I really don't understand why people think crowd-sourcing is where the "innovation" is. People have been crowd-sourcing and offering shares in potential profit for hundreds of centuries. To put it in perspective, the British Conquest of India was partly "crowd-sourced" in the sense that East India Company had a number of private investors. You could say wars were also crowd-sourced in the sense that bonds issued to fund these wars in the 17th century were bought by private investors. None of this is what's "innovative"

The primary innovation in the ecosystem was what Satoshi offered when he made a system that allowed all of us to remove the barriers set by conventional banking and fiat system . A lot of these "investments" are being made because you have an anonymous system of value transfer that happens digitally. Granted a lot of the new coins (especially IOTA ) are solving drastically new problems, what am trying to talk of is the pointless hype around them.