Shouldn't a cap be set? I mean, there is an obvious conflict of interest here...
Maybe, but it would need to come from Kristov himself rather than people just randomly stopping donations. For the community to decide the cap we would need to know how many hours he is going to spent going over the code, how much he would be paid per hour for similar actively by other entities, whether or not he is just reviewing or will be providing snippets of improved code, etc.
Plus if you read the reddit it seems like this not the first time that he has used this model and I have not heard anybody calling him out on his integrity.
If he finds issues with the code or design, and provides suggestions or even code to fix them, then he would deserve another round of donations imo.
Don't disagree. In fact, to put things another way for anybody that has fears of the the donations being seen as bribery.
This might have actually been a concern if Darksend was going to forever remain closed-source and the marketing was going to be based on "well it is closed-source but Kristov Atlas said it was OK".
However that is NOT the case. Darksend will be open-sourced. And if (and I don't believe for one second he would do this) he purposely gave a false endorsement so that his donations would increase in value -- then as soon as the code was open-sourced the coin would fall flat as anybody would be able to see any and all warts.
The reason to donate is so that he feels motivated to
spend a lot of time on the code looking for any and all bugs, suggesting new code, etc, -- so that when it is open-sourced we don't have a bunch of day 1 exploits, hacks, or other disasters. The donations are for his valuable time. And the more of it he spends on the code the better for all parties involved with Darkcoin.
Kristov: 140
SW Devel : 163
What other people do with their money is none of my business, but Kristov Atlas donations outstripping the SW dev fund in under 24hrs seems a bit, uh, weird.
For 190DRK or whatever it's up to now I'd want a joint audit by Norbert Wiener and Richard Feynman.
What is the "SW dev"? Something for Evan? If so, then it is likely the case that people are donating based on the fact that he has some number of coins (may or may not be a lot) already somewhere secure.
. agree with you on that. joint audit may just be needed 
