How can money be siphoned off? Miner fees?
Are you seriously admitting you are blind?
1. Selling the ICO/pre/instamine to you.
2. Using control of a significant portion of the coin supply (and thus perhaps 90+% of the exchange volume float) to buy coins from themselves, set fake bid/ask walls, and otherwise manipulate you into buying high and selling back to them low. Repeat & rinse.
3. Having some "governance" scheme wherein some staked nodes (e.g. Dash masternodes and Bitshares' DPOS delegates) pay out some of the created-out-of-thin-air coins for each block and pay them to the owners of these staked nodes, which are disproportionately those who control the coin supply from #2. And even paying some of these coins to the lead developers via "voted on projects" (and remembering who controls the staked nodes and thus who controls the votes).
The truth and facts are that Dash Masternodes are decentralized (spoiler alert: my grandmother runs one
) and are a brilliant idea to perform Dash's myriad of current and future open-sourced services. They are a way for the largest stakeholders to have a say in the direction Dash takes, without ceding influence to well-heeled outside entities. Masternodes are a key part in the way Dash is creating Satoshi's vision of a true digital cash.