I can support smooth's statement here as I've donated 200K+ AEONs to the dev fund and..get this...it was entirely voluntary on my part. I was not desperate as TPTB has suggested because I hold XMR as the majority or my coins. In fact, I traded most of my mined AEONs to XMR. Why donate 200K? Because the difficulty was incredibly low from Oct of last year til recently and I've amassed quite a bit of coins since then as there were very few miners. I personally felt development needs to be funded and asking for donation is quite an honorable and respectable thing, a rare thing these days as most coin devs would just rely on premines and ICOs.
Q (americanpegasus): If I see this, I will report on it. For my money, I am still supporting Monero.
I personally feel that anyone holding 400k of a future-minded currency, especially a dev, could be considered a little excessive (that's over 2% of a currency.... akin to a small premine).
I would say I would have felt more comfortable with smooth outright taking a 3%-5% premine, but I'm not too worried.
Monero remains the first viable implementation of cryptonote, giving it true anonymity, and that along with continuing development is what we have to go off of. Bitcoin was the first viable implementation of a transparent blockchain and litecoin didn't suddenly dethrone it, did it?
I feel the situation is the same and am not currently concerned.
A (smooth): Yes I'm technically holding the 400k donation fund, but:
It was voluntarily donated by coin holders who felt it was a good idea to fund development, there was no premine setup or other manipulation on my part. All I did was create a fund and ask people to donate to it. They felt it was a good use for their coins. The fund continues to be open for any and all voluntary donations, just as with the equivalent Monero donation fund. How is that in any way a bad thing?
I've already stated that all members of the development team, including me, will be subject to some sort of vesting rule (with details tbd, but the intent is a period of years). Which is to say that if I quit the project before that time, I won't keep the coins, I will either burn them or pass them on to the new developer.
At this point the coins, other than a small minority used for bounties and such, are just being held in safekeeping pending decisions on what to do with them.
Responding to the parent post, the two coins do not have the same features. As of next week, AEON has a different proof-of-work, and a slower block time. There will be additional differences soon thereafter. As I said elsewhere I have no objection to any and all features being ported back upstream, and I'd even do the work if they are features the Monero community wants.
Finally, no one is "heavy" into AEON. The total market cap (based on OTC) is something like 100K XMR or 60K USD (and the donation fund is maybe 8K XMR or 4.8K USD). People making a big deal about any of this are being hyperbolic or deliberately trolling.