RE: do I have gazillions of bitcoins:
I've said before that I have "thousands of bitcoins, not tens or hundreds of thousands of bitcoins." I have mined a grand total of 250 bitcoins-- electricity here is not particularly cheap, and I'm a software kind of guy, not a hardware hacker. So it always made more sense for me to buy bitcoins rather than mining them.
I would definitely be wealthier right now if I had been working as the CTO for a company for the last two years and had never heard of Bitcoin.
RE: what work will I do:
I will continue doing what I've been doing-- trying to focus on work that benefits all of Bitcoin and not one particular company. That is the kind of work that falls through the cracks-- why would one company pay for cross-implementation compatibility tests? Sure cross-implementation compatibility is really important for the stability of the Bitcoin network, but as long as the implementation THEY'RE using works properly then why would they spend extra to make life easier for other implementations?
Or a company might fund the development of anti-denial-of-service techniques, but once they do, why would they want to share that with their competitors? Being more denial-of-service-resistant might give them a competitive advantage...
TruCoin paid me a salary for a couple of months last year to do core development work (and paid Alex Waters to start doing Q/A for core development), but TruCoin ran into funding problems of their own and stopped paying us to concentrate on their own projects.
Creating a Foundation is a proven, well-established way for projects to solve the free-rider problem of funding core development that benefits everybody. Over time, I hope to be working less on the reference implementation and more on "Chief Scientist" stuff, like organizing working groups to write best practices documents or work out agreements on changes that might be necessary to the core protocol to support more transactions, better privacy, advances in quantum computing, hiring or recruiting experts to do security reviews of proposed new stuff, etc.
RE: voting:
Great ideas! I think I'll be pushing to start with a good old-fashioned "send you a letter with a PIN number to your mailing address" as the first step to preventing voter fraud. We'll have to have a much more extensive discussion of voting procedures before it is time to vote. I'll probably push to follow the lead of other successful organizations, and to do the Simplest Possible Thing That Will Work-- which might be hiring a disinterested high-reputation company who specializes in running elections for organizations.