afaik they have no coins to offer bounties because there was no ICO reserved for such (instead I heard the devs were mining the shit out of the egregiously front loaded debasement curve and rumor was the guy who optimized the PoW hash netted himself $150,000 before releasing the optimizations), nor would they like a rancorous dev coming in and rearranging the house
The community is offering bounties, of course it is a different game as we don't have "free coins" but everyone must surrender actual value to get something done. On the other hand, this is called "voluntarism", which is the antithesis of "communism" practised by the premined coins.
I haven't heard that the devs could be "mining shit out of it". Mining Monero is somewhat tedious, because there is no ASIC, and GPU is not specifically good return. The only advantages you could get are using Amazon instances (mostly difficult, or else possible for all), botnets (not accessible by people except their owners, so a mandatory nuisance), or optimized miners (this era ended a year ago).
The emission schedule is a bit front-loaded, in part worse even than Bitcoin. At least Monero has perpetual emission (0.9%), which takes care of the network security and makes the game fairer. Less than half of the coins are mined, cf. 70% with BTC.
As for the ability to capture egrecious value by joining in now - yes, it is very much there. 1 XMR = 0.50 USD, and less exist than there exist BTC. So we are talking about BTC in 2010, and that's the year when many could have placed a sidebet worth a few $grand, yet did not do it, causing some gnashing of teeth for themselves.
Especially there is no need to care about mining, the coins can just be bought in surprisingly liquid markets.
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I've heard (not verified) they inherited a sloppy C code base and I hate C and C++, even I am very proficient in those programming languages
According to Latapie (core team member), the codebase is 84% rewritten for security reasons (although no malicious things have been found in the code).
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over a year ago, rpietila was telling everyone to buy more BTC at $600 and XMR was the greatest thing since sliced bread and I was turned off by the lack of cooler heads and objectivity. Since then, I come to respect smooth and realized that rpietila isn't the key voice of XMR (and I don't dislike rpietila, he is my friend and even a potential token amount seed investor of my controlling group... no I am would not pull rpietila away from XMR, he just likes small diversifications and he is my friend after all).
That guy is like a broken record (or at least turns v e r y slowly): he was instructing to buy silver 5 years in a row and now he's been bullish on BTC constantly since it was $3, and still is. Despite his incessant shilling of XMR, he does not even have such a high % of his wealth invested (way less than the castle he owns in Estonia anyway - at the current valuation, the castle is nearing XMR marketcap).
I think it is correct to invest small amounts in many promising, +EV projects, Bitcoin and Monero (and Newcoin) included.
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XMR was a coin for those devs who already had money to invest, not for a dev like me who exhausted his former 18,000 oz stash and needs to strike it big one more time in life coming to old age without a retirement, blind in one eye, teenage dependents, and diagnosed with a chronic, progressive illness Multiple Sclerosis.
XMR is the "rich get richer" coin in the sense that the rich who grok it, can buy 100k XMR without sacrifice. The poor can only buy a few k.
Nevertheless, if it makes big, both will never need to work again.
Complaining about "devs" buying the coin at an early mover price is ludicrous as the price here and now is about -75% compared to last summer average ($0.50 vs. $2). In reality those who buy now, are the ones to be envied if it takes off. Are you in?
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nor do I want to own 1% of the economy (what a major responsibility and nearly impossible to allocate resources optimally at that scale).
The guys who buy 1% of the coin supply and still have it, are rather few and far between. I don't know anyone in the world, except Satoshi, who still has his maximum amount of BTC.
If XMR would even to become as big as BTC, it would need to go up 2^10 times. Every time it doubles, statistics say, people tend to sell 17% of their holdings, distributing the coins to the newcomers whose interest is the cause for the price to double.
(1-17%)^10 = 0.15
After 1000-times upsurge, on average only 15% of coins still belong to the original guys. If we are talking about hindering the global economy with your wealth, we need a 1,000,000 times appreciation, at which point your holding is not 1% anymore but 0.01%, still a massive stash but not a disruptive one.