[EGreg]

Funny definition of “quick”. They started this project in 2006 and have not been raising any money except back then, as one of the FIRST ICOs (before Ethereum existed, they used Mastercoin).

And frankly, raising money with a token is far better than raising money selling equity. When you sell equity to a guy like Peter Thiel who thinks that “competition is for losers” and “you should build a monopoly”, you build exactly that. You kill off wirehog and lock everyone into your platform, instead of making an open source reference implementation of a protocol like Email (smtp) or the Web (http). All because you have to generate profits perpetually, as that is what equity investors expect.

With a token, you raise money from future participants in the network and you don’t need to have a profit motive causing you to build a monopoly. Show me open source projects that were funded by seed equity funding.

The socialist in me wants to see more funding of projects by developers, infrastructure providers and others being paid in tokens, rather than equity in a monopoly that will extract rents and be afraid to give out the code to anybody — or even become interoperable!