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Comment by cslarson | Hacker News Reader

I think many people involved in Ethereum community now believe the current ICO model to be fundamentally broken despite being the platform most of them are hosted on. Vitalik, for instance, has said "fund ideas, not teams" and proposed the DAICO model - which makes it easy for investors to move their money to whoever is most likely to get the job done. ICOs were for 2017. Hopefully they will be replaced with something superior.

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We've learned a lot of things about how not to do an ICO, but I don't think the model is fundamentally broken. The idea of getting to a situation where the network carries itself by the weight of so many people supporting it (like Bitcoin) I think is very powerful.

The thing that's happening with ICOs today is that we're skipping steps, over-valuing things, and making impossible promises. The largest ICOs also tend to handwave away some very substantial, long-term research problems that the general audience they are pitching to has no awareness of.

Teams get put in a position where they raise 5 years of runway with rapid growth all at once, pre-product, pre-traction. That's not a problem with the ICO model, that's just a function of the space being extremely overheated.

That seems counterintuitive, a team has to implement the idea. A bad idea can be successful with a good team. And yes a good idea can become successful with a bad team.

But personally I would put my money on the good team over the bad regardless of the idea

I don't think it's that the team is not crucial to delivery, but rather that incentivising that team by giving them such an upfront, guaranteed reward is not ideal.

The purpose of ICOs is to transfer money from speculators to prospectus-writers as fast as possible. Like pre-crackdown Kickstarter, any actual product delivered is up to the goodwill of the people who now have the money.

If people wanted a structure that had some sort of accountability for non-delivery of results they'd do a share offering.

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