I'm afraid that's not the state of the law.  Under federal regulations, and speaking only generally, a business who transmits currency (fiat or virtual) is a money transmitter.  From the recent FinCEN guidance that everyone is talking about:

FinCEN's regulations define the term "money transmitter" as a person that provides money transmission services, or any other person engaged in the transfer of funds. The term "money transmission services" means "the acceptance of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency from one person and the transmission of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency to another location or person by any means".... The definition of a money transmitter does not differentiate between real currencies and convertible virtual currencies. Accepting and transmitting anything of value that substitutes for currency makes a person a money transmitter under the regulations implementing the BSA.

Nonetheless, it looks from your description that you won't be doing that at all; some other business will be doing it for you.  Your company only sets up the voting pool - you don't actually handle the bitcoin right?

This sounds like a great idea.  You know what they say, though: functionality is the best marketing.  I'm interested to see how you implement this plan.

I see you've read up on how to avoid money transmission registration: make someone else handle the money.  But who will you be using to hold and move the BTC?  I'm not aware of any currently licensed entity that has the capability of handling BTC.

The website does not work for me... does it use Java?

I could still grab someone else's address and wait until he fills it.

There are coins that are merge mined and tradable for BTC that can be CPU mined.
And what if there is a guy that has $10,000 that he would spend on buying coke to sell, but starts up a mining op in a few friends houses when he gets out instead.

buy low, sell high

My bots are bored!!

I'm not necessarily doubting that he said that, but I've never run across it.  Can you provide a pointer?

It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user only needs to keep
a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying
network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain, and obtain the Merkle branch
linking the transaction to the block it's timestamped in. He can't check the transaction for
himself, but by linking it to a place in the chain, he can see that a network node has accepted it,
and blocks added after it further confirm the network has accepted it.

As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network, but is more
vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker. While network nodes can verify
transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated
transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network. One strategy to
protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid
block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to
confirm the inconsistency. Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to
run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification.

So, say I owned the escrow company and set up a secure platform for each of a bunch of projects.  An external auditor/escrow person could perhaps control my ability to access each vault system (though said person could never access the vaults themselves or at least not with a lot of cooperation with others.)

PORTLAND – A group of Southwest Portland residents decided they were tired of neighborhood potholes and hired a contractor to fix the problem. But the city might now charge those residents to bring those unpermitted repairs up to code.
 
Homeowner Peter Samson said that until about seven months ago he could barely even make it into his own driveway because the road in front of his Multnomah Village home—Southwest 37th Avenue–was unimproved.
 
He said driving home was like an off-road adventure. Neighbor Paul Hughes said the gullies created by the potholes channeled water into his home.
 
“It was obvious to all of us the city was never going to do anything on its own,” Hughes said.
 
They told KGW that when they spoke with city officials about the improvements they were told it would cost each homeowner about $20,000.
 
Instead the homeowners decided to take matters into their own hands. Last October they hired a paving company to do the job for only about $1,000 per resident.
 
But just last week they received letters from the City of Portland, stating that because the homeowners and the paving company did not get the proper permits, they are now liable for any run-off, flooding or environmental problems their unauthorized paving may cause.
 
“In this case because it’s a very steep hill, the rainwater and the storm water will run off, and run into a neighbor’s property,” said Diane Dulken of the Portland Bureau of Transportation.
 
Dulken said while the street looks good, a city engineer will still have to see if it meets code. If not, Hughes, Samson and other neighbors will have to pay the price to fix it. That could end up costing more than the original estimate for the permitted work. But homeowners said they are confident the work will be up to code.

Recently I was part of a group buy and was thinking of ways to automate things.  This led to the following rough outline:

 - an organization employing a number of escrow agents who's qualifications are advertised.

 - a 'job' would assign one of the escrow agents and he/she would work closely with the client (project owner) to obtain identity information and familiarity with the task.

 - project participants (who cough up funds) would fund individual green addresses which they retain access to.  They could withdraw their support at any time by withdrawing funds (making this an unusual escrow...'youscrow' and 'yescrow' and 'mescrow' domains were taken   Communications about participation and decisions would be understood by simply evaluating the funding level green addresses.

 - The project owner would propose a funding need by a vote and the results would be weighted in relation to how much funding each participant had.

 - Funding would be obtained from the participants account by a scripted operation.  The escrow agent would evaluate the votes and execute the script to transfer funds.

 - The escrow agent would probably have to obtain cooperation from another escrow agent at the 'office' in order to execute the script.  A reasonable number of escrow agents could execute scripts absent the primary agent (to avoid hit-by-a-bus accidents.)

 - The addresses would probably exist on a very secure system where only script execution was allowed (no logins, for instance.)

 - The entire escrow company would be backed by a bond which was sufficient to cover the costs of accidents to any one of the underway projects (loss of secure machine or some such.)

Such an elaborate setup would probably be overkill except for expensive and complex projects.  The project I had in mind was related to commissioning the development, production, and delivery of a new piece of hardware.  If anyone wants to steal the idea, or parts of it, please do.  I'm much more interested in using such a solution than in working on development of it.

I give.  Who?