Civic

A tailor-made token for a specific use case never makes sense. It goes against the fundamental idea of money. People don't want to have accept payment in things they can't use elsewhere. It's a limitation, not a feature.

To trade in one currency and settle in another requires a liquid market for CVC to other currencies. Who do you think is going to provide that liquidity? Probably someone earning on the spread = hidden fees. For the users, this is the opposite of an optimal economy.

I'm really curious to see how the "utility tokens" turn out. I suspect they'll be pennies on the dollar. The tokens of CVC, for example, are gift cards for using the service. I don't think there will be enough business generated to justify $223M market cap.

In 2-3 years, kids will swap social crypto tokens using platforms like Civic or Bancor like they swap snaps and likes.

Civic was at the nascent stages of starting a potentially successful identity startup, which could have been a boon to traditional financial services companies. The gluttony of 2017 pushed them and many others to make short-sighted decisions. Not every company needs to become a “project” and embrace the ethos of “Web 3.0. — not that Civic even comes close — Civic’s project isn’t even open-source in counter to the cypherpunk ethos of other self-sovereign identity projects.

Scarcity drives value.

E.g. someone can fork Civic easily and implement the same system with Bitcoin payments. Utility only leads to value insofar as the useful feature is hard to reproduce. Forcing use of Civic by banning all other currencies won't work if Civic forks work too.