I'm not sure we have anything to offer those who do not have a saving habit. If you are living hand to mouth with no savings at the end of the month, then by definition you would be selling your bitUSD as soon as you got it. You would not be holding it for yield and you would not be worried about your government inflating away its value or confiscating your nest egg.
I'm talking about a closed loop where people actually work in the Bitshares ecosystem, get paid in BitUSD, spend most of their BitUSD and save some of it.
If a janitor were working for BitUSD why wouldn't they save some of it?
I guess we could collect fees for the wages passing through our network, but is that really helping people?
That's not exactly what I had in mind. I don't think the goal should be to deliberately help people. The goal should be to create an ecosystem where people can help each other while earning BitUSD. There doesn't need to be any active effort except to make it easier for people to facilitate earning BitUSD.
For example if someone started a brick and mortar janitorial company where they go into commercial offices with their team of people and clean up then they should be encouraged to use BitUSD. Businesses or sole proprietors need a way to pay their employees or contracts in BitUSD/BitJYP/BitCNY or BitGLD.
Such people are better off getting paid in fiat wherever they can earn the most for their time, cashing their paycheck, and spending it with no fees of any kind.
If we have that attitude why would people who have jobs paying in fiat ever care about BitUSD or Bitcoin? They'll only care when the job they have pays in BitUSD or the new job they get is offering to pay in BitUSD. At that point they will investigate what BitUSD is and discover Bitshares. That is free marketing to anyone looking for work and also if we are getting paid in BitUSD then we show we trust the system enough ourselves.
Whether or not there is enough BitUSD flowing has a lot to do with how large the ecosystem of producers, service providers, merchants, but the problem is just telling merchants to accept BitUSD doesn't get the majority of the economy to accept it. What about their employees? What about the parent who could be paying their child's allowance in BitUSD? The ideal situation would be if we could convince businesses like Overstock to agree to pay it's employees using BitUSD because that would immediately get BitUSD to circulate.
So, I view BitUSD as the best place for savers to keep their savings. This option is open to everybody who is able to save, so this is where it makes the most sense to place the on-ramp.
We agree BitUSD is a great place for savers. The problem is you cannot spread BitUSD like it's some commodity that people buy if it's supposed to be the ultimate digital version of USD. It has to spread viral and the way to make that happen is as simple as making it easy to pay employees/workers in BitUSD.
This way if any of us start businesses in the future we can set them up to pay higher salaries to people who accept BitUSD instead of USD for example. If workers get paid more if they accept BitUSD then they'll accept it and at the same time it would be subtle marketing by business owners. I think just accepting Bitcoin and immediately converting it to fiat doesn't support Bitcoin except to spend it which is why it's not much of a currency and isn't spreading viral but if people actually went to work one day and their boss offered to pay them in Bitcoin the polls I've seen show that a significant number of people actually want to get paid in Bitcoin despite it's volatility.
http://www.coindesk.com/getting-paid-in-bitcoins/Rather than engineering a thousand ways for different skill sets to earn bitUSD,
lets engineer just one way for all those skill sets to save.
That's the most cost effective way to benefit everybody who can benefit.
Why not do both? The success of the dollar and reason everyone uses it (beside the fact that it is legal tender) is that you can get a job and it's always going to pay in dollars. This isn't going to change until Silicon Valley and the majority of the companies in the tech industry start paying in their own currencies, in Bitcoin or in BitUSD. If a tech entrepreneur offered their employees the option to get paid in BitUSD I'm sure some of them would give it a try and if they find out the peg holds that is when they'll go all in.
I think yes we should market it to savers. I absolutely support that idea. I just think if money isn't flowing in from savers today and savers aren't paying attention to Bitcoin either it could be that they don't understand what it is because they don't have experience getting paid in it. I think if barbershops and casinos for example started paying their employee in BitUSD then it would spread viral pretty quick and it's an advantage for BitUSD because Bitcoin cannot make a good currency due to volatility.
I don't think the Bitshares team has to do much to make this happen I just think we need to balance out the on-ramps with the off-ramps. The Bitshares team does not have to directly hire people or create fake jobs it just has to encourage BitWage and similar companies to integrate BitUSD into their product. Then the product should be marketed to business owners who want to be able to hire tech workers internationally without having to deal with the expense of converting between different currencies or having workers wait weeks to get paid when they could be paid in real time.
I've started using bitUSD as my savings account. The money is only a couple days away and it kicks the living tar out of my checking account (yield is so low on savings accounts it's just not worth the hassle).
Besides if I'm not putting my money where my mouth is than what are we talking about? Time to get on board for real.
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This is a good start. We need some businesses to actually put their savings in BitUSD. We also need businesses to start paying employees in BitUSD so that all the employees can do the same.
It would be nice if Overstock could be made to pay it's employees in BitUSD instead of Overstock coin. It would be even better if large tech companies agree to pay their employees in BitUSD.
Topic: Why are market-makers reluctant to make a tighter market? (Read 10208 times)
