$100,000 is chump change. I earned that in 2 months (inflation-adjusted) in 2001.

I believe these guys have a lot more money than that and they are dabbling with small amounts of their money in projects they think might have large potential.

They are trying to find the next home run, while holding a core, large position in BTC. Their Monero holdings are even smaller than their BTC holdings (or at least it was before Gavincoin was on the threat horizon).

I believe if they see superior technology and market momentum, they will quickly be joining that camp.

These guys are trying to figure out how to expand the pie beyond the limited scope of bitcointalk.org. They are experimenting and trying to find the killer combination.

I am also experimenting.

Personally I am not interested in attacking Dash. The masternode concept is fundamentally flawed because it is not autonomous. It violates the end-to-end principle. But if people want an inferior system for speculative frenzy reasons (or what ever reasons they have), then who I am to tell them what to do?

Smooth already created a thread which details the alleged instamine for Darkcoin. He provided a disclaimer there acknowledging his conflict-of-interest. I wasn't even aware of that until I read smooth's thread.

Again I would suggest to smooth to back off of attacking Dash. Nothing more will be gained from that and it is counter productive. The way you help is by educating n00bs in your own site and threads. And that doesn't need to be an attack on Dash. Simply explaining why autonomy is important and why CoinJoin (and other off chain anonymity such as CoinShuffle) is not autonomous and can never be.

To your credit, I ack that the vote here should indicate to smooth the counter vailing forces to excessive attacking. You don't go against a large community. That is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Also I hear you guys about being more about coding than talking. Hear here. I will definitely internalize that wisdom.