Excellent article and explanation. I'm a relative newcomer to cryptos and every time I read articles about trading and exchanges the same word keeps coming up, over and over: TRUST. Or, it seems, the lack of trust.
Seems we always ends up with what I have dubbed "The Farmers' Market Dilemma." We're all individuals who have turned our backs on centralized and government driven finance and banking... and yet we need aspects of centralized structure to function. In a sense, we are like individual small farmers who have things we want and things to offer... so we need a "Farmer's Market" (exchange) which IS a "centralized" sort of thing... but we have deep mistrust of anything that looks collective, so there ends up being a "clog."
Which has always been where I have questions about decentralization, cryptos and beyond... where does "decentralization" (a good thing) actually become "fragmentation" (not such a good thing) that keeps us from actually getting where we need to go?
Very good points. I love this:
It is a paradox of sorts. It will take time to improve because right now there are very few decentralised solutions and they are imperfect.
With time these issues will be fixed.
Indeed. It is early days, yet. I keep reminding myself that another "brand new technology" started to make itself felt around 1993... but true "mass adoption" didn't really happen till 2003-04... 11 years. Yes, I'm talking about the Internet. It was also a decade+ from the invention of PayPal (representing non-bank money transfers) till it became a commonly accepted method of payment...
Absolutely and I think that blockchains are very much like the internet in the way they change things!
A very good analogy of our situation.
It will take a long time to sort things out. Right now we still haven't even figured out which of the new crypto coins will even be around in 1 year. I still can't figure out why anyone would want to even get involved with "actual" bitcoin when you can already trade bitcoin on teh open U.S. equity exchanges. The OTC actually. But it is starting to pick up enough volume now so it should not be difficult at all to get a buy or sell order finished in a few seconds. This "bitcoin tracker" will at least be "tradable" until the world falls apart and bitcoin is the ONLY game in town...and that's a looong looooong loooong way away. get out 'safely"...get out quickly. With this.
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advchart/frames/frames.asp?show=&insttype=&symb=gbtc&x=57&y=21&time=18&startdate=1%2F4%2F1999&enddate=2%2F18%2F2017&freq=7&compidx=aaaaa%3A0&comptemptext=&comp=none&ma=0&maval=9&uf=0&lf=1024&lf2=2&lf3=8&type=2&style=320&size=4&timeFrameToggle=false&compareToToggle=false&indicatorsToggle=false&chartStyleToggle=false&state=9
As you can see, same great returns as the "actual" bitcoin. And you can use GBTC to tell when the bitcoin price is about to drop. I have been posting commentary on it here at steemit.