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Yeah but it's anonymous / via bitcoin, no one could stop you from doing a 1000 'small' donations under a 1000 different identities, yet you control them all?

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Damn. Of course you're right. And it could all be automated, transparent to you, the cheater.

Maybe they could charge a small per-share voting fee which would be destroyed (or used in some clever, non-game-able way).

I could even imagine automatically refunding the fee for those casting losing votes to avoid wars of attrition... I guess that's essentially an auction.

Wouldn't work, people could group together and remain anonymous.

I suspect that if N honest backers would expect a net gain from a decision even if they spend X/N voting for it, a single owner of N fake accounts would expect a net gain from the same decision even if he spent X voting for it.

Anonymity on the internet pretty much inherently means that you can't tell how many actual individuals a given set of apparent individuals really are. You can tell how much money they have (or CPU power, bandwidth, or various other proxies for wealth), but that's about it. I don't see how this wouldn't be an inherent problem for any cryptocurrency (or crypto-whathaveyou-system) attempting to force decentralization (see; the primary actors in Bitcoin split war.)

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