Having been part of launching Helium HNT token (which is honestly a real-world utility use case), here is my personal experience related to his points...
Helium started as a traditional centralized IoT project, realized that centralization was a limiting factor, then joked about turning it into a blockchain application. Now it is over $1.5bn market cap and provides a real-world utility.
Exchanges are pay-to-play. It feels bad to interact with them to get listed.
Lots and lots of scammers.
There is still so much untapped value in some possible use-cases, but honestly too many get-rich schemes.
Launching a new layer 1 protocol is a tremendous amount of development effort and I think underestimated by most.
Security is hard.
Scammers/hackers go after all project members personally. You probably aren't prepared for any kind of success.
5 years ago crypto wasn't mainstream. Fast forward to today, and when you say you're in crypto, everyone thinks you're a billionaire.
1.) Decentralization will come for sure (DAO LLC), but no matter what, there is still a Foundation of some kind.
2.) Community depends on utility. There are some amazing strong communities, but is in direct proportoin to the utility the token really brings. Otherwise, just pump and dumpers.
3.) I don't think it is 100% possible to truly decentralize governance. But people are trying.
4.) I don't believe this is true for everything. There are pump and dumpers, but many of the decent tokens today need to focus on utility, the tokens for speculation only will always be manipulated.
5.) I think the VC landscape has changed and maybe a more piling on, but couple of years ago, VCs wouldn't touch crypto and the VCs focusing on crypto (Multicoin, Polychain, etc) are very good and extremely smart.
6.) Time makes no difference. Since it is decentralized it isn't like you have a support team fielding issues. You can't fix anything in a moment's notice. Releases take careful planning and careful testing.
7.) Again this assumes there is no utility in the token. But he is right you can't talk about token price or speculation. But underneath it all you hope the token price goes up.
8.) 100% true. You can't build it and they will just come. It requires real marketing and PR. Most importantly branding. People are looking for value and community around your token. But the early adopters are FOMO speculators.
9.) Yes, legal fees are very high. Could be 7 figures.
10.) Taxes are becoming more clear. Cost basis and capital gains. But a lot depends on how you acquired your token.
11.) Basically, people will constantly claim your are scammers. Literally day and night. And people will spam free bitcoin offers to all your telegram and discord users. Every day and every night.
12.) I think insider trading is unbounded in crypto currency, but that being said a.) its still illegal and not sure founders would be participating in this, b.) its still unclear what really motivates the market. Crypto is heavily retail and the chatter as always be trolls, scammers and naysayers. But also fomo'ers. So hard to say how much insider trading will capitalize on information versus exchanges that can manipulate the volume data. I think whales can manipulate far better than insider trading.
13.) hard to say are we talking a stock market bear market or a crypto bear market?
14.) There are several tokens that have real utility and likely you aren't questioning your lifes' decisions. But lots of sh*tcoin maybe you are. But blockchain (layer 1) developers are still incredibly hard to find--so think they can pick whatever they want to work on.
15.) Again, utility (real use case) or pure speculation play. There are tons of garbage uses of blockchain that are a super poor fit. Hopefully, you don't work for one of those (does supplychain really need to be on a blockchain?)
16.) Unsure if that is true. I think most projects get a halo effect from the success of bitcoin. Most new tokens should be real utility instead of trying to replace bitcoin.