I agree, but here on HN you'll get downvoted into oblivion for saying anything pro-blockchain. VCs (and other insiders) have long enjoyed the advantage of being the only ones that are allowed to participate in early funding, and thus reap the rewards. It leaves everyone else behind. This is one of several reasons why people who are already rich are the only ones who are becoming wealthier.
The old system is no different from how ICOs work. The difference is that now everyone can participate, not just those who are wealthy and have the right connections (i.e., insiders).
I don't think this will be the death of the crappy VC model as we know it, but I think that opening up the market to everyone is a wonderful thing.
I don't know why people intuitively hate blockchain here, I rarely comment about this stuff anymore, even though I have a trillion anecdotes that make me know something big is going to happen, and soon. HN is an echo chamber like anything else.
No, I think it's a healthy dose of skepticism. Many applications for blockchain tech are impractical at best, leading to discussions about the ethics and legal implications of selling a token that quacks like a security via irreversible funding rounds.
Most of the big things are either tied around vice or price. If an early adopter (or group of them, depending on your Spoofy theories) decide to manipulate the price enough to pump the price and create floors, they can. I haven't seen a killer app that specifically adds to people's lives in a way that doesn't provide liquidity to human rights violators (backpage, DNMs, kids/adults committing fraud, etc).
Sure, there's Venezuela using and mining Bitcoin because their currency is unusable, but Bitcoin wasn't designed precisely for them.
Shite companies love to prop up their use cases on developing country citizens (Coinbase with their 'African mothers will use us for businesses instead of M-Pesa' ), but the practical matter at hand is that most of these developing countries don't have stable enough internet and crypto-liquidity in a way that's conducive to using crypto on their phones.
Where's the funding round for decentralized Wi-Fi balloons, or a legitimate competitor to M-Pesa? They're about as practical as another decentralized storage platform with minimal commits since the token sale and an ICO that raised a quarter billion based on hype
I think people naturally dislike what they don't fully understand, or that which does not confirm their biases, so many new technologies are ignored or ridiculed early on. You just have to brush off the haters.
The old system is no different from how ICOs work. The difference is that now everyone can participate, not just those who are wealthy and have the right connections (i.e., insiders).
I don't think this will be the death of the crappy VC model as we know it, but I think that opening up the market to everyone is a wonderful thing.