imho we should incentivate donations instead of begging for donations...
what about a weekly lottery where participating cost you eg. 1 xmr and the winner gets eg. 50% of the jackpot and the remaining 50% goes to developers?
we could use the block hash to choose the winner like fairpumps.net is doing for choosing the coin to pump (just an idea)...
it would be even better if it could be implemented directly into the gui (just to incentivate a little more the developers to finally release it ).
what do you think?

Rounding things up, it looks like we can/will fund development by:
 - mining at a pool with a % going to development fund
 - donate on personal initiative (thus joining the hall of fame)
 - by setting up a donation % on top of transaction fees, soon^(tm)

Initiatives like MEW might/will come up with their own funding strategies as well. As stated upthread, nothing precludes a crowd funding initiative that might take place.

I think this already gives participants from all quadrants, the opportunity to take their part in assuring that development doesn't stagnate and is properly rewarded. Not all these bits are fully in motion yet, so it looks like we don't have a realistic funding quantification at this time.

There's one participant in particular that benefits largely from the Monero community, and should be in a position to 'give a little back', and that is Poloniex, which has an apparent dramatic increase in popularity and trading activity, in no small part thanks to Monero. Just my 2 cents, but I think that it would be great if they would donate a small % of their Monero trading fees to the development fund.

@ fluffy: I don't know if this has been considered yet, but perhaps it is worthwhile having a couple of different development fund accounts, in order to separate donation sources? I'm thinking that it would be useful, if long term, one could perform some statistical analysis on donations per source (% of donations made from pool fees, % of donations from individuals, % of auto-donations from the client software, etc).

Cheers,
~ Myagui

I also thought about poloniex role in this process but did not come to a proper solution.

there are basically two scenarios:

1.) busoni keeps his place as basically the monopoly of xmr trading - in this situation he should support xmr in the best possible way. I think if he does this position would be self enforcing.

2.) a bigger exchange overtakes his position (btc-e?), in this case he would be worse off.

that said - it could be a marketing idea of an exchange to say it funds the development of xmr

No he didn't. He said there is a timewarp exploit (in KGW), which the devs fixed.

maybe can you reach the swarmcorp team for that purpose ?

What the heck is going on with the price?

It'd definitely be awesome if someone could figure out a way to fairly compensate FOSS devs for the all those LASER beams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYJwen53cII

1% is not that much of a loss. no one should complain about it considering what the coins are going to be spent for.  

No good ?? Don't want to do a secondary offering ??

Then ask the top 100 wallets on the 'rich list' ( they know who they are )
to kick in 1% of what they currently own/hold to the 'Dev Fund' ..

Triff ..