There is/soon-will-be a separate group MEW, Monero Economy Workgroup, similar to foundation that some coins have.
Isn't that a bit arrogant. Bitcoin = "some coin"
I will not be joining any coin that has a foundation, the exception being a foundation that has the very limited role of holding the domain names (and any other assets that can't be held anonymously) for compliance with law.
I observe throughout all examples in human history all collective trust is corruption directed. The best intentions of mice and men won't change this, e.g. I was banned at least once from their Cryptocrypt forum. They could have learned a lot of information from me a lot sooner, but their top-down perspective won (unwittingly a manifestation of gestapo).
PoW solved the bottom-up consensus without trust problem (although we discussed upthread that the trend towards centralization hasn't been solved yet and if I am correct BCX will need to find a new vocation and abandon his pools). Google Paul Brody at IBM to see how fundamental this paradigm shift is.
The most useful activity those with large capital can do is to angel invest in startups which proliferate the use of crypto-currencies to hopefully drive adoption as a unit-of-account. For as long as crypto-currencies are just a pass-through mechanism (e.g. Bitpay) then we've accomplished nothing against the coming global consolidation of fiat power.
I'm refuting the notion that there exists some causal relationship between expenditure and value. That relationship is correlation in some cases, but not causation. Plenty of coins have been mined with great expenditure of resources yet are worthless now. The inverse is also true. Some coins have been mined quickly and without much expenditure, but are highly valued.
That is a very astute point. The value of a coin other than as an investor pump has been the value of a currency, which is related to the number of goods and services it can be spent on and moreover the number of people who use it as their unit-of-account. Bitcoin has done only moderate inroads on the former and failed miserably on the latter (Peter Thiel's Bitpay actively works to not make it a unit-of-account).
The only prayer of attaining unit-of-account status is to put the coin in a 100 - 1000 million spenders' hands such that both the former and latter are synergistic. Apple Pay is going to lock up 200 million within a year or so. Time is running out, but there is still the developing world, yet I see Bangladesh has threatened to jail users of crypto-currency and Ecuador is also hostile.
I've had my mind on bigger issues than just anonymity. Anonymity is personally important to me, but not to vast majority of consumers. A coins design has to factor these realities in.