After having installed Anoncoin and while still wondering about all the cryptocurrencies, I yesterday did some “trading”. Well, I was invited to check out a market place and actually even provided with “money”. But let me tell ya about it …

I was following the i2p-dev-meeting yesterday in which exchanged was also discussed because of a possible inclusion in the router console. On that topic I think, that the router console should only contain stuff relevant to the router. Links could be on a seperate page that can be updated easily. And probably could include more links than. But

User abyss seems to be the operator of that site and was willing to help me on with my questions. He also offered some coins to just start trading. So lets be clear, that he kind of paid me. I’m not sure what fraction of a cent those coins are worth, yet. But we are not talking big money here. Also the money is still on his server, but let’s start at the beginning …

I do want to get some experiences with digital currencies. As I was not able yet to buy bitcoins with a paysafecard (we original plan), I welcomed the opportunity to get my hands on some trading tool already. He did give me those coins using some kind of a bot within the IRC channel #exchange. So to actually get it from the bot, I had to find out about that first. I entered a chat with that bot by issueing /msg dogedtip in which I could query and read the help and issue commands:

21:57:40 -!- Irssi: Starting query in irc2p with dogedtip
21:57:40 <lbt> help
21:57:44 <dogedtip> You can use following commands:
21:57:44 <dogedtip> balance - displays your current wallet balance
21:57:44 <dogedtip> address - displays dogecoindark address where you can send your funds to the 
                    tip bot
21:57:44 <dogedtip> withdraw <dogecoindark address> - withdraws your whole wallet balance to 
                    specified address (you will be charged 2 DOGED withdrawal fee)
21:57:44 <dogedtip> tip <nick> <amount> - sends the specified amount of dogecoindark to the 
                    specified nickname
21:57:44 <dogedtip> rain <amount> [max] - splits amount coins between max users or the whole 
                    channel
21:57:45 <dogedtip> terms - displays terms and conditions for using dogedtip
22:12:23 <lbt> balance
22:12:27 <dogedtip> lbt has 100 DOGED (unconfirmed: 0 DOGED)

Ok, so I actually had a balance there. 100 DOGED - I had no clue what that was, but it felt kind of cool nethertheless. Exciting. So to get hold of those, I could transfer them to digital wallet now, which I didn’t have. But the idea was to trade on the exchange anyways, so I went to create an account there. I actually expected that not to work out due to me not being willing to use javascript. But abyss told me he would have a “zero-js policy”. Whaaaat? Yes, indeed. For me the page worked without any js.

To create an account you will have to allow session-cookies for the site btw. Do it beforehand or you will have to enter your info again ;) And note that your accountname will need to be at least 5 characters long. Otherwise you’ll go again to enter your stuff. After one is through with the creation, a surprise: the site supports I2P-Bote, the decentralised email-system. And it actually works, I had to enter a confirmation code after receiving that per Bote. Nice mate!

And in the account overview there were wallets for each supported currency already created for me. So let’s get the “money” there, right? I copied “my” address for DOGED and went back to irc and the bot there:

22:16:13 <lbt> withdraw xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
22:16:18 <dogedtip> lbt: 98 DOGED has been withdrawn from your account to 
                    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
22:16:18 <dogedtip> You have been charged 2 DOGED withdrawal fee.
22:16:18 <dogedtip> Transaction xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
                    completed.

I assumed it will take some time for the transaction to be completed. So I looked around. First it was hard then to distinguish the links at top. After mentioning this, some visual seperators there on-the-fly. Nice. That helped. I then had to get used to some things. Not being a trader, that might be just me. But it took me some time to figure out what the numbers mean each. Besides not even knowing the name of currencies like vtc, ltc, xpm, dash, cyp and so on, I didn’t understand sell/buy orders if watching any of them, either.

Some things that might be good to know:

  • Bitcoin is the “master currency” on this exchange it seems. You can only echange each of the currencies towards bitcoins. If you want to exchange let’s say DOGED to ANC, you will have to trade the DOGED to BTC first, before you can go to echange the BTC into ANC.
  • Although only three currencies have links at the top (ANC, LTC, DOGED), you can trade them all. Just click on the currency in the overview and you will get shown buy/sell offers.
  • The exchange is just a market-place offering users to place buy and sell orders and will process those as they fit. So you can either look that offer there are and make a counter-offer “accepting” it, i.e. with a matching price, or you can place your counter-offer with a different (higher) price, then the exchange will wait for someone to come and place an accordingly matching offer.

So, after my transaction was confirmed I wondered what I can do with my 100 DOGED now? I sold some for BTC accepting an offered price on the market there. Not all of them. I then put up a sell order with a price slightly below the existing orders. There were 2 with 500.000 DOGED each. So one million coins. Think that’s a lot? Just read on …

Now idea of course was to wait for someone to come that want’s to buy DOGED and would accept my offer then, which was the lowest (best) price at the time I put it up. Now this was all yesterday and when I looked at the market today, guess what has happened. Another player has been active and has placed some orders below mine. Now if it were a few coins, that wouldn’t be a problem. But it actually were 2 times 4.000.000 coins. So 1 million was there before and after I had placed my order someone came and placed another 8 million coins below that. Sounds like I will have to wait quite a while …

So what’s happening here? Well, players are playing the market. It seems to be rather big players in terms of DOGED. abyss hat supplied my with the link to coinmarketcap (see bottom). Quite many currencies are listed there (many hundred). I those told though, that there would be several thousands. But I went and looked up DOGED there. The available supply is given there with 9,213,450,000 DOGED. So the 9 million playing on this exchange equal about 1/1000 of the whole DOGED market. So those are pretty big players that can probably influence the market as they wish. I made a screenshot from the orders that should be shown below.

DOGED on exchanged on 2015-11-05

I’m not sure what’s the point in this btw. But it’s interesting to play around with it :) And if moving to bitcoins (in general), the market probably is not owned by a single player that way. Though there will be forces at work, too ;) So from the first look it seems these alternative coins are the playground of few big players. I wonder how somebody should become interested in playing with (against?) those. For bitcoins, a more established currency, things probably look different though.

It feels strange that you have to transfer your money to someone else to trade it. But actually, that’s what banks do. And I tend not to trust those, but I have to use them anyways. So what’s the difference? Well, here the guy is completely anonymous. He could pack together all balances and leave anytime. Probably more risky than with a bank, that might get saved by a government when in difficult waters. Thing is, you need to meet the buyer/seller for your orders and unless you know them directly, there is the need for such an exchange I guess. But one should keep that in mind and only risk the minimum amount needed I guess. As I’m playing around with someone elses money (and as it’s only a small fraction of a cent or something), I currently do not care much. But if we are talking real money, one probably should. It also seems that “no risk, no trade”. A thing one probably needs to get used to when dealing with crypto-currencies?

I’ll finish with mentioning that the exchange offers an API. That can be used to query the current data of the exchange (not of the markets in general). It seems there is a bot in the making that will allow to have a program do some trading. That might be interesting to play around with. If the example bot becomes available, I might actually look into that. In general I think I will keep an eye on this and further my plan to get more into this topic in general. I don’t see the usefulness of the many alternatives currently, but in being a playground to get used to trading. But that’s a benefit I will try to use. Doing a private wallet, transferring something to there. Back then. And so on. Just to get used to it. While BTC are most established, they do not offer anonymity. I therefore imagine that Anoncoins could have a chance to compete. See the link at the bottom for the infographic on Zerocoins, a planned addition to Anoncoins that would provide a “build-in-mixing” facility to foster anonymity. Background is, that all transactions are publicly visible in the blockchains of the currencies and thus pretty much traceable. But I will need to follow this more, this all is just my first “impression”.

Thx to abyss for offering toys and playground for this! :)

ClearNet Links:

  • https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/
  • https://wiki.anoncoin.net/images/6/68/1412242631687.jpg