Having to resort to an ICO already shows some technical flaws in my opinion.
The supply should be put out there automatically in a more elegant way than some ICO, which is why I think Bitcoin is superior already to this project.
Also a project doesn't work until it has been attacked by governments numerous times and failed at each attempt (every hardfork attempt on Bitcoin has been governments trying to screw it up). It must also held a couple billion worth for a couple years without no hacks.
Until then no amount of whitepapers is going to convince me to sell my BTC to buy any other so called "better alternative to Bit[Suspicious link removed]d luck with your project in any case.
Hey, I agree with you that there's no reason for most people to put money in a project just because of a whitepaper which very few people can actually go through. That's why we just want people to try to understand the algorithm and give us feedback now.
Most of the Bitcoin supply has already been distributed to less than 0.1% of the world's population, I don't think that's a very elegant delivery mechanism though. Neither would an ICO solve this issue, which is why we first want to get some seed investment from qualified investors (that's why we're not posting here to raise anything). In a competitive market, having the best tech is not enough to win, you still need Marketing and PR. Bitcoin is not that complicated to implement compared to our protocol, and came at a time when you didn't need marketing budgets to get adoption.
After that, we want to do a long-term coin distribution, where as many people have access to it, while allowing us to raise capital for development. Calling it an ICO is a bit of a stretch, but there's no great terminology since everyone seem to just try to raise as much money as possible quickly. Frankly, we don't know yet the details of this phase, but it's a separate problem from the consensus protocol, that we can provide details on later.