Do you have any tips for attracting (or keeping) developers?
Yeah hire them. It helps if you are a programmer too and can talk shop with them. Presenting sexy tech helps a lot too. Helps also if you are likeable, reasonable, and demonstrate strong technical acumen. Mutual respect builds confidence.
Realize there are very few people who can possess all those skills, plus marketing skills, organizational skills, etc.. Not easy to find such a leader. Monero apparently had a core group of guys that gelled I believe via some connection to rpietila but perhaps I am mistaken.
Specifically for new coins that do not have much if any funding yet.
Nope. Get funding.
I think rpietila came along early in the life of Monero but after the core devs already joined the project.
One if the interesting things I see in Monero is that proportionally more bitcoin early adopters are involved than I see in other alt coins.
Is it because:
1. Bitcoin early adopters see Monero as a viable hedge to side chains and other potential fungibility/privacy fixes for bitcoin?
or
2. Bitcoin early adopters have been around long enough to recognize obvious pump/dump clone coins lacking much innovation and are far better at avoiding them than cryptocurrency newcomers trying to find the "next bitcoin"
I think we all can agree that 99+% of all altcoins will fail. How do early adopters identify coins that may be among the <1% to succeed as either a bitcoin hedge or a viable option to fill some niche that bitcoin either can/will not?