I think it is only a matter of time before governments start cracking down on this.
G7 already made this statement a few years ago:
In 2013 the G7's Financial Action Task Force issued the following statement in guidelines which may be applicable to companies involved in transmitting bitcoin and other currencies, "Internet-based payment services that allow third party funding from anonymous sources may face an increased risk of [money laundering/terrorist financing]." They concluded that this may "pose challenges to countries in [anti-money laundering/counter terrorist financing] regulation and supervision"
I think if enough people started actually making transactions in bitcoin or other crypto-currencies, what will happen is governments will start missing out on tax revenue that they normally expect to trace through centralized banking. This is the same reason that India removed large bills from circulation. They will then lean on the idea of stopping organized crime and terrorism to introduce curbs on its secretive nature. They will insist on having the "keys" to the money trail. The Swiss finally caved under this same pressure and agreed to open their books to international tax collectors.
Lots of the newer cryptocurrencies are trying to bank on making things even more anonymous than bitcoin. Bitcoin largely relies on obfuscation - you can't link an account with a user, but if you figure that out, you can find everyone they do business with. ZCash, Monero, Dash - they all seek to remove the traceability.
Personally, I wouldn't touch it as supplier or user. There just isn't enough history of stability. It's really just being treated as a commodity right now, but the demand side is just too hard to figure out. Gold has real uses for making products. Bitcoin (or other such) could one day just be supplanted by yet another crypto currency. So holding them would seem highly dangerous to me.
Making them? Unsurprisingly, you're not the first one to think of it. According to this site, there are 1384 of them.
https://coinmarketcap.com/My favorite name might be
Useless Ethereum TokenThe UET ICO transparently offers investors no value, so there will be no expectation of gains. No gains means few investors, few investors means few transactions, and few transactions means no Ethereum network lag—not to mention no depressing posts on /r/ethtrader about people losing all their savings!
I learned all about Ethereum smart contracts and Solidity over a weekend so I could launch this ICO. Most of the smart contract contract code is copied from GitHub and Stack Overflow posts, so it should be pretty much right… right?
and:
Wait… is this a joke? Is it a scam?
Neither! This is real—and it's 100% transparent. You're literally giving your money to someone on the internet and getting completely useless tokens in return.
Will there be more chances to buy UET?
That's a great question! It totally depends on how the ICO performs in the beginning. If I don't make enough money to buy at least one flat-screen television, I'll probably keep the ICO open longer than initially stated.
According to the webpage, their crowdsale gathered $339,822.
For tokens that can't be used for anything, anywhere. Now, all those people had to do was to click through to the fully transparent web page. But they couldn't even manage that. No way I'm going near that kind of mania with real dollars to invest. BTW, just look at the
chart for that garbage over the past week.
