It's done by taking the amount of Ether it has already raised * the current price of Ether. See it transparently on the Ethereum blockchain: http://etherscan.io/token/TheDAO
There are several things Ethereum does currently that's better for scaling.
1) It produces blocks every 17 seconds. It can do this without neglecting security, because orphan blocks count as uncles and are included in the security of the whole network.
2) It has a scalable/dynamic blocksize. The miners can scale the gas limit up or down by a certain amount. If the current gas limit (pi million) gets hit, miners can start increasing it.
3) Tx fees purpose is primarily for DDOS protection & solving the halting problem with turing-complete scripts. It's not a fundamental element for security, because the issuance rate is constant. This means that a "fee market" doesn't need to exist as much as in Bitcoin, in order to make sure the blockchain remains alive. It has an infinite, but predictable supply, rather than finite.
4) Future scalability improvements include Casper PoS, which will decrease block time to around 1 - 4 seconds & sharding, which will remove the need for every node to process every part of the transaction space.
These additions will mean that for the current period, transactions will increase, and perhaps lead to more centralization as not many will run nodes to keep the whole state. This is a trade-off in return for running more transactions.
To be honest, we were frustrated that it slipped through. As in exactly as you say: it's sloppy and should've really not let this happen. Completely our fault.
One thing I need to clarify (similar with Ripple). If in the future, there are enough trust hops between nodes, then the currency won't even be required, right? Because the currency is just a way to hop between untrusted nodes?
We also have to look at a future where an artist like Justin Bieber could put up a BTC address on his Twitter profile. Taking a cut means the artist has a small reason to not want to sign up ("they take 1%-2%. I'm better off just sticking a BTC address on my Facebook").
VRCoin. It's a blockchain that simultaneously doubles as storage for items a decentralized virtual space. You require the coin to store/remove items from the space [namecoin for coordinates essentially].
I think once VR takes off there's going to be a desire for a virtual world that's not owned by any one specific entity. The blockchain acts as decentralized storage as well as spam control, so people don't just place dicks everywhere (or rather it would be costly to do so).
VRCoin. It's a blockchain that simultaneously doubles as storage for items a decentralized virtual space. You require the coin to store/remove items from the space [namecoin for coordinates essentially].
I think once VR takes off there's going to be a desire for a virtual world that's not owned by any one specific entity. The blockchain acts as decentralized storage as well as spam control, so people don't just place dicks everywhere (or rather it would be costly to do so).