The website also has its own token, naturally. Because obviously what people really want is to require a completely unrelated token when they try to trade two other ones. Who on earth thought this was a good idea?
Other than a few thousand investors in the ICO, the leaders of the projects who are building on it, the market participants so far, and the most respected fund in the space? No one, really.
Just because self-proclaimed experts involved in this whole unregulated ICO insanity think something is a good idea doesn't necessarily make it a good idea.
What's your distinction between a "self-proclaimed expert" and people building actual products on a technology and/or people who have already banked piles of money in the space?
I'm not trying to convince anyone that the space isn't a bubble or that putting money in any project isn't risky -- but I think it's incredibly stupid to think that all people building products on it are all fools and investors who've already made huge returns are exclusively the beneficiaries of luck.
They're self-proclaimed in the sense that the value of the whole field is entirely questionable, and has mostly been defined by those same people.
Aside from the securities fraud concerns, the whole thing just smells like either a pyramid scheme or money laundering. Especially ICOs where the value of the coin being offered are based on sketchy whitepapers or questionable implementations.
But hey, maybe I'm "incredibly stupid" to think that raising many multiple millions of dollars for currencies that are either useless at launch or have no value outside of the money raised through hype is sketchy, and that people who claim to be experts in this field are experts at selling things of questionable value.
Again, I've said I'm not trying to convince you or anyone that it's not currently in a bubble or risky. No doubt there is some money laundering (BTC-e) and securities fraud going on. The pyramid scheme accusation has been aired here for like 5 years now. One day, maybe soon, there will be a few prominent doomsayers here and elsewhere who'll be lauded for calling the crash, when they'll really have called 15 of the last 2 crashes.
"They're self-proclaimed in the sense that the value of the whole field is entirely questionable" -- putting aside that this doesn't really make semantic sense, I think we're past the point where we can say this is objectively wrong. The field may be inflated to bubble proportions, but, yeah -- no offense -- I do think it's stupid to be arguing at this point that PoW cryptocurrencies -- Bitcoin at the least -- are valueless and/or a pyramid scheme.
> I do think it's stupid to be arguing at this point that PoW cryptocurrencies -- Bitcoin at the least -- are valueless and/or a pyramid scheme.
I completely agree that BitCoin is not a pyramid scheme, but we're not talking about BitCoin. We're talking about <AltCoinX> which is being used in a similar fashion to shares with an ICO (except the token isn't worth a portion of the company, it's "worth" a portion of some product that may exist some day). Bringing up BitCoin is muddying the waters.
Claiming that a token used as part of a product (that doesn't exist yet) is like Bitcoin (and is not a pyramid scheme or at least, not vaguely some form of confidence scheme) is a bit like claiming that you can use gift coupons or poker chips as a fiat currency. That just doesn't make sense to me.
OK, fair enough. There are definitely tokens that either could be in-app-purchases backed by a company's database, some that are accidental securities, and some that are outright scams.
Coming back to the original topic -- I don't think ZRX is any of those. Is it worth a quarter billion dollars? Technically and literally yes at the moment, but it's almost all speculative value. I think one thing we could agree on is it would be really nice to be able to short some of these things. (You can short a handful on some exchanges, but none of the ones I can see going to near zero in less than a year)
2. Submit an 0x post to HN and get it upvoted (use 0x and other crypto chats to create ad hoc voting rings but brief the guys to do the upvoting right)
3. Once on the frontpage, go to other chats and exchanges' trollboxes (eg liqui.io) and shout '0x IS ON HN!!!', wait a bit and sell
If you build such an arbitrage bot why on Earth would you write it up and complain about being too poor to run it rather than running, not walking, to beg or borrow the capital to run it to its full potential? Then you can still write it up and get your academic props
I think the security risk of centralized exchanges is overblown. If you only transfer tokens to an exchange when you want to sell them your risk is pretty low. Plus, most exchanges have most of their coins in cold storage (kind of like a bank doesn't keep all the cash at one branch).
Plus, if you're interested in actively trading coins centralized exchanges have the best liquidity. It takes seconds to execute your order.
Decentralized exchanges mostly function as a tax dodge. Imagine all the early bitcoiners who got in before the gold rush, reinvested profits into ICO's, and have never paid one cent in capital gains.
The idea of transferring tokens only when you want to sell them is a nice idea, but it doesn't work in practice for a lot of people. Imagine speculating in 30 different alt coins. It is just too much work to run wallets for each coin. So people keep them in an exchange. Also, people may want a lot of open orders. Successful investors can accumulate a lot of value in an exchange quickly.
0x doesn't solve the alt-coin problem but encouraging people to hold their own ethereum tokens is a start.
Today I sold Ether token for Augur reputation token just to give it a try via the OTC Dapp. No middleman, cost me almost nothing, it was a great!
There's a lot of potential in this technology IMO
