A great idea or capitalism gone awry?

I've been pondering crowd-funding lately and i'm not really sure it's a good idea.

It seems good on paper - democratic / meritic small-scale funding by interested public. Thing is we already have something like that: the stock market.

But unlike the stock market it is a complete free-for-all unregulated mess full of fraud and failures (ok so is the stock market, but even if it is also no better than a slot-machine, they do pay out sometimes).

In some ways crowd funding could be seen as a clever ploy by capital to finally remove all the risk from their side of the equation - most of it is already gone anyway. Rather than having lawyer backed due dilligence being used to take a calculated risk on an investment with some expected return, the public are taking uneducated risks based on emotion and group-think for no real return at all.

I don't regret helping to find the parallella, but i'm not sure I would do it again.

It is an industry sorely in need of regulation which will surely come before long. It should have a long-term place for small projects but once you get into the millions it seems far too skewed in favour of the fundees.