
0x – A Protocol for Trading Tokens - CryptoPunk
https://0xproject.com/otc
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joosters
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?

~~~
jraines
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.

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cyphar
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.

~~~
jraines
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.

~~~
cyphar
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.

~~~
jraines
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.

~~~
cyphar
> 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.

~~~
jraines
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)

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thinbeige
How to get rich (or daytrading for beginners):

1\. Buy ZRX

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

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wmf
Recent analysis: [http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/08/13/cost-of-
decent/](http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/08/13/cost-of-decent/)

~~~
jraines
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

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atomical
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.

~~~
deweller
The risk of centralized exchanges are a real problem. See
[https://magoo.github.io/Blockchain-
Graveyard/](https://magoo.github.io/Blockchain-Graveyard/).

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.

~~~
thinbeige
May I ask if you are invested in 0x?

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jspdown
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

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hepolz
I'm just getting a blank page for
[https://0xproject.com/](https://0xproject.com/). The browser error console
reports:

    
    
        SyntaxError: missing ; before statement
        bundle.js?v=1 (line 1, col 1475769)

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CloudYeller
It's 1999 all over again, except s/web/blockchain.

"Hey everyone! This business uses a block chain! It's going to the moon!"

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wslh
But you cannot do HFT or fast trading with a descentralize exchange, this is a
con.

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fervorarc
If you bought ZRX after reading this post, you would have 2x any money you had
put in. Food for thought. Absolutely Ludicrous.

~~~
swiley
There probably should be a rule against promoting crypto currencies as your
first and only comment.

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xer
Only problem is that you need to install a Browser Extension, much bigger
problem is that browsers are not secure.

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jc__
You can buy ZRX (0x) token on the market already, been going up the past few
days:
[https://liqui.io/#/exchange/ZRX_ETH](https://liqui.io/#/exchange/ZRX_ETH)

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CryptoPunk
A subreddit has also been created for publishing OTC offers:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/tokentrade/](https://www.reddit.com/r/tokentrade/)

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mmanfrin
What differentiates this from Stellar or Ripple?

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jeremyt
It doesn't transport money, it trades tokens.

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loppers92
Why isn't OmiseGo listed?

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loppers92
Mmh... I had loading issues

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whatnotests
Brilliant idea. Wish I would have thought of it myself!

