[chrisco255]

On 1) the exchanges may be unregulated, but there's dozens, if not hundreds of exchanges. Implying that exchanges are manipulating the spot price across the board is ludicrous. There's also exchanges like EtherDelta, which are entirely run by a smart contract on the Ethereum block chain, so it's independently verifiable that the trades are fairly executed.

2. BTC is being used as the reserve currency for almost all exchanges. BTC has a vast network and even as popular as ETH has gotten, it has some ways to go before it's accepted at the same level as BTC. The others, like LTC & XMR also rarely have trades delimited in their currency.

[0wing]

1) Unregulated exchanges are likely operating as fractional reserve pools. Also notice how historic charts show steep, often 90° falls in spot price? Low liquidity and high latency allows exchanges to take in new deposits and delay withdraws while they shuffle funds from new deposits to pay withdraws.

EtherDelta is only compatible with Tokens generated within the Ethereum network, i.e. digital "assets" produced not by mining but by writing a separate contract that immediately creates or "pre-mines" millions of Tokens.

Pre-mined Tokens are a gimmick that amounts to a gift card for a Business, but the marketing tries to claim this is a magic software network where a limited amount of giftcards are released into the wild and you need to horde the giftcards to use the services offered by the business. Please feel free to show proof where this is not the case.

2. BTC is not a "reserve currency", it's merely referenced in the form of a ratio for other crypto-assets. BTC could fall to $0.001 USD and you would simply see the ratio as BTC 6 : 1 OTHER-CRYPTO

[chrisco255]

1) Many existing networks, including the Qtum network were sold on ERC20 contracts (https://qtum.org) originally as an ICO method before moving to their own network where they trade the tokens for coins on the network. In that case, Qtum continues to issue new coins on a proof-of-stake basis. There's other examples out there, this is just one I'm familiar with.

If you can point to 90° drops on GDAX, I'd be interested to see them.

[chrisco255]

"reserve currency" may be the wrong word, but the fact remains that for the vast majority of exchanges, you add value by depositing in BTC and you trade in terms of BTC (not USD). So any crypto you want to sell usually has to be converted to BTC first before your native currency.