Great great great great article. Never seen so much facts and analysis in an Ethereum/ICO post (aside from Vitaliks maybe).<p>This whole ICO craze is going to hurt Eth in the long run, just like fraudulent campaigns hurt Kickstarter. People need to realize those ICOs are completely overhyped right now, lacking anything worth investing in the most cases.
Bancor's initial response isn't great:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/bancornetwork/status/876934646344404992" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/bancornetwork/status/876934646344404992</a><p>since they mentioned FUD, it sounds like they're afraid Gun's post may affect trading of their token.
> There already exists a common currency through which we can trade. It's called ether, and we can use it no matter which token pairs we want to trade...<p>Exactly. For every ICO that pops up, ask does this use case require a special token? Often ether would be sufficient or even preferable because of greater liquidity.<p>Exchange between digital assets can be easily facilitated with something simple like Prism: <a href="https://info.shapeshift.io/blog/2017/05/21/introducing-prism-worlds-first-trustless-portfolio-market-platform" rel="nofollow">https://info.shapeshift.io/blog/2017/05/21/introducing-prism...</a>
The underlying problem here is that the ICO model as most-frequently implemented is pretty broken.<p>It's kind of a like a hybrid between an IPO and a Kickstarter, but:<p>1. With kickstarter, the reward has roughly constant value with respect to the total funds raised;<p>2. With an IPO, the supply is predetermined. While the cost per share may be astronomical by the time you get around to buying in, it's clear what fraction of the offering you're purchasing.<p>ICOs tokens typically have:<p>1. value inversely proportional to the total funds raised; and<p>2. (since supply is not determined until the end of the ICO in many cases) no clarity around what fraction of the offering an investment actually purchases until the offering is complete.<p>This leads to some pretty crazy situations, Bancor being the most recent and most notable example, but in general, it just doesn't really lead to very sane practices.<p>---<p>This is precisely why IPOs are conducted the way they are, with investment banks pre-purchasing a predetermined number of shares just shy of what they expect to be a fair market value, handing that money to the company, and then selling those shares on the open market.
Just wondering how those of you who have known about Ethereum for a while but didn't buy it feel about missing out on >3000% returns this year. I didn't buy any and dislike knowing I could've been rich.
We need a futures market for crypto currencies. It would massively aid in hedging and price discovery. It would be easier for the price to adjust down to since there would be an easy way to short them too.
Wow, 144M. As a crypto n00b, can someone clarify if this is "real" money? Just wondering since I have never heard of Bancor before and this amount of funding is incredible.
I feel like the article definitely has some merit but the timing of it (days before a TBD announcement on token trading), the inclusion of very obvious non-unique points (i.e. not scalable, anything Bancor can do Ethereum can do - uh, why not include the definition of Turing complete here) and the false assumption that Bancor's use case is for a groundbreaking ERC20 token that's going to be traded on every exchange makes the author's claim dubious.<p>A more likely use case for Bancor is some SMB (store/restaurant) or content creator issuing tokens to be used for membership reward/points or for voting on a new video/project idea, not for Augur/Steem/Gnosis 2.0 to issue an ICO.<p>If you take this gross assumption of the equation, his whole argument about slippage or "trailing the market", etc are gone. You're issuing some small time tokens. There no reason to always buy back from the market and there are no big players trying to "deplete your reserve." The author makes it sound like I'm selling some popular cryptocurrency at a fixed price and am being left to bleed dry when in actuality, I'm issuing my_random_token for friends and customers.<p>I didn't review the code but if what he's saying is correct, there is a reason for alarm regarding their reimplementation of basic arithmetic functions(!!!) and user overpaying.<p>By trying to make this into a laundry list, it comes more off as a FUD argument, very similar to what Bitcoin maximalists were doing post the DAO hack to Ethereum.<p>(Disclaimer: my Bancor holding is about 0.5% of my total Crypto portfolio).
Is there a way to fix no one being able to short these things? The counter party risk and irrational exuberance outlasting ones solvency should be solvable somehow?
I bought some BNT... Now the price is only 2.72$ :[
(<a href="http://bancorprice.org/" rel="nofollow">http://bancorprice.org/</a>)
As an experienced trader in FX and us stocks, and as a bit of a budding technologist, how can I best get into speculating Ethereum?<p>I've tried getting into ethereum, and am super interested in programming numerous smart contracts, but have showed up late to the party, so all the docs are in varying levels of accuracy (out of date) and it seems like i have to download a million and a half heavy applications just to participate. Red flag. It seems weird that company with so much interest and participation doesn't have proper documentation.<p>Is there a way to go short; are there options markets; is it currently possible to bet against the price of a smart-contract like Bancor?
I would like to know if anyone reading Hacker News invested in BNT. Or any other token.<p>They look so obviously overpriced - it is difficult for me to understand why people are buying into this.
Official response <a href="https://blog.bancor.network/this-analysis-of-bancor-is-flawed-18ab8a000d43" rel="nofollow">https://blog.bancor.network/this-analysis-of-bancor-is-flawe...</a>
I wish I knew what an ICO was<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICO" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICO</a>