Project Financing Dilemmas (bigger fool theory)

[cambyu]

First a couple of words about myself, I am an early BTC adopter but I have left the community as soon as the altcoins boom started. I am a BTC loyalist in a sense since I believe virtually all other current "crypto" technologies don't have technological merit and are worthless essentially. I am a HODLR till the Messiah comes in regards to BTC. I've had plenty of accounts on bitcointalk but they were all compromised over the years and are now being ran by NPCs, is the forum a zombie forum? Is it being ran by NPCs? Dunno 

In regards to raising capital, I see that the vast majority of ICOs (inb4 sockpuppets mentioning but not X ICO to plug) are complete failures, with teams of scammers that never deliver the product. I am wondering what is the average ETH contract funders ability to differentiate between fact and fiction, spot the logical fallacies (e.g. fallacy of argument from authority is a red flag for an ICO), tell-tell signs are paying for traffic, whitepaper with no scientific significance etc.

Common sense tells me the market will self-correct and wipe out the fools, but the question is what will they learn? Not to fund contracts with ETH? Also what in regards to actual fund raising whereas a project which is shilled through the roof might create sophisticated temporary structures that look like success but are not actual growth but a project with deep technological value may be less relatable or understandable to the layman (e.g. misallocation of resources problem)?

[buwaytress]

Just bringing up the conundrum I was just discussing earlier, that I'm probably with you on this. Fundraising for me only works as a business strategy for an existing business. You want to expand quicker than you possibly can, or you want to liquidate ownership of your business in return for equity, so you reverse ICO and give control of the business to investors.

But ICO for the sake of ICO? Yeah I learnt my lesson too. Because projects that really have the ambition will go ahead and develop a product and then try to sell it (or reverse ICO later). Genuine projects rely on ambition and drive from motivated developers dedicating their free time (reminds us of Bitcoin, no?). Devs working on salaries are why ICOs fail as they get stuck in development limbo, til all the funds are gone and they release some slapdash code to fulfil some arbitrary roadmap.

Notice also how precious few projects actually don't have the basic budget? They don't even know how much things cost and are raising on some random hardcap.