Bitcoin Forum

A couple of small coins I invested a couple of bucks in because they were very early start ups turned out kind of odd, as the dev team both went unheard of for about 2 weeks afterwards and the coins have temporarily tanked.  There seems to be no transparency in either of them.  I haven't tried to do a whois on their domains, but I know that is often blocked.  Should devs be held accountable to let us know real information about them to show some possibility of due diligence in what they are offering?

No. As long as it opensource software - no, they not. If you like idea and have some free time you can improve coin by yourself, this is how open source software supposed to be developed. If devs not sold something on "ICO" they can do whatever they want.

If it is opensource and not an ICO (and not a Dash-like obfuscation of a commercial enterprise), then there is no one set of developers. Anyone can hack on it. Token holders could fork if they want.

So yeah in that case devs don't have any obligation.

But maybe some devs have good reputations, then it probably will help confidence in that open source repo.

I am not anonymous. I am a dev.

W.r.t. to ICOs, they are illegal (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1218399.msg18015763#msg18015763), so I have no interest in them.

I think making devs reveal their identities is to miss the point of cryptocurrency. Yes, revealing identities would greatly rescue the risk of scams. However, it does mean that there are a whole new basket of problems, for example governments could put pressure on devs such as those of Bitcoin to make changes that would reduce users privacy. It would also mean it would become much harder to set up an altcoin.