I have and still am involved in pure community coins with no funding and development is excruciatingly slow. Which leads me to believe some form of funding helps progress along and you nor i are getting any younger. So the quicker the better imho.
You must be joking. Look at the commit logs of Monero, Aeon and Sumokoin:
Can you tell which coin is the least active?
Monero which is purely community funded without any scammy premine is making extremely rapid progresses every day non stop. This is simply because no open-source developers (myself included) are interested in Sumokoin which is to them clearly a scam. Granted that Aeon's activity is much smaller than Monero's, but this is reasonable given the current circumstance. Smooth (Aeon's core dev, also part of Monero Core Team) also recommends developers to contribute to Monero for now until the rebase is done. And even then, Aeon's developer base and activity are much bigger than Sumokoin.
By the way, Aeon has a huge development fund of 400k (roughly equivalent to $1M) which were all donated from the community unlike Sumokoin's scam premine.
Hi Stoff,
We are on the same team. I own a considerable amount of XMR. Monero is a good example to use but make no mistake. The devs who are tirelessly working on Monero code hold many many thousands of XMR so are incentivized in their own way. Which is a good thing.
Monero came about before the ICO Boom where Dev's who missed the Bitcoin rush wanted to try to replicate that with a new coin.
I am sure there are a few altruistic dev's out there but they are very few and very far between.
It would be great if sumo management did confirm how and who holds these coins in escrow. As i agree, its not really escrow if core can access these coins at a whim.