It seems good on paper - democratic / meritic small-scale funding by interested public. Thing is we already have something like that: the stock market.
But unlike the stock market it is a complete free-for-all unregulated mess full of fraud and failures (ok so is the stock market, but even if it is also no better than a slot-machine, they do pay out sometimes).
In some ways crowd funding could be seen as a clever ploy by capital to finally remove all the risk from their side of the equation - most of it is already gone anyway. Rather than having lawyer backed due dilligence being used to take a calculated risk on an investment with some expected return, the public are taking uneducated risks based on emotion and group-think for no real return at all.
I don't regret helping to find the parallella, but i'm not sure I would do it again.
It is an industry sorely in need of regulation which will surely come before long. It should have a long-term place for small projects but once you get into the millions it seems far too skewed in favour of the fundees.
1 comment:
The problem with regulated market like stock's is that is too bureaucratic and expensive. You need a lot (a I mean A LOT) of paperwork just to able to operate. Sure, you get some "guarantees", but sometimes it's just vapourware as much as the croundfunding stuff seems to be. And most of the regulated market need more than tech ppl that wants more that what tech ppl want (notably profit) which can skew up the whole thing to begin with
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