They do the offering now because they have a bit of a name and the world is currently filled with suckers who think that getting in on an ICO is a worthwhile speculation. The greater fool theory at work.

It could still tie their hands later on. Once it starts crashing they'll lose a lot of the early adopter enthusiasm that they will need to catch on.

To make money, even if it doesn't work.

And to drive attention.

And to engage people in a way they will have to defend their investment later.

Timing. Do it before the bad PR and bubble talk leave no more "greater fools" and makes it harder to pull off an ICO.

There's 168 million reasons to do the coin offering now. If someone was begging you to take that kind of money for a half-baked side project, would you say no? (to be fair, this is quite a bit further along than half-baked, but still)

I agree with your main point, and know you added a small disclaimer, but this team is the most put together team I've ever met. Every time I've been with them they've been hard at work making things happen. Any time our team needs something from them we get it.

> I don't understand why they would do the coin offering now. The network is inoperable and won't be for quite a while.

This is quite cynical of me, but the first thing that comes to mind is that they could be scared that theres a general CC bubble going on right now and they want to be sure to get some money before it pops. Look at bitcoin prices right now: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/

> A distributed file store would be cool, but as a community/free network like P2P.

Something like IPFS? https://ipfs.io

filecoin is made by the creators of ipfs.

And it sheds a really bad light upon it for me. I like the idea of IPFS but cannot stand all this coin snake oil.

I think the /idea/ of IPFS is very useful. On the other hand, I think the creators are way too interested in bikeshedding and writing new white papers for less useful things. They just aren't interested in providing real value to end users. They have this early adopter bubble that seems to be quite popular but I don't think it's going anywhere.