I continue to go back-and-forth with my support for the crypto community, ICOs and the token economy in general.
One day, I'm optimistic that we've created a revolutionary new form of capitalism - an ability to raise non-dilutive, community-sourced capital without the need for broker/advisor/banker leeches, all wrapped in the new version of excel that is blockchain. Its HARD to dig into this technology and NOT come away thinking about all of the numerous ways in which it could accelerate the world forward, in a positive way.
But then ICO's like Decentraland happen. The Decentraland team, for months, had been maintaining a community of 3,000 Slack members, providing updates on the project's progression, getting contributing members prepared for what was PROMISED to be a broadly distributed ICO, etc. They even introduced a concept of a "white list", where they PROMISED that all of their Slack community members, after signing up to the whitelist, WOULD GET ACCESS to the ICO...
And then, conveniently one week before the ICO, their Slack was "hacked" which prompted the team to (a) remove all Slack channels that provided community members the ability to comment (i.e., one-way communication) and (b) disbanded the "whitelist", BUT again promised that whitelist members would gain preferential treatment in the ICO.
Then we get to the ICO, which blows out in 30 seconds to a few large insiders and a smart contract pool that eats up all demand. That'll be REALLY conducive to developing a trusted community of network users. Thanks Decentraland.
Which comes to my point: Is this all really just a ponzi scheme? Are blockchain "projects" really just spending all of their resources on coming up with creative ways to hype their ICO in order to raise ungodly amounts of money? Who is there, post-ICO, to make sure that these people ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING towards the cause they promised their buyers? The answer: no one. The only thing incentivizing them to do ANYTHING is the fact that they held back 60% of the tokens for themselves - that way, they can continue to hype non-existent product and networks, continue to leak tokens into the market and raise MORE funds until, I suspect, everyone finally realizes what just happened.
850 token project owners got rich. Everyone else was sold a bill of goods and wampum that will inevitably go to zero.
WORLD CHANGING IDEAS fueled the start of this revolution. My deeply-rooted concern is that human nature has taken hold and will spell its demise. And it will be UGLY.
To some extent, I completely agree with you. Those broken promises and the lack of transparency is a real issue. To fix this, Decentraland team will be conducting another small ICO for those that were whitelisted. Were you one of those people on the whitelist? If so, are you planning to give them a second chance? Let me know!