OmiseGo: a Thai-based project that received $25 million worth of cryptocurrency in their token sale to develop a decentralized exchange and payment network.
They've led development on multiple scaling initiatives, including vanilla Plasma and Plasma Cash, as demonstrated by their GitHub:
Golem: a Poland-based project that received $8.6 million of cryptocurrency in their token sale to develop a decentralized market that enables people to sell their unused computing resources.
They launched on the Ethereum mainnet last month, and all of their code is released open source:
https://github.com/golemfactory
Request Network: a France-based project that received $33.6 million in cryptocurrency to develop an open payment request network and protocol. They launched their DApp on the mainnet in March, and like the others, everything is open source:
https://github.com/RequestNetwork/
I could easily list off a dozen more, but I don't have the time to do the write up for that many. My point is, the market for raising funds through token sales has become extremely competitive. There are now over 84,000 ERC20 token contracts, and 749 tokens with enough trading volume to be listed on coinmarketcap.com.
The projects raising the most funds are all more than just a whitepaper nowadays. They all have significant substance backing them. And unlike traditional venture capital, they are globally distributed, unlocking the potential of people who as a consequence of geography, would historically have had a lot of difficulty raising the necessary capital to pursue these projects.
There's still a lot more room for improvement in terms of quality, but the trend is clearly in the direction of improving quality, if you compare the top token sales today to those that were raising millions a year or two ago.
Second, your post is incredibly one-sided and misleading.
>>The space is littered with fraud.
And also unprecedented accessibility. In no previous era in history were so many teams of capable developers living outside of wealthy countries able to raise enough capital to pursue ambitious technology projects.
Also unprecendented innovation and market evolution: we're seeing:
* rapid emergence and growing popularity of websites for vetting and rating token sales, and identifying scams
* an investor class that is becoming wiser to scams, and more discerning in general, every day. No longer can a whitepaper alone raise tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH. In just the space of 18 months, we've seen investor behaviour undergo a massive transformation towards sophistication.
>>Wallets have bugs that lose hundreds of millions of dollars
Wallet bugs and scams are largely a thing of the past in Bitcoin. Ethereum's ecosystem is much younger, and so we see it going through the same trials.
Once the industry matures, these kinds of problems will be much less common.
>>Energy consumption forecasted to hit 0.5% of the world’s electricity consumption by end of 2018
That's because energy is one of the largest, if not the largest input to the production of cryptocurrencies and maintenance of blockchains.
Blockchains require very little resources other than integrated circuits and energy, which makes them very different from other product categories, where labour costs are much higher relative to direct energy costs.
So the flip side here is much lower costs in other types of resources relative to the cost of the good/service being generated.
Also, proof of stake is coming.
>>Promoters yelling “decentralize everything” while exchanges, development teams and mining are all highly centralized
Development is highly decentralized, with people defecting through hard forks when they disagree with some coalition of developers (see Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin Core).
In Ethereum at least there are also multiple independent implementations of a full node.
All changes to development occur through consensus, with a straightforward exit path, via hard forks, for those who do not agree with that consensus.
As for exchanges: several decentralized exchanges have been released over the last year.
Once blockchain scalability gets better, and peer-to-peer usage increases, exchanges will also be much less necessary.
>>No legal use case found to date
Absolutely ridiculous claim. How about avoiding rent-seeking by monopolistic platform providers, by encoding the rules of use and fee levels in an immutable smart contract?
Anyway, providing people with the ability to circumvent regulated industries that impose financial censorship can have social value. Unless you think Wikileaks bypassing the financial blockade was not a net benefit to the world, or that repressive governments never impose tyrannical laws.