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.
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Thanks for the information exciter0.
I agree devs need to be funded, I said before they should have enough share to be incentivized if they are to be expected to work full time for a few years and deliver what they promise - who wouldn't.
The potential issue I see though is with the fact that Smooth has a stake in both XMR and AEON as I have already highlighted as it represents a conflict of interest and various sketchy scenarios can come up if AEON increases in value, with Smooth positioned on the core team of both coins, and that I don't think the AEON / XMR investors are fully aware of this situation.