I have only been active in the world of crypto for 2 months as of today, but in that time have signed up and played around with Bittrex, Poloniex and the DEX. While the former two exchanges hold the most transaction volume of most popular coins and tokens, I still cannot for the life of me understand why people are putting up with those exchanges in favour of the DEX. I have experienced and been frustrated by asset freezes, lack of trading pairs, and a constant fear of an exchange going offline. As such I will be moving all my assets, and doing all my trading, through the DEX after the August one BTC freeze blows over. What follows is my reasoning, and why you should do the same.
The DEX Cannot Randomly Shut Down and Disappear
I have learnt a number of crypto lessons the hard way: I have sent crypto to the wrong address, given in to FOMO, tried to time the market with insufficient experience, and many other mistakes. Thing is, we learn from doing these things. There is one mistake you NEVER want to learn the hard way though, which is leaving your crypto on an exchange and having it close down on you, such as happened with Mt Gox. For those of you unaware, Mt. Gox was the world's largest Bitcoin exchange before suddenly goin offline - taking 850,000 BTC owned by its users with it.
There is nothing stopping the same thing happening to Bittrex or Poloniex. If any are practicing fractional reserve banking (we have no idea if they are), then a run on the exchanges during a potential price drop in the coming BTC split could very well see them follow in the footsteps of Mt. Gox.
The DEX cannot disappear with your assets, as it is decentralised all over the globe. As a result, there is no single point of failure that could take the exchange offline. More importantly, no single entity can actually take the exchange offline. As long as there are two computers still running full nodes for the DEX, the exchange will continue to exist.
The DEX lets me Trade Anything for Anything
Have you ever gotten frustrated that to turn your USDT into BTS on Poloniex, you have to first convert everything to BTC? This is because Poloniex and Bittrex only offer a select few trading pairs, all centred around their 'key' coins. The DEX is asset agnostic - meaning I can offer to trade anything for anything. Of course, there still needs to be a buyer for the trading pair you want to use, but the potential is there.
The benefits with this are significant. Not only are we not forced to trade through some key currencies (that are therefore more important on the exchange), but you only have to pay fees on a single transaction instead of two transactions to achieve the end result.
The DEX Has Many Pegged Assets to Store Value Safely
While on Poloniex I am limited to storing value safely in USDT through the Tether platform, the DEX offers a vast array of pegged assets. Further, the DEX pegged assets are backed by twice their value in BTS, as opposed to a bank account operated by the Tether service which backs USDT. As a result, if Tether goes backrupt USDT will instantly drop to value of nill, while this cannot happen to the DEX pegged assets.
The pegged assets on the DEX include classic investments such as precious metals, as well as other commodities and currencies. As a result, if the crypto market were to experience a sudden shift and I wanted to pull out my investment to relative safety I could do so on the exchange. On top of this, these pegged assets enable decentralised traditional investments into currencies and commodities on the DEX, previously done through bodies such as the Forex market.
The DEX Interface Is Clean and Easy to Use
When you open your Bitshares wallet (through which the DEX is accessible) you are greeted with a screen giving an overview of the top markets. It is clean, crisp, and all the rest of the layout and design on the exchange follows this same design philosophy.
There is no excessive content on the screen, and the user experience is trivial to customise to what best suits each individual person.
The DEX is Built By - and On - the Bleeding Edge of the Industry
As if you should need more convincing, the DEX was designed by 
Further, the DEX is built on the Graphene blockchain. This is the third generation of blockchain technology, greatly surpassing the BTC and ETH chain technology. The Graphene blockchain technology is only limited in speed by the speed of light and the size of the planet, and is capable of handling 100,000 transactions per second.
While the Bitcoin crowd is trying to bandaid its throughput, why not jump on board with the future that already exists?
Image credit:
Banner, holytransaction
Footer, me-shell
