineering takeover of bitcoin by Gavin Andresen's audience at Langley would've been child's play.

my point is that you look at bitcoin as a seemingly infinite variety of personalities today, and might not realize how small a world it is if you limit your criterea to people who could have been on that boat, but weren't.