Great job on this article. I hope it gets some attention. Keep in mind, the tokens in the Monaco ICO are not available to U.S. residents and they are a one time payout kind of investment. A certain amount of the ethereum/bitcoin generated through fees on the Monaco Visa will be added to the money pool that backs the tokens. If the card is successful there could be a significant amount of crypto in that pot. There is also the issue that Monaco is allowed to issue up to 30% more of these tokens than are sold at the ICO according to the whitepaper. Hey, they'll still give you 140 of their tokens for a single ETH, and I can easily see these tokens going to 1 ETH a piece.
The ICO may not be as good a deal as the card itself, which I think is totally awesome, and will save frequent travelers a ton on currency fees.
Dear natxlaw, what do you mean by "they are a one time payout kind of investment" ? As far as I know the tokens will be exchange traded (they're about to announce in which exchange it'll be listed) and also you're able to redeem your tokens for your fair share of the ERC20 assets held on the smart contract at any time. The white paper explains how this division is done.
With a stock, it pays what is called a dividend (used to do this anyway). That means you get payouts forever based on the ongoing revenue generation. With these coins it's a little different. The pot gets bigger based on fees coming in, but once you cash out the coin, you get your payout (1/5,000,000th of the fee hoard at the time). Your best payday is a game of chicken between you and the Grim Reaper. But you can trade them like a stock, so someone might be willing to pay you much more than 1/5000000 of the pot, if it looks like the pot is growing astronomically. Since many stocks don't pay a dividend (which is a scam IMO) this is at least as good as that because it has a concrete contractual backbone.