Like many white papers in the crypto space, Polymath (if you close your eyes and dream of rainbows and unicorns) sounds really impressive. It's not that their ideas, in theory, are not good or maybe even potential in the very long term. The problem here is the same problem that keeps recurring. We have startups that can write out beautiful ideas without having any sort of inroads, legitimate working relationships with serious industry players or, in all cases at this stage in crypto, an underpinning technological platform that is capable of scaling to even meets the technical needs of their IDEAS if they did happen to have a functional product and the working relationships to actually execute on their ideas. Pie in the freaking sky. With the level of "idea-creep" that we are going through right now, I wouldn't be surprised if WorldCoin is next to arrive with a "genius" hedge fund douche leading the project with the scope being something on the order of consolidating the entirety of the worlds economic activity onto a single platform with its associated crypto able to facilitate every single transaction (financial, legal, moral, sexual, blah, blah) with its underlying coin, simply named TRANSACT.
Yawn. Show me a stable, scalable, fully decentralized crypto that can gain mass adoption, integration with a critical mass of businesses and not be obliterated by the governments of the world and then we can talk about the latest, greatest coin taking over every aspect of the existing business environment.
The one part I prefer about more traditional fundraising is that even though it's a pain in the ass, at least it forces people to dedicate their lives to a project for a while - some real "sweat equity" - before being able to raise a dime. The ICO model is broken - and while Polymath may not technically be an "ICO," they basically created money out of thin air like everyone else has by pre-selling then launching the token and creating a multi-hundred million dollar asset out of very little on a technical front (check their Github).
Of course, this commentary is NOT limited to Polymath - it is true of many ICOs, where the creators often don't have the same level of sweat equity as a traditional start-up founder (or in this case, the sweat equity is all spent on privately raising capital, marketing and beautiful conferences in the Bahamas). Part of what I love about guys like Vitalik is that they do have that sweat equity, so even if I don't always agree with him (or someone like him), I still respect him and his thoughts.
The creators don't have (and don't really need to have) any amount of sweat equity in their projects because in this frothy environment, nobody even expects them to (which, I know, is stating the obvious) because, I feel, much of the equity flowing into these projects is pure short term speculation. So, from the creators point of view, they don't care about proving out the validity of their concept because they know they'll get the money they desire. From the "investor" point of view, they don't care (in aggregate) about the validity of the project either because they only want to ride a short term hype bubble to a quick 500%, then claim investor victory. This is a caustic situation for all involved and those who are not paying attention and get caught in the hype at the ATH for a particular project will pay dearly for this two-way moral hazard.
Exactly!