VC isn't against ICO, VC has a very important part to play in the ICO system in terms of due diligence and "stamp of approval". I know many prominent VC's who are serious about tokens, but usually they are spinning out new funds without the LP agreements they currently have.
The scary thing to the current system is that entrepreneurs are getting more power. The bullshit common in fundraising (i.e. last minute changes that threaten to blow up the raise, unreasonable asks from capital, multi-month full-time fundraising, I can go on...) will become abnormal as raising money gets easier.
People forget that VCs also raise money. Setting up a venture fund that is backed by an ICO token would be a good way to give public accredited investors access to the private market.
Compare the time to liquidity and global access between VC investments and tokens, and you'll see its the beginning of a solution. But you all would rather see it trampled before being optimized for the benefit of all, for some reason.
I see one benefit coming with a hoard of downsides, and nothing like an attempt or desire to fix those downsides, which in fact play like financial upsides to the ICO providers and high-level players with money to lose.
You can't compare benefits and downsides like that. The single benefit could dwarf all of the downsides by several orders of magnitude.
As for the downsides, these will gradually diminish through inherent market dynamics, like rising collective knowledge within the cryptocurrency investment community, the emergence of reputable services that aid token buyers in vetting token options, etc.
If the benefit alleviates more pain than what's being caused by the technology, why not? I don't know if you know this, but the internet also created many classes of problems that had never existed. You can't simply shut down any new technology or way of living because it's associated with problems. It's not utopianism to make an objective comparison of pros and cons. What's utopianism is to assume that it's possible for a new technology to not introduce new problems.
Also, my main point was about how you're assessing the net effect of cryptocurrency. Benefits and drawbacks aren't uniform units that can be weighed by their count. The individual benefits/drawbacks need to be measured in terms of their impact. One giant benefit/drawback can far outweigh numerous small drawbacks/benefits.
Also, no one is forcing anyone to use cryptocurrency, and unless someone is a ward of the state, there is no justification for removing market options from them, let alone through the drastic measure of prosecuting anyone who offers that option to the public at large on the market, in the name of protecting them from their own bad judgment.
That doesn't follow. "People are still behaving naively and being exploited, ergo, the market isn't getting smarter".
And as an aside: if one is to assume consumers and the institutions that collectively make up the market aren't getting smarter, it would be total irrational to assume voters, regulators and politicians are. The political and regulatory system is teeming with corruption, meaning that expanding the power of government over private interactions could lead to far more exploitation, not less.
The scary thing to the current system is that entrepreneurs are getting more power. The bullshit common in fundraising (i.e. last minute changes that threaten to blow up the raise, unreasonable asks from capital, multi-month full-time fundraising, I can go on...) will become abnormal as raising money gets easier.