Well said.
Filecoin ICO was a tough one for me to be my usual harsh critic self.
I appreciate the CoinList/SAFT effort (though SAFT seems like a one-sided stopgap protective strategy… better than nothing for now). I also admire the people involved and the people in the trust circle (including blockstack guys). Like you say, they have all the qualities an investor should expect and I believe they will be committed and not negatively affected by having a huge lump sum of funds.
Otoh, I am not a total believer in the level of importance that IPFS is seen to have. I don’t see a huge problem with current file storage landscape (cloud services, consumer hardware, compression, streaming popularity etc). I see bandwidth issues being more of a concern (which p2p does help with) but not so much storage space. The mature cloud service market though not nec great has shown to be sufficient for most to all use cases. With that said, I am a big believer in decentralized p2p file networks… I just think that a hybrid p2p/cloud model is the realistic future and a token economy might not be necessary.
To prove my great interest in this type of tech, I have preferred to use and support another p2p network that has been traditionally funded through grants and donations… That is the DAT Protocol (Hypermedia related). No crypto token, no blockchain, no hype but a ton of innovation by brilliant engineers. DAT has lots of similarities with IPFS but is arguably more flexible and can cater to more use cases. When you are aware of such a competing technology and use it and follow the people building it out… it puts things into perspective in the context of ICOs etc.
Regarding the general sentiment of this piece… which I mostly agree with… I recently wrote a Crowdfunding Creed as a sort of stance against the current ICO climate for a cryptocurrency/token project that I am involved with. tl;dr — We’re doing traditional crowdfunding (a term I coined over a decade ago)… accepting normal developer donations. We’ve used the phrase Open Market Reverse ICO to describe our case.
I look forward to seeing how this all plays out!
