I am tired of hearing about some promising new project, taking my valuable time to look up the [ANN] topic, dig around through lots of flashy graphics, only to find the topic creator going on and on about some elaborate and self-masturbatory IPO/ICO scheme.  The defenders of said crypto cry:


But the sad truth is that if your project really is as revolutionary as you claim, then it will organically grow to the point where just being a natural early adopter will make you fantastically wealthy.  Then when you 'make it' you will have the added bonus of not having your history tainted by some shady early investment scheme.  
  

I don't care.  With all due respect to Nick Szabo's genius, into the trash it goes.  They should have launched with a clean proof-of-work and a set in stone time for moving to proof-of-stake if they wanted to not have a joke distribution.  Maybe they will go to a jillion dollars per gas, but I won't own a single fart of it for the long haul.  That's not how you launch a world changing currency - that's how you design a scheme to get wealthy.  Crypto is supposed to actually mean something, and getting wealthy is just a side effect.
  
It especially irks me to see actually interesting and innovative projects like Iota's tangle fall victim to this IPO mess.  There are a lot better ways to handle an initial distribution, even for blockchains that technically require it.  The only exception to this rule is micro-premines solely for the purposes of technical testing (like Litecoin's 150 coin micro-premine).  
  
So this is my plea to you, the good programmers of tomorrow: Launch your blockchain with no premine or ICO, and make an honest go at it.  Maybe you fail, and that's ok.  At least your project will fail as an honest project remembered fondly by the community - not some shady pump and dump.