You would need to know them personally. There are lots of big mining farms around the world, and many smaller ones. You would need to be friends with the big ones to pull anything like this off.
And people would start losing trust in the network if this was happening, thus the value of the currency would start dropping, thus all the network participants including the miners would be in a losing position in the long run, which is not what you are looking for after you have invested money in the mining equipment and the whole operation.
That's why the total "hash rate" (the computational effort spent by all the participating miners) is in direct relation to the perceived value of the currency.
That makes more sense, if the assumption is that institutional level investment is primed to get in and CMC's SIMETRI rating system is the seen as the most trusted way in.
Which I have serious doubts given how so many Banks and Hedge Funds already have established systems in place. Fidelity being the most notable in the US for example, but are much larger outside of the US.
It's not waste of time. I think if helped progress in the hardware. It educated people on blockchain. Now there may be rigs our there for sale, which can be reused for more important things, scientific research, etc.
The regulation is fine. It's just that it's not always easy to predict how it will be applied since the SEC behaves in some very strange ways when it comes to ICOs.
A lack of precedent makes this the biggest challenge. New regulation would have the same problems.
Why do they? There's nothing special about an ICO, other than it's "on a computer". When it comes to the concept of investing, they're not doing anything new.
Well, tokens sold on ICO mean nothing and does not represent share of the company, or anything at all. They are just vapour.
Personally i don't think that ICOs should be banned or regulated - if anything, they are frequently done by anonymous or fake identity people and cashed out using monero, anyway.
Just explain people that they are a scam, and a crime if (unlikely) caught, just like they explained about nigerian prince scam.
