I agree completely, and I have no intention to "run" to the SEC. Furthermore, if I was 19 like Vitalik is, I'd probably decide to get rich first and then deal with SEC or whatever. The sensible thing is to remember that that did not play very well for Charlie Shrem, but a handful of millions or well worth the risk for most youngesters.
I try really hard not to think about age. Of course you make some determination of a person based on their characteristics, and the thing about Vitalik from what we read in the media is that (a) he is onto something really cool, and (b) he's young. I just feel it's a bit unfair for people to have at it because Vitalik is relative young compared to most of us, and therefore is at a higher risk of doing something stupid. I'm not saying your thoughts went down that route, but I think it's interesting to point out the reasoning, which is something I've noticed people do when they talk about Vitalik and this project (I'm probably guilty of that too sometimes).
Regarding the model: business is business, and the founders have found a huge business opportunity. They have realized people is demanding get rich quick schemes and is willing to throw their money to whoever comes up with the next things that smells of innovation and triple digit % gains. You can see how colored coins get less attention than MSC... Why? The answer is very simple: greed. MSC is marketed as the "ultimate investment" (as Ethereal is), colored coins isn't.
I think Mastercoin is a nightmare of insanity to be quite frank. I don't mean that in a way to diss the project or anything like that, but I think how they did things was wildly unethical. To simply start taking people's money with no real plan, or no idea of who's going to work on your plan when you get it figured out, is in my book totally insane - perhaps even where all this craziness started. A white paper is not justification to start accepting money.
In the world I come from, companies make IPO's when they already have a product that works. Before that, you have private investments, seed capital, whatever - but you do not go public.
What's happening is pure madness in my book. Profitable madness? Probably, but its unsustainable in the long term.
Let me give you an example. Way before Mastercoin, a user on here by the name of tacotime posted his ideas in a conceptual white paper on this forum. I thought it was cool and he didn't sound like a jerk, so I started helping him out. We've had endless messages sent to us where people wanted to throw money at it and instead of taking people's money without a solid plan like a lot of projects on here, we decided against it. We're both in grad school, and it's only now that we have the chance to organise things in a way that will provide people with some form of assurance. And that's why you don't take money if you can't provide that.
To this day we haven't accepted a penny. Instead we focused on building relationships with interesting people and organisations and kept up to date with the ideas and trends in the field, with the hope that the project can end up giving people something they want to use. These little grassroots projects hardly get the attention the bigger ones do that cause the hysteria, but at the end of the day, I'm more interested in listening to the community (I do that even when I troll), and put something together through the people who want to use it. If that means it's small-scale and doesn't take over the world, then that's okay by me. Maybe that's idealistic and stupid, but I'm happy going down that road instead.
