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Comment by zjaffee | Hacker News Reader

As someone whose generally bearish on crypto currencies, I do see one clear benefit to ICOs over traditional exchanges. Namely the fact that you can trade them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, in any currency (theoretically) and on no fixed exchange (although it's likely that the number of exchanges will be limited to reduce price instability).

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> you can trade them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, in any currency (theoretically) and on no fixed exchange

This describes securities, generally. You and I can transact to trade shares of Uber in renminbi on a Saturday. We can transact, over the counter and using a broker, to trade shares of Apple in Canadian dollars the following day. The Apple trade would need to be reported to the national ticker, for transparency purposes, but that’s about it.

We concentrate public equity trading into fixed windows and currencies to increase liquidity. It’s a convenience. Privately-negotiated trading is still common for large blocks of public securities.

The obvious difference is transactions without a third party. You can also verify ICO token integrity on the blockchain yourself (via open source apps).

The obvious question is whether that actually matters all that much for securities, since the broker/exchange adds negligible risk and overhead for the buyer relative to the trust in the public company needed to buy a stake in it and the costs of meeting regulatory requirements for public companies.

Anybody who's more worried by the potential complications of T+2 settlement when purchasing blue chip stocks than the Wild West world of ICOs shouldn't be investing.

That is indeed the right question to ask.

Maybe it's less about trust and more about permission. With token based securities I could trade with whomever I choose whenever I want.

Interesting to see how it turns out in the end.

What happens if a trade that is illegal under the law of the country of the seller/buyer/exchange? The courts would be completely powerless to undo the transaction. Again it seems to me the main and only attraction is evading regulation.

There's a 95% accurate O(1) solution to determine if an ICO transaction has integrity.

And you can maintain custody, so somebody isn't loaning out your shares.

You can trade pretty much any security 24/7 these days, and people do.

Many futures exchanges are open 24 hours on weekdays (perhaps with 15 minute gaps), but not weekends. Can you link to one that's open on the weekends?

Practically any retail/spot forex exchange I thought?

you just described the FX derivatives market, which btw cannot work without regulation and enforcement and monitoring bodies with real consequences for bad actors.

I haven't seen an FX exchange that trades through weekends, since Oanda stopped offering weekend trading back in 2012.[1] Can you link to one?

1. https://www.leaprate.com/news/oanda-suspends-weekend-trading...

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