I am seriously considering investing in Bancor, but I have this nagging question in my head that hasn't been answered yet:
How is Bancor's token any different than any other token? Are the following statements accurate:
1. You buy it with another ERC20 token. Now you have Bancor token.
2. You sell Bancor, use it or hodl.
3. Bancor's price goes up or down based on the buy and sell ratio of Bancor.
Bancor presumably answers the liquidity issue, but what makes Bancor liquid? Isn't it the same as what makes any token liquid, buys and sells?
Not fudding at all, I want to invest! Please help me understand.
So the BANCOR token will be the first of the smart tokens. What makes it liquid is the exact same thing that makes every other smart token liquid: namely that when you are buying/selling smart tokens to the smart tokens' contract, the contract itself is the entity that is selling/buying.
Up until Bancor, the only way to sell is if you can find a buyer who wants to buy what you're selling at the price you're selling it. With the Bancor protocol, the smart tokens' contract is always available to buy from and sell to.
But is it actually buying my token or am I just trading my token for a Bancor token? Bancor tokens will have to be liquid themselves in order for me to buy/sell them. I'm having a problem identifying the difference unless I'm stuck with a token that has absolutely no liquidity itself in which case how does it help Bancor's token? I'm not seeing how this is any better than trading on an exchange and choosing any token/coin I want.
They will hold the reserve in ETH to make us able to buy or sell bancor. It does not need to be listed on any exchange for this.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between buying a token with another token and trading a token for another token. If you were to buy BANCOR from the smart contract, you would send your ETH to the smart contract (which would be added to its reserve) and the smart contract would mint new BANCOR tokens (at the price it calculated at time of trade) and send them to you.
Like I said, Bancor tokens are liquid the same way every other smart token is liquid. The smart tokens' contract is the thing you are trading with (as opposed to exchanges where you have to be matched with another party to make a trade). That is why it is always liquid.
The biggest reason that Bancor is better than exchanges is that EVERY conceivable currency in the world, even small ones like community currencies and loyalty points and in-game currencies, will be fully liquid. Exchanges only make currencies with high trading volumes liquid. With Bancor, the long-tail of currencies can be created (alike to how youtube enabled the long tail of videos, how Instagram enabled the long tail of photography, etc.).
There's also the fact that trading on Bancor will be cheaper than on exchanges (no/low fees), that you can create smart tokens that serve as token baskets (kind of like ETFs), and that it is decentralized and therefore cannot be DDoS'd or otherwise easily attacked.
I can see some advantages to that (which is why I'm interested in the first place). However, I don't see this as an alternative to exchanges. If I trade one token for another on an exchange I now have the new token. If I trade one token for Bancor I now have Bancor Tokens. I don't own the tokens inside Bancor outright. I have an ETF basically as you say. An ETF Token, which, is cool and maybe that's really all it is when all is said and done and all the fancy math is complete
Have you read the whitepaper yet? It explains that the type of contract that is issuing the BANCOR smart tokens is just ONE use-case of Bancor.
Bancor protocol can be used to:
- Make it possible to create a smart contact that continuously & instantly issues/liquidates (mints/destroys) its currency according to demand. Like the BANCOR smart token contract, and countless possible community/company/project based currencies. Or tokens to be used to buy a specific thing, with the price increasing as demand does (like tickets to a show, or a freelancer's personal currency that goes up as demand does).
- Make it possible exchange ANY currency for ANY other currency on the bancor, instantly, even if said currencies have such small trading volumes that you'd usually have trouble finding a buyer/seller (thereby enabling an explosion of small-market-cap cryptocurrencies alike to how Youtube enabled an explosion of video content). These are the Token Changer smart tokens. They can also take a fee which is added to their reserves (thereby increasing market depth and decreasing volatility for higher-volume trades) that increases the value of the Token Changer smart token itself (so that owning one of these is kind of like owning a share in a mini-exchange).
- Make it possible to create a smart token that holds multiple other tokens in reserves at pre-set CRRs (so that it is always re-balancing it's holdings to keep the each reserve token's value at the % of total smart token value you desire). This is the ETF use case. These can be combined with Token Changers.
That's just a few of the cooler use cases. There's more in our whitepaper, our upcoming FAQ, and the future's store of innovative use case ideas no one has had yet (alike to how Bancor is an innovative use case of Ethereum).
- explain about exchanges between tokens, how the BANCOR smart token type is just one type (the type that creates a new currency)