Almost all of us involved in the creation of HTP5 were children, few of us cared about money. It didn’t seem attainable at the time anyway, just something fraudsters from third world countries dealt with.
I think bitcoin changed this, now there’s a clear mechanism that enables anyone to profit from their crimes without having real life contacts or dealing with insecure services like liberty reserve.
If I were to get root@Linode again I’d certainly have far more lucrative targets in mind than rival IRC networks.
The great blackhats from groups like Ac1db1tch3z became billionaires by hacking bitcoin exchanges. It’s obvious why nobody is making zines anymore. The hackers claiming to not care about money were almost without exception children or just pretending to not care because they didn’t have the answer to “how?”.