***Full disclosure: I invested in the Ethereum presale and made a profit from it. I no longer hold any ether--I sold the first day because of the aforementioned management issues.
Interesting summary ddink. I invested too but only dumped half. Wish I'd dumped the other half as well now but that would have broken my trading rule
I think the Ethereum project will probably survive - even if the current incarnation goes insolvent. They've come quite a long way and it will probably get picked up somehow.
One of the reason's I've stuck with Dash in terms of long term technical interest is that it has a small, compact team with highly focused objectives. It's a sharp knife with achievable goals and measurable progress.
By contrast, trying to write the OS for all-crypto is probably a greasy flagpole that will only be assailed by multiple parties over a period of time, standing on the shoulders of the early corpses. Meanwhile, the commercial world continues to tool-up with bitcoin interfaces, bitcoin brand and using bitcoin as the reserve measure of value. You could up with a situation where they create the most beautiful and functional 3D Television of all time for which no channels will ever be transmitted.
I agree with you completely. The entire project is open-source, even the unreleased parts, so it's likely that it will continue to be developed in some form. If the Ethereum team runs out of money, maybe a new group could come in and clone the repo, redo the presale to raise money, and then relaunch the coin with a new blockchain.
One of the things that has impressed me so much about Dash is how we created a formal project management team relatively early on (with far fewer core team developers at the time than Ethereum has). Sharp, highly focused, and well-organized. Dash's core team is the big reason that I believe in this project so strongly.