The Bancor Network Tokens will be liquid immediately after the ICO closes. Via the BNT smart token contract (just like every other smart token).

Why? What's wrong?

It's in the first post of this entire thread, at the top.

https://bancor-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/

It won't be. If you want to participate in the ICO, exchange the amount you want to buy from BTC to ETH.

This is actually one pretty cool aspect of Bancor's price discovery algorithm: it makes pump & dump operations a lot less feasible.

See, when you make a trade with a smart token contract, the price is calculated as if you made an infinite amount of very tiny trades. With each tiny trade, the price for the next goes up slightly. So, if you try to pump or dump, the price will rise with the size of your order & you'll wind up paying a price that takes into account the amount you've bought/sold.

Therefore it'll be extremely expensive to attempt to manipulate the price via pump/dump schemes.

Thats totally up to exchanges. Though its worth noting that BANCOR tokens will always be tradable for ETH via the Bancor smart tokens' contract.

New Bancor blog post: Smart Tokens 101

https://blog.bancor.network/smart-tokens-101-63edc2cc5a89

Announcement on that here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1789222.msg19042838#msg19042838

First: the diff between Bancor and everything else that enables a swapping of tokens is that Bancor allows for a swapping of tokens WITHOUT needing to find a counterparty. This means that even small market-cap currencies with low trading volumes (think of the countless community/complimentary/business-based currencies for example) is always completely liquid.

Second: same as first. Yes Waves enables trade, but its still P2P and requires a counterparty.

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Additionally, there's the heretofore unheard of use cases like creating Token Baskets (like decentralized ETFs), and creating a currency that is minted/destroyed constantly based on demand;

This is true, a deeper market depth (which is a main function of a reserve currency in this type of smart token) makes for less volatility. The market depth on any given exchange is usually <1%, so a 20% market depth can be considered quite large.

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)

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.

Actually, the supply can be (and for most smart tokens, we think it will be) much smaller than 20%. The reason that smart tokens can still be liquid with tiny reserves is that, when you buy/sell a smart token (or its reserve tokens) the price is calculated as if you sold an infinitely large amount of micro transactions that equal the same total amount. For every micro transaction you do, the price for the next goes up (as with every supply/demand system). So if supply were to grow smaller, the price of each smart token would decrease proportionally. The token would stay liquid, it would just decrease in value.

If demand were such that the price is no longer 'reasonable' to enough people, demand would go down and said price would stop rising (or fall, if demand went low enough that there are now more people selling than buying). In other words, the price of a smart token is kept reasonable by the market, like any other freely traded commodity.

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.

If I understand you're question correctly, you're asking how the inevitable price differences between smart tokens internal prices & their prices on exchanges.

The answer is the same as the solution to price differences between exchanges: arbitrage bots. When there is profit to be made by a difference in price, these bots automatically come and make trades until they've evened out the prices (and so it is no longer profitable).

To be clear: smart tokens' contracts can buy/sell themselves. No second party needed. That is how every single currency on the network can be fully liquid from day one.

This gets automatically managed by arbitrate bots. Whenever there's a price discrepancy between any two sources (say two different exchanges, or an exchange and a smart token), people (and the bots they create for this purpose) are incentivized to trade and make a profit from that difference until it's no longer profitable.

So there will be, as there is today on all exchanges, a constant trading of assets by bots that keeps prices in line with each other.

The point of Bancor isn't to make ICOs easier.

The point is to make EVERY SINGLE currency completely liquid and connected to the global financial ecosystem, thereby enabling the countless small currencies (like complimentary currencies, loyalty points, in-game currencies) etc. that don't have high trading volume to be exchangeable for every other currency.

Bancor will do to currency what youtube did to video, what Instagram did to photography, what the internet as a whole did to publishing: enable the long tail.

This is beautiful. I'm saving this in our quotes book

As for Italian translation, we haven't officially assigned the Bitcointalk Official Italian thread yet. Say you want it here: https://app.bancor.network/communities/59072308fe34d10001aaf3d7/posts/5907339698c9cb000161feec?newCommentText=I

Try again now? Should be fixed.

Yup. Chinese Bancor Whitepaper here: https://bancor.network/static/Bancor_Protocol_Whitepaper_cn.pdf