There are 8 names on the press release, and probably a few more smaller investors. This doesn't represent a huge amount of money for any given fund - at most probably US$20m or so for the lead. The payoff should BTC prove useful will be in the realms of Facebook/Google/Apple valuations. Even if you think there's only a fraction of a percent probabilty that they'll be successful it'd still be worthwhile putting a few million in (assuming you can afford to lose it).

Personally, I think BTC is going to be OK because there's already a decent ecosystem growing around it. Enough people are keen on it succeeding that it'll do something useful. The real question is whether it'll be a multi-trillion dollar industry that replaces money or a multi-billion dollar industry that's used for secure value transactions or proof of work or something, not than whether or not it'll fail entirely and disappear.

> Enough people are keen on it succeeding that it'll do something useful.

Exactly. I am personally convinced it will succeed, but I don't know in which way. It could be anything that benefits of proof of work.

Are there actually libraries, or clients which create a P2P network, that is generic? I mean the client synchronization is the same as in BTC, but the data exchanged is generic.

Namecoin (http://namecoin.info) might be of interest to you.

That's what I was looking for.