Bancor has lost more than half its value since June ICO

I'm sure Bancor couldn't care less about their token price collapsing. They've already got all of the "investors'" money.

In fact, they could just walk away right now instead of carrying on developing the system. The brave new world of ICOs offers no protection against companies failing to follow through on their ICO roadmap. Maybe Bancor could use the token collapse as an excuse to quit now?

ICOs are more akin to angel/VC rounds than IPOs - you often invest in a idea thats still not fully developed and might need 1-2 years to come out on the market. The huge difference to traditional investing is that shares/tokens are immediately tradable and small(ish) crypto investors have 0 patience to wait those 1-2 years so they often sell early and crash the price to go looking for another get-rich scheme.

Thats a curse of the ICOs - but also a benefit. As an investor you get to assign value to something immediately and have the freedom to terminate your investment (something very difficult with traditional angel/VC rounds) and sell the tokens. Its also a fascinating marketing strategy - some of your crypto "investors" are early adopters, promoters and users of your tech - even more so because they're vested in it.

I'm not defending the ICOs (especially the over the top ones) - but lately there are so many articles that don't really try to understand the concept. And so many people automatically equating temporary loss of value with scams. Internet and cryptos are moving at the speed of thought - but the rules are still the same - startups need time.

In all fairness - Bancor is still a very young project. Also a fairly promising one - many projects already using it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bancor/comments/75b7us/list_of_all_...

Bancor plummeted right after the ICO. It's still above it's all time low, so it's not exactly a new thing. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bancor/

There were plenty of warnings and research about how flawed their product is, including here. The lesson, as always, is caveat emptor.

Why do so many cryptocurrency projects seem so meta?

Platforms for creating platforms, coins for creating coins.

The spot price has fallen by more than half; the value has held very steady at zero.

Bancor's been plagued with some technical problems that have been exploited by miners and hackers to front-run their algorithm.

The explanation for the losses are related to the price stabilisation / automated market making algorithm being exploited while in its early infancy.

I'm really sad at the reactions people on HN have to Blockchain businesses and topics, but I am confident this is a case of horse-traders dissing on Ford Model T. It's like the SV crowd is finding it hard to believe no one wants another social media uber for X whatever now that the money and the spotlight are shining on communities very far from your own.

Volatility in cryptocurrency-based securities? I am shocked, shocked.

What? This is like every shit coin. Tons of them tank to near zero and deflate. Anyone who thinks these coins are legitimate are fooling themselves. They are built with one core requirement, do just enough to differentiate from other coins, pump it, get out.

The average person can't understand 99% of the specs of these coins, it's all speculation. The whole thing is a ponzi scheme.

I did quite a lot of research into Bancor from a non-cryptocurrency-developer perspective a few months ago (when looking at possible ways to launch a token for Matrix - c.f. https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/22/thoughts-on-cryptocurrenc...) - and concluded that it's actually quite an interesting idea (once it finally 'clicked').

From the normal dev perspective: the idea is that it removes the concept of using a marketplace to exchange between currencies entirely; instead it replaces the exchanges with an algorithm which gives a consistent global way to calculate the FX rate at any given point. The formula used is mathematically very simple: you allocate a 'reserve' of your currency to be backed by a 'base' currency (by default, their BNT); and as folks buy and sell your currency it algorithmically defines the exchange rate relative to the base currency based on the total supply of your currency in circulation. So rather than the exchange rate being determined by the human interactions of traders, instead it's determined by a function of the current market cap - and everyone is held true to using the same function because it's part of the codebase that defines how the currency operates, running as a smart contract on the Ethereum VM. From memory, the function itself defines the FX as being proportional to the amount of token supply relative to the reserve, after applying a selectable exponential damping factor.

The code is kinda interesting, as it ends up implementing some fairly scary fixed-point exponentiation in such a way that it can run on the EVM with the reversibility and predictable rounding errors which are required for small transactions to cause tiny but 'correct' changes in the FX rate for that currency. https://github.com/bancorprotocol/contracts/blob/master/soli... has the gory details.

Now, the idea certainly does have some controversies, including:

* It requires some kind of common currency to be able to work, and Bancor positioned themselves as the common currency for that purpose (hence their ICO). That said, you could also chain together separate 'common' currencies though, or just access a Bancorified network of currencies via an old-style exchange.

* Whilst the formula used to calculate the FX seems sensible enough, it's not obvious it's the only (or optimal) solution, but it's very baked into the system. (Although the contract does have a backdoor to let it be upgraded in case of bugs or problems, which is a bit controversial in and of itself).

* It's an interesting question whether it's a feature or a bug that markets have a human function which can act emotionally/irrationally - rather than behaving 'perfectly' through the magic of a shared smart contract.

On balance, it feels like a very interesting system for managing small-scale tokens - especially ones which need liquidity and stability beyond their natural market cap. However, this is a slightly niche market which is still evolving (relative to everyone who's running around trying to do as large an ICO as possible), so it's perhaps not surprising that it's yet to take off.

(Disclaimer: I'm not working with/for Bancor, although have chatted to them a few times.)

> Bancor Chief Executive Officer Guy Benartzi said Sirer is making his claims because he is advising another company.

That really says it all. The CEO prefers to attack ad hominem instead of responding to his very well substantiated arguments. Bancor is BS and a perfect example of the whole ICO scam thing.

Cryptocurrencies were created to allow people to opt out of society's current power structures.

That might explain why Bancor, a cryptocurrency backed by traditional power brokers doesn't work as a cryptocurrency.

Why not name the coin in the title? Bancor.

Most people in the scene were warning people away from Bancor due to the large amount of money being raised. Generally large raises will result in a massive fall regardless of the teams performance short term.

Also it was never clear how their token fit into the future of the CryptoCurrency ecosystem.

It always seemed like an ICO-token without a purpose, looking to invent one.

Thing is most of these dapp ideas would gain a larger network effect and be more efficient just by using ETH.

Ehh, my 3d printing stock fell to about 10% of its value. It happens in every market - just make sure you are diversified... especially if you are investing in high risk markets.

Edit: I'm probably getting downvoted because I'm comparing IPOs to ICOs. They are significantly different and everyone should beware of scams.

So what, GRPN fell to 1/5 of its IPO price in its first year.