I think the kickstarter over-subscription thing is kind of out of hand. Diaspora asked for 10 and got 200, but it is highly unlikely the result will be 20x better. I wonder how the 128 people who just donated money to the project feel now that it's clear he had no need of donations. Also, not everything can scale well. What if he had a great tooling line already picked out, but now that he needs to do 100x the volume he'll have to find a worse one.

You should have to set a maximum as well as a minimum on a kickstarter project. The first time one of these massively over subscribed offers turns out to be a total scam, or just fails there's going to be a lot of unhappy people.

I think pre-sales projects like this are really interesting, but it doesn't really match the donation model. At a minimum, kickstarter should escrow the money and release it in $xx,000 chunks or something, and ensure people are getting what they ordered. Even better would be to not have people paying until they were reasonably close to an actual delivery date. It's one thing if you're waiting for upfront R&D, but it's another thing if you're simply on the ass end of a one year waiting list.