Yeah, the kind of person who's alerted of this tech's criminal potential by pictures of weed etc., rather than knowing about it through other means, isn't the type of person you would feel safe conducting an illegal transaction with.
Yeah, one would hope that cooperation with law enforcement would be hopeless. Otherwise the decentralised nature of OB, and its impartiality, would be called into question.
This is kind of amusing; they should add more currencies and maybe other types of assets. Although, as others have mentioned, the kind of thinking this encourages isn't healthy to the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Very few important developments are driven by a fear of missing out.
In the short term it may seem more unfortunate, but the problem with expensive ASICs is that they make centralisation far easier, by making it less feasible for ordinary people to do the mining.
I believe the author also thinks that piracy is, overall, a benefit to creators: "My feeling is that most people who choose pirated books are unlikely to pay for them, even if that's the only way to get them. As such, I'm inclined to think the marketing effect of illegal copies exceeds the lost revenue."