The idea that you can invent a crypto currency, mine the earliest (and therefore easiest-to-mine) tokens yourself, build a business/community/market, then get incredibly rich strikes me as incredibly shady. In theory it's not that different from founding a company, selling some of the shares to investors, keeping "founder shares" for yourself, then growing the company. But somehow it seems much shadier?

I guess the difference is: in a company an investor can look at a cap table and say "that's a reasonable number of shares for the founders to keep" whereas the coin "investors" can't know how much of outstanding equity belongs to the founders.