I get what you're saying and I don't know if there's a way to disprove that in a factual way. If BCNext and a few partners created a bunch of shill accounts and sent bitcoins to the ICO address they would have been paying the money to themselves and not really spending their money. However, that just doesn't seem plausible to me in the case of NXT, the whole thing from the get-go just doesn't seem like a scam. If it were a scam you'd think the whale accounts would have dumped most of their NXT by now, especially during that big pump when the NXT market cap shot up to $100 million. But instead they've held onto most of their NXT all this time. Why would they have done that if they were just running a scam and trying to cash in? Scam-coins tend to be clone coins with lazy coding, why put so much work into developing real features, which they did from the very beginning by writing entirely original code for the first all-POS crypto. And the dev team has been active ever since. All that evidence suggests to me that whoever started NXT was serious about making a crypto of real value and not just a get-rich-quick scheme. Why develop all these features if you're just looking to make a quick buck. I guess it is possible that they did both: develop a real crypto AND scam investors by setting up shill accounts. Who knows? But to me that's really not the issue. The real issue is whether NXT is a quality altcoin with valuable features. Even if there were some shady dealings going on there's really no denying the quality and originality of the platform.