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.
Hi,
FYI, the premined coins were locked on Sumokoin blockchain using a wallet command named "locked_transfer", that's a simple but effective command to use in this case: you can specify how many blocks ahead coins transferred would be unlocked.
Monero is respectable project with its own philosophy and it had a history (on how it started) ofc you knew it well. As a fork, we can never make sure the same level of support from community from beginning as Monero so a premine was set and we don't think it's abnormal among so many coins around. Until now, the decision (to premine by Sumoshi) has proved right and now we can have resources for devs, community, exchanges etc without having to find donation for each task (though I personally don't think donation-based is bad way either). We don't misuse premined coins, even little on hand by now, only a small portion of them was released to market mainly for rewards, exchange submissions, website/logo redesign which are good for our community. And that's why many ppl here support the coin and the community is growing up day by day.
As said at ANN from the beginning, we also set a part of premine for donation to Monero. All coins to donation wallet in the first year will be transferred to Monero project and we are willing to donate more.
At devs meetings, Sumoshi has more than one time insisted that devs should pay respects to all other coins but we'll keep our rights to correct nonsense, groundless info about Sumokoin.