You don't really need an ICO, if you launch without one you can just wait until the initial mining dump finishes and begin buying, you could easily get 15-20% of the Coin for cheap and then just continue developing on it and you get the best of both worlds. If you launch without an ICO and buy from the market and are able to buy larger amounts then you would have had to buy from miners/stakers so assuming there was no deception, you can attain more than what could have been had by premining and can resale or give those Coins away to help stimulate development without having to worry about the accounting of it.
I am completely agree with you, but in order to achieve that you
must have money to start.
Let's say you have some funds, good ideas and such, but those coins/your project are/is worthless (people are not buying it). I am not going to teach you on how much funds a project could require if we assume that you are failing for let's say months.
Well a project costs virtually nothing to run and then to develop on, if someone can't maintain costs to the point where it is self sustainable then that person shouldn't be developing on the project. Raising 30k funding for whatever project doesn't mean it would be used wisely even if it were spent on development.
Let's think bigger for a bit. What if the dev (if we are talking about coins) is from Democratic Republic of Congo were average household income is like $400/year?
To support altcoin for like a year, you will need at least let's say $300-$500 for the accounts/hosting (such as github/domain) and to support the network. Not to mention your work and passion involved. How about if you suck on designing and such and you need some specialists in that field? You must pay them with something. You have like the best idea in the world, but you don't have money for it. How will you feel then if you have like the best coin out there, but trolls in here are not "supporting" it, pumping it etc... your work will be priced at -1 litoshi.
That is why I think that in some specific cases ICO's are not a bad thing. The world is running with investments since the beginning.
...if someone can't maintain costs to the point where it is self sustainable then that person shouldn't be developing on the project.
How about if we think about the idea first and then for the money involved? With that way of thinking many projects should not start at all.... cryptocurrencies included.
Even if they are from the Democratic Republican of the Congo, the actual costs to run a network are like $60 a year assuming you are atleast hosting 1 node, other than that it might be maybe $20 in electricity costs. If you suck at designing and need to pay specialists, well you could premine whatever you need from the Coin and use that for payment, or set it up in a way where that amount could be possible. If you truly suck at doing that stuff that much (paint shop pro and others are easy to use) then again I would question as to why they are there in the first place.
Basically whatever ICO is collected, that is the amount of future funding that is needed to pay off that amount so you are working with future debt rather than a free-floating market which is what you want.
I bought about 20% of PayCon for under $1000, used that for lots of promotion and development and got a lot done with it, built a very large base of people around it and at any given time I get more than 50 connections to the network. For me that is ok, my costs are nothing now and the money spent was worth it for me to learn the things I did and the network itself is profitable because by now everyone could have achieved ROI.
Trolls will only support something that can make them money, that is the simple truth in the matter. You think it's the trolls that don't support something? all you do is have to do is give the trolls what they want, after all a troll is only a person who is actively interested in Crypto and generally knows their stuff.