So, as a novice hobbyist, I am still very interested in this coin (?), so i'll throw this out there. In business you're often asked to prepare and give someone the "elevator pitch", which might be about 30 seconds worth of bullet points. So someone give this to me, what is the "elevator pitch" for this coin?
Is it a bitcoin killer? What does it do that other coins don't (is it the notion that you can leverage mining power into real-world applications/computations?)
I am interested in understanding this myself. It looks like the most talked aspect of the coin is the issuance, the IPO/fundraiser + mining + founder stakes make this the first PoW IPO. It's an attempt to ensure that coin distribution is more spread out and over the years the percentage held by large addresses should diminish. Lock-in for founders makes this slightly different from pump-and-dump - i.e. devs have a vested interest for at least 12 months, also the algo is claimed to be ASIC resistant (I think) thus giving smaller people like us a chance to mine something and thereby increasing the chances of a distributed environment. There are several other features that are listed but we haven't seen them implemented by any of the second generation coins, for example colored coins, decentralized exchanges, sub currencies, contracts and so on.
If you participate in the fund raiser you are essentially accepting that these features will be implemented sometime in the future, thus endowing good faith in the devs led by a couple of known cryptographers based on their protocol philosophy. How much you buy will be entirely based on your risk appetite keeping these factors in mind.