Well, some Hacker News readers would certainly have a financial stake in preserving the VC model by any means necessary.
There are risks indeed to crowdfunding, but not wholly unique ones. All one has to do is browse penny stock boards, or perhaps Bitcoin boards, these days, to find scams currently in progress and bagholders left with nothing but broken hope. Equivalently, a lot of VC-funded companies are in it to build up an impressive but fragile organization quickly and then hand it over to someone else before it explodes.
The change here is merely that we are removing gatekeepers to participating in the action at all, and the illusory veneer of stability that affords. Every company is built on some degree of faith, and that makes early investment a largely irrational proposition. The question to focus on is not "how much abuse will ensue" but "how do we mitigate damage", a question not really asked at the high levels because it is dangerously close to revealing how power works.
There are risks indeed to crowdfunding, but not wholly unique ones. All one has to do is browse penny stock boards, or perhaps Bitcoin boards, these days, to find scams currently in progress and bagholders left with nothing but broken hope. Equivalently, a lot of VC-funded companies are in it to build up an impressive but fragile organization quickly and then hand it over to someone else before it explodes.
The change here is merely that we are removing gatekeepers to participating in the action at all, and the illusory veneer of stability that affords. Every company is built on some degree of faith, and that makes early investment a largely irrational proposition. The question to focus on is not "how much abuse will ensue" but "how do we mitigate damage", a question not really asked at the high levels because it is dangerously close to revealing how power works.