DDOS, Hacks & Scams, seriously?

Start trading at a decentralized exchange NOW!

Source: Reuters

“ We are under a DDoS attack, we are working on getting the site back, don’t worry your money is safe with us...”

MT GOX, Cryptsy, Bter and many other exchanges have deliberately stolen customer´s money. Their story its always the same and it follows a similar pattern: first they claim they are getting attacked by DDoS, then they disable withdrawals and finally they announce they have been hacked before slowly disappearing to some island in the Bahamas to enjoy some Piña Coladas with your money!

There are far too many risks with centralized exchanges, even if they don’t have bad intentions in mind, they could still lose your Bitcoins out of negligence or actually get hacked one day and go bankrupt. The bottom line is that if you don’t own the private keys, you are always going to depend on a third party to hold your currencies for you.

I do think most Bitcoiners and Crypto aficionados know all too well about these risks, but for some reason the vast majority still choose to trade at centralized exchanges. to give you an idea of how much money is being transacted at these exchanges, at Poloniex alone there was more than $40.000.000 trading volume on the day Ethereum Homestead release (14/3/2016).

Ok.. so if we don’t trade at Centralized Exchanges, where do we go?

Well I guess the obvious choice is to start trading at Decentralized Exchanges, these are exchanges built on top of a Blockchain which basically cuts out the middle-man so that the possibility of getting scammed is zero and the risks of losing your money is reduced only to your own stupidity.

The first decentralized exchange I heard of is actually built on top of Bitcoin Blockchain, its called Counterparty. The problem with this exchange is that its so slow that it can´t even be considered as an option. This is because you have to wait for a a Bitcoin’s confirmation in order to buy, sell or transfer money, that takes at least 10 minutes.

So, the only viable option at this point is Bitshares Decentralized Exchange. As stated on their website:

BitShares provides a high-performance decentralized exchange, with all the features you would expect in a trading platform. It can handle the trading volume of the NASDAQ, while settling orders the second you submit them.

BTS Decentralized Exchange

I have been using Bitshares platform for a while now and even though it still needs some improvements (stop-limit orders being the most important one) it is by far the safest platform to trade at. You hold your private keys and you are prompted to type your password every time you decide to make an order or transfer funds.

So if you don’t want to lose any sleep when you have big orders open at centralized exchanges, head over to Bitshares.org and download their software or just open an account at OpenLedger , a decentralized exchange built on Bitshares platform.