Author Topic: What can I do with my bitUSD?  (Read 4691 times)

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Offline MartinZ

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What about this one?
http://tradebts.com/

Is it a working gateway between bitCNY and fiat CNY?
(it's a Chinese version only so I cannot verify myself)

so it seems:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13457.0

jakub

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What about this one?
http://tradebts.com/

Is it a working gateway between bitCNY and fiat CNY?
(it's a Chinese version only so I cannot verify myself)

Offline Gentso1

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Convert it to bitsilver or bitgold and redeem it for REAL gold and or silver http://cryptosmith.info/index.php

Offline onceuponatime

Because of sites like  www.metaexchange.info   blocktrades.us  and shapeshift.io

what you can do with bitUSD is spend it anywhere that you can spend bitcoin.

AND, until you are ready to spend, you can a return on your holdings.

jakub

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What can't you do with bitusd?
It's quite simple: I cannot sell and buy things at market prices.

1. If I am a consumer and earn my income in fiat USD I would have to spend substantially more than USD 100.00 to purchase something priced at bitUSD 100.00.
2. If I am a merchant and pay my bills in fiat USD I would have to charge my customers substantially more than bitUSD 100.00 to sell something worth USD 100.00 (or alternatively I would have to give up some of my profits to keep up with the market prices)

If we had a fiat gateway offering very small spreads none of the above would be true and the bitUSD commerce would flourish.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2015, 11:13:18 am by jakub »

jakub

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From a trader's perspective (closest to "my perspective" I think), bitUSD is nothing more than a BTS derivative, and although clever, it realistically has little to do with perceived safety of holding onto fiat USD. I might be stating the obvious, but lets not forget that bitUSD is not backed by U.S. military power, IRS, NSA or other shady actors working to preserve fiat USD integrity. These guys couldn’t care less about bitUSD, or worse, if stakes become high, could turn aggressive towards bit assets as means od bypassing their banking system.

So as long as BTS's rubber is still touching the road, bitUSD is actually tied to USD. However if things get shaky, and liquidity falls below a workable threshold, the "USD" part of bitUSD could as well be labelled "Donald Duck” or “princess Kenny", and it wouldn't make much difference - the dollar sign in bitUSD is a consensus thing and nothing more. I know its hardly revealing, but it brings us to what I understand is Jakub’s main point, that it's liqudity and resulting adoption that makes BitShares and bitUSD stand a chance in the market.
As we are indeed friends and business partners, MartinZ and me differ in one respect: I would never say "the dollar sign in bitUSD is a consensus thing and nothing more". For me the collateral mechanism (combined with extremely low probability of total wipe-off of BitShares value) is a solid foundation which makes me perceive bitUSD on almost equal footing as fiat USD in terms of investment. I think bitUSD not being backed by U.S. government does not matter in this case.

The main difference for me is that for fiat USD I can buy things and for bitUSD I cannot. The existence of a fiat gateway would eliminate this deficiency and expose one big advantage of bitUSD: in 10 seconds I can transfer it anywhere in the world.  And this would be a huge advantage and the whole point of the BitShares concept.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2015, 11:08:47 am by jakub »

jakub

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Have you checked this out?

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=12794.msg195422#msg195422

Good news guys!

We have an agreement with the bank and now we can move forward with the development.

Our goals:
 - Enable bitUSD deposits
 - Have On/Off ramp with Bitcoin and supported cryptocurrencies
 - Have On/Off ramp with EUR
 
Then 50% funds will be used to give a signup bonus (10 bitUSD) for all new customers who make their first bitUSD or bitcoin purchase.

As soon as our delegate will be approved, we will dedicate a full time developer to it.

This is the news I was hoping for. Thank you, onceuponatime, for bringing it up.
I try to follow the forum regularly but I must have missed it. This makes me much more bullish about BitShares future.

Offline bitmeat

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With a real USD you can at least wipe your ass. LOL

Offline luckybit

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You can use bitUSD anywhere bitcoin is accepted with shapeshift, blocktrade.us, metaexchange.
The other day the rate on circle was $268, and on blocktrade.us it was also $268, so the spread doesn't seem to be that much of an issue.

What can't you do with bitusd?

Spending and obtaining BitUSD are still much too difficult. Only delegates and developers seem to have a reliable way of earning BitUSD. Only hardcore geeks know how to speculate or do anything with BitUSD.

So you have to spread BitUSD to miners at first. At least this way it gets into enough people's possession to become useful over time. The next thing you need to do is start accepting BitUSD.

I think getting paid in BitUSD is much better than getting paid in Bitcoin because you can be sure you'll keep your BitUSD. Bitcoin you have to cash out immediately or you could lose a lot of your value so from a businessman perspective holding BitUSD is far better.

So market BitUSD to merchants, make it easier to earn, maybe get artists to accept BitUSD as well and let Bitshares Music BitUSD exchange for Bitshares BitUSD.

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Offline luckybit

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If we look at BitShares as a company we can all agree that our end product is bitUSD (and other bit-assets). The product looks good as it does what it says on the tin: thanks to the embedded collateral it is secure and thanks to the market peg mechanism it closely tracks the value of USD. That's really cool but what I can do with it?

Can I buy anything with it? No, because nobody is selling anything for it.
Can I sell anything for it? Not really, because to pay my bills I would have to be able to convert bitUSD into fiat USD and at this stage it is both expensive and complicated (bitUSD -> BTC -> USD).

So it looks like we have designed and built a superior Tesla car but all we can do with it is keep it in garage because there is no infrastructure to charge the batteries once we try to use the car.

Imagine an internet service offering this:
A. Using a bank transfer or credit card I wire them USD 100.00 and they instantly send bitUSD 100.00 to my BitShares wallet (minus a small fee).
B. From my BitShares wallet I send them bitUSD 100.00 and they instantly transfer USD 100.00 to my bank account (minus a small fee).

I have these questions:
1. Would you agree that without the existence of such service bit-assets are doomed to be quite useless?
2. How difficult would it be to build such a service in each country? What are the main obstacles that are preventing this from happening?

The only thing BitAssets need to do is act as a good store of value. But in order to do that people have to use the decentralized exchange to speculate on the stored value. As a design it could work but it requires lots of volume and speculating.

I don't think BitUSD matters all that much particularly. It's just a stablecoin or stable value storage. Many of us would rather use Gold but if enough people accept BitUSD then it can be useful. Also for something like micropayments I think BitUSD is ideal and far better than Bitcoin could ever be.

Minebitshares is a good test case. The payout is in BitUSD and it's far more useful to be paid in BitUSD from an accounting perspective, a tax perspective, etc.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2015, 01:02:32 am by luckybit »
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Offline lil_jay890

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First of all I wanted to say hi to everyone here and thank you for your insight. Second, a little disclaimer, as I and Jakub are good friends, together in business, and we talk/argue a lot about anything IT/crypto etc ;)

That said, Jakub, I second your observations.

From a trader's perspective (closest to "my perspective" I think), bitUSD is nothing more than a BTS derivative, and although clever, it realistically has little to do with perceived safety of holding onto fiat USD. I might be stating the obvious, but lets not forget that bitUSD is not backed by U.S. military power, IRS, NSA or other shady actors working to preserve fiat USD integrity. These guys couldn’t care less about bitUSD, or worse, if stakes become high, could turn aggressive towards bit assets as means od bypassing their banking system.

So as long as BTS's rubber is still touching the road, bitUSD is actually tied to USD. However if things get shaky, and liquidity falls below a workable threshold, the "USD" part of bitUSD could as well be labelled "Donald Duck” or “princess Kenny", and it wouldn't make much difference - the dollar sign in bitUSD is a consensus thing and nothing more. I know its hardly revealing, but it brings us to what I understand is Jakub’s main point, that it's liqudity and resulting adoption that makes BitShares and bitUSD stand a chance in the market.

As of yet, the whole in-out process of dealing with Bitshares is quite geeky and complicated (we went through it a number of times), can be nerve wrecking (mailing chinese exchanges about evaporated BTC transfers using google translate  :o ) and for now, serves little purpose, except gambling on BTS valuation by using its internal derivatives, otherwise untradable with the outside world.

So I second Jakub's question, about how hard would it be to establish a service exchanging USD to bitUSD (even at a slightly skewed rate, given additional BTS collateral risk)? And do you guys agree that it is the only way out of the ditch we seem to have got stuck in?

BitUSD is quoted using feeds provided by delegates using data from exchanges and there is a band that bitUSD can be traded in relation to that price feed... It's far from the Donald Duck or Princess Kenny Analogy.  BitUSD is functioning very well in this super low liquidity environment already and the peg has worked even as bts has fluctuated wildly.

And to Jakub's point earlier about fiat gateways.  I believe there is a bounty being offered by the dev team for anyone who creates a gateway.  It is extremely expensive and could cost into the millions of dollars to build an on/off ramp and obtain a money transmitters license.  Forex brokers are regulated very heavily in the US as can be seen by the total of 9 that are allowed to operate.  Other countries are different, but many of the big money countries have laws similar to the US.  Look at how much VC funding some of the bitcoin exchanges have needed to attempt to get off the ground... millions.

Offline chewchew

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You can use bitUSD anywhere bitcoin is accepted with shapeshift, blocktrade.us, metaexchange.
The other day the rate on circle was $268, and on blocktrade.us it was also $268, so the spread doesn't seem to be that much of an issue.

What can't you do with bitusd?

Offline onceuponatime

Have you checked this out?

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=12794.msg195422#msg195422

Good news guys!

We have an agreement with the bank and now we can move forward with the development.

Our goals:
 - Enable bitUSD deposits
 - Have On/Off ramp with Bitcoin and supported cryptocurrencies
 - Have On/Off ramp with EUR
 
Then 50% funds will be used to give a signup bonus (10 bitUSD) for all new customers who make their first bitUSD or bitcoin purchase.

As soon as our delegate will be approved, we will dedicate a full time developer to it.

Offline MartinZ

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First of all I wanted to say hi to everyone here and thank you for your insight. Second, a little disclaimer, as I and Jakub are good friends, together in business, and we talk/argue a lot about anything IT/crypto etc ;)

That said, Jakub, I second your observations.

From a trader's perspective (closest to "my perspective" I think), bitUSD is nothing more than a BTS derivative, and although clever, it realistically has little to do with perceived safety of holding onto fiat USD. I might be stating the obvious, but lets not forget that bitUSD is not backed by U.S. military power, IRS, NSA or other shady actors working to preserve fiat USD integrity. These guys couldn’t care less about bitUSD, or worse, if stakes become high, could turn aggressive towards bit assets as means od bypassing their banking system.

So as long as BTS's rubber is still touching the road, bitUSD is actually tied to USD. However if things get shaky, and liquidity falls below a workable threshold, the "USD" part of bitUSD could as well be labelled "Donald Duck” or “princess Kenny", and it wouldn't make much difference - the dollar sign in bitUSD is a consensus thing and nothing more. I know its hardly revealing, but it brings us to what I understand is Jakub’s main point, that it's liqudity and resulting adoption that makes BitShares and bitUSD stand a chance in the market.

As of yet, the whole in-out process of dealing with Bitshares is quite geeky and complicated (we went through it a number of times), can be nerve wrecking (mailing chinese exchanges about evaporated BTC transfers using google translate  :o ) and for now, serves little purpose, except gambling on BTS valuation by using its internal derivatives, otherwise untradable with the outside world.

So I second Jakub's question, about how hard would it be to establish a service exchanging USD to bitUSD (even at a slightly skewed rate, given additional BTS collateral risk)? And do you guys agree that it is the only way out of the ditch we seem to have got stuck in?

Offline luckybit

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If we look at BitShares as a company we can all agree that our end product is bitUSD (and other bit-assets). The product looks good as it does what it says on the tin: thanks to the embedded collateral it is secure and thanks to the market peg mechanism it closely tracks the value of USD. That's really cool but what I can do with it?

Can I buy anything with it? No, because nobody is selling anything for it.
Can I sell anything for it? Not really, because to pay my bills I would have to be able to convert bitUSD into fiat USD and at this stage it is both expensive and complicated (bitUSD -> BTC -> USD).

So it looks like we have designed and built a superior Tesla car but all we can do with it is keep it in garage because there is no infrastructure to charge the batteries once we try to use the car.

Imagine an internet service offering this:
A. Using a bank transfer or credit card I wire them USD 100.00 and they instantly send bitUSD 100.00 to my BitShares wallet (minus a small fee).
B. From my BitShares wallet I send them bitUSD 100.00 and they instantly transfer USD 100.00 to my bank account (minus a small fee).

I have these questions:
1. Would you agree that without the existence of such service bit-assets are doomed to be quite useless?
2. How difficult would it be to build such a service in each country? What are the main obstacles that are preventing this from happening?

Hold it.

The idea was it was supposed to be 5% interest but something went wrong with that plan.

If interest were higher I think more people would hold BitUSD.
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