I do feel it's unethical/undesirable that some of us have a great deal more of the currency than even the developers.
The developers can be seen as having an indirect incentive derived from the donation fund.
The intent is that the donation fund support the project which includes incentives for developers. This is consistent with the wishes of those who made a statement when donating (including some very large donations), though there are also many anonymous donations with no stated wishes.
Obviously at the point most of the donations were made, they were worth next to nothing and spending it on just about anything would just cause the entire fund to evaporate.
So the following plan was made, and described in various posts on the thread, but collected and clarified here:
1. HODL, distribute small bounties
2. Reimburse direct project expenses (seed nodes, web hosting, etc.). Currently paid by lead developer.
3. Compensation for core developers and potentially larger bounties for external projects
4. Distributions to core team allocated by responsibility and subject to a vesting policy of at least one year (policy applied to all including lead developer)
We are currently in stage 1. The transitions to stage 2, 3, and 4 will occur in sequence based on a subjective evaluation of whether the fund can handle those roles without being unduly depleted, which in turn is largely a function of value (but also to some extent, probably lesser now and greater later, the rate new donations are received).
Two indirect consequences of this plan:
1. If the value increases sufficiently, then the core team will upon vesting receive a significant amount of coin as we reach 4 without the fund having been depleted.
2. If I leave the project prior to vesting as described in #4 having occurred, the donation fund will be passed on to a replacement lead or if there is no continuation of the organized effort to develop the coin, it will be burned.
I'm willing to commit AEON funding as we go forward towards not only you, but also others that help with the coding and development. Without that, and ongoing experimentation using Aeon as a Cryptonote test bed, the blockchain is useless anyway.
The donation address is in the ANN OP. All donations are welcome. The daemon miner supports a --donate option which automatically directs mined coins to donations so you can simultaneously support the network and the project (--mining-threads is also needed if you want >1 thread)