@SomethingElse I wish you were wrong about the best marketing overruling everything, but I'm afraid I have to agree with you. Thing is marketing takes big bucks and massive manpower and time, not something most start-ups can provide unless they have big VC-backing or something like that and that doesn't help with the decentralization and low barriers to entry principles.

Crowdfunding/ipo seems to come with it's own set of problems, like an angry mob of "experts" who seem to think that harassing a small team with extra pressure, threats and rumors is a sound strategy to insure the success of their "investment". I'm seeing more and more kickstarter-projects suffering the same backlash. If anything, it looks like crowdfunding requires that the marketing and pr teams should be bigger than the dev-team.

One thing that worries me about overhyping like with Ethereum is that it could very well backfire, but then again some people just want to believe in a dream, so it might just work even if they aren't able to make true on their claims. Now that you mention it, where is Ethereum getting  the money for their marketing and travels if they haven't done their IPO yet, are they backed by VCs or something? Anybody have any info on that?

Elaborating on my remark about NXT, DeathAndTaxes answered that part very eloquently, also I was paraphrasing what ComeFromBeyond actually said on the nxt-forums as being the reason for not releasing the transparent forging code. The other part of it was referring to the code not being released for quite a while after the fundraiser and even then it had those 3 deliberate bugs in them (apart from the non deliberate ones of course). Opensource is the primary requirement for me in this space for several reasons especially when dealing with trust in anonymous/pseudonymous people.