This is like downvoting all mentions of IPFS because FileCoin is a currency that is used to pay others for storing files. Or like downvoting all mentions of Freenet.
Mmhm. Well, they raised money using an ICO, so apparently they felt their coin was worth people speculating on. Market cap is above $200 million.
Maybe the technology is great, but it's built and operates like any other get-rich-quick crypto scheme. Their mission, if genuine, would be better served by a different approach. Avoid the appearance of impropriety and all that.
I don't have much of an opinion and don't want to argue, but you did ask why people were downvoting. That's why.
I would invite you to check out what the project is really about, check out: https://primer.safenetwork.org/
Secondly, if you want proof that this project actually predates bitcoins, here is a talk the founder gave at Google Tech Talks in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA77zxk-vA And maybe it was just because of this that they found a way to solve the Bizantine Generals Problem independently without relying on blockchains. I hope you get the significance of this.
And there is good reason why they chose an ICO over alternatives. You don't say what you favour, but what this project has achieved by this route is complete independence to deliver according to fundamental principles.
They have no VC investment, nobody has control who is not aligned with the goal to create a fully autonomous, decentralised network and the "fundamentals" of Safe Network which you can read up on if you want. So the project continues to aim at a hard target regardless of many opportunities to get rich along the way.
It was I think the first ICO, so if getting rich was the aim it could have happened many times by now.
As things stand it is a shame that people are turned off from even looking into this project because of that association. Once it emerges I think the value it provides rather than captures will change minds.
If you want to know what the target is you can read about the Fundamentals of Safe Network here: https://safenetforum.org/t/safe-network-fundamentals-context...
And frankly, raising money with a token is far better than raising money selling equity. When you sell equity to a guy like Peter Thiel who thinks that “competition is for losers” and “you should build a monopoly”, you build exactly that. You kill off wirehog and lock everyone into your platform, instead of making an open source reference implementation of a protocol like Email (smtp) or the Web (http). All because you have to generate profits perpetually, as that is what equity investors expect.
With a token, you raise money from future participants in the network and you don’t need to have a profit motive causing you to build a monopoly. Show me open source projects that were funded by seed equity funding.
The socialist in me wants to see more funding of projects by developers, infrastructure providers and others being paid in tokens, rather than equity in a monopoly that will extract rents and be afraid to give out the code to anybody — or even become interoperable!
