I'd heard rumblings about how it's kind of centralized, not secure, deck of cards etc...
When you hodl you don't care too much. Markets can bid things up for a while, and speculating never killed anyone.
Now that I actually try using it a little...
It sucks.
Augur is a great idea, but I wish it wasn't built on Ethereum.
I was never a believer in "the flippening" or ETH as a threat to BTC or anything like that. It always seemed like a more niche thing. But I assumed it would at least function at what it claimed to be.
Turns out, using it is kind of a mess.
Tx fees (or "gas" prices) are high, first of all. Like $0.50-$2 usually, and I'm not sending big bucks. But more than that, your transactions often don't go thru.
It's like a guessing game of whether or not you put enough gas.
Either you can risk paying something absurd like a $60 (nearly 100%) transfer fee, or you manually put a more reasonable limit on it (of $0.50 or $3 or whatever seems like enough according to data that you can find on websites like "ETH gas station"). And then what happens is it tries to execute the transfer but often just runs out of gas and doesn't go through.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but looks like you still end up paying the gas even when it doesn't go thru??
It's just awful, to actually use these ERC20 tokens. I have like 4 in a row right now that didn't go thru, and basically am done coughing up money on it for now.
I say that with all caveats of recognizing that I'm a noob with it etc. But I remember using Bitcoin for the first time when I was a noob (to all of crypto), and it always felt intuitive. Steem too for that matter.
You can look at your transaction history in a Bitcoin wallet, and it's a clean list of transfers in and out. In an Ethereum wallet it's like a graveyard of all your different attempts and failed transactions.
So maybe I'm screwing something up or Ethereum network is going thru congestion or something. I don't know. But my gut feeling is that it kind of sucks.
Even if I fine-tune a way to transfer a little more cleanly, it's kind of like.. why should I have to? Why would it need to be a science project to figure out how to do it? Why would this even be a possible user experience?
It just doesn't feel intuitive or like this is a real thing that will be the future of anything to me.
Ironically (or I guess not ironically?) I'm trying to play a market that bets against the price of ETH. But ETH is too lousy to execute the transaction 😆