I'm slacking behind the ANN how "algorithmically-calculated conversion rates" should work, and liquidity without trade volume, maybe the habits have grown to strong. Watching orderbooks all day, picking from buy or sell side, it is that simple. Could not tell you a fixed rate at any given point in time how could a formula do that? SMA or EMA kurves are followers only.
Bancor offers a completely new method for price-discovery, which is possible only with programmable tokens that can hold other tokens, be issued/destroyed by their contract, and provide a public API to buy and sell them.
While in traditional exchanges the liquidity source is the market depth, and the price-discovery is based on the agreement between two independent parties -- with Bancor-tokens, the liquidity source is the reserve(s) and the price-discovery is based on the buy/sell history.
This means that whenever a Bancor-token is purchased from its contract (in exchange for a reserve token), new Bancor-tokens are issued and the unit price goes up relative to the reserve token. When a Bancor-token is sold (in exchange for a reserve token), the tokens are destroyed and reserve-token are transferred to the seller.
The price changes result from how the price is calculated, which is simply: UnitPrice=ReserveBalance / (TokenSupply * ReserveRatio). There are step-by-step examples in the whitepaper elaborating on this.
It's important to emphasize that this is how
Bancor-tokens operate, however, reserve-tokens may be any ERC20 token, including Bancor-tokens, so the "Bancor Network" enable conversion between any two tokens (Bancor-tokens or reserve-tokens).
Bancor-tokens use this method of price discovery, in which the price is the result of the previous buys/sales of the Bancor-token. This creates a situation that when a token has high demand, the price will climb up until it reaches the point where sellers are encouraged to sell it, and buyers discouraged from buying it -- and the price will remain around that equilibrium point between buys and sales. This is
very different from the way exchanges work, however, it has a similar behavior in which buying a token increases its price and vice-versa.
What/how/who/howmany of these reserve tokens will come into existance to fuel the exchange supply?
The reserve token can be ETH, or DGX, or any other ERC20 token. These reserve tokens cannot issue themselves, so they do not "come into existence" . The initial reserve can be collected in a crowdsale of using a direct deposit, and will grow due to a strong demand for the token. The market-cap of the token will grow in parallel simply since the market-cap is calculated as ReserveBalance / ReserveRatio.
Any investment opportunity?
We are planning the crowdsale of BGTs (temporary name), which is detailed in the whitepaper as the first "genesis network token" (a Bancor-token which is to be used primarily as a reserve of other, user-created Bancor-tokens - enabling conversion between all of them)
We will provide additional details on the crowdsale soon.
For more info - read the whitepaper and review the Bancor smart-contract code at
https://bancor.network