I think that partial pre-mine is fine (Vitalik from Ethereum also did it. After all he can't work for free. And I can't expect him to work for free).
Evan didn't stop at the premine. He has allegedly levered that into an ongoing extraction of $millions from ecosystem. All that for a GUI?
Vitalik et al produced what? Casper will never work. The DAO failed. After much wrangling they didn't solve any of the intractable problems.
I mean if Vitalik et al had continued hacking in their parents' basements and earned maybe $100k each per year. Then I would say his effort was worth it.
Okay I hear that he popularized blockchains and brought a lot of new capital into the ecosystem. Maybe that is true. So maybe we can justify the $millions expended. Maybe. I am not sure.
Can we make the same argument for Dash?
Re: Stay away from ICOWho cares if Monero and Dash are scams when you can make good money on every pump and dump.
Scammers take capital out of the ecosystem and spend it on crack, Yachts, booze, and prostitutes.
You personally may get richer (if you are a good speculator), while on average the ecosystem gets poorer, unless of course we are bringing more new fools (and their capital) into our ecosystem from outside of it.
So eventually there could be no ecosystem remaining for you to speculate in.
My opinion is we have a window of time (5 - 10 years?) within which to leverage this opportunity to produce something really significant that could help the world. And to produce a $trillion marketcap.
Any way, please continue what you are doing. Hopefully those who developers who are serious will find a way to operate within this ecosystem so we don't lose the potential.