Interesting. Have never heard this story before. Obviously ideas don't get created out of a social vacuum.

Both. Just 1.5 ETH which two people donated to my blog post. When you give away your idea, you decentralize it from day one :)

I was waiting for some sort of bug. Did expect it earlier though and at a lower multi-million dollar level. Effectively over one billion dollar market-cap got destroyed. But hey, what does not kill Ethereum,

You say that he invented the 'DAC'. How about the 'DAO' (not 'theDAO')? Do you see any difference between a DAC and a DAO? I remember also Vitalik writing about the DAO quite early.