Author Topic: Traders and investors are the most important userbase, not merchants.  (Read 6153 times)

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Offline gamey

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IMO the main problem seems to be that all market making is pegged to BTS which is pretty much a wildcard. So to be more than a mere gambler, one has to understand both markets.  That just seems to be asking too much. Infact it might be such that only the manipulators can win at this stage because of all this stuff. All I know though is that being a successful market maker is a hugely complicated task and thus it is hard to build markets for bitassets.  Perhaps if somehow everything is calculated in relation to each other and not vs BTS ?

The other problem in general is that everyone wants to pontificate about who we should target.  Everyone has an opinion, everyone is a great thinker. The problem is not enough doers.  BTS lacks both merchants and traders!  Only way to get traders is likely to have a fairly stable and predictable BTS.

Merchants?  Why bother with small market cap and API that is distinctly different ?  Oh bitAssets... Where can one see a simple 2-4 minute video that cuts to the core concept and why it is superior?  Anyone know?

Will there ever be a video explaining what makes bitAssets special vs IOUs?

BUT If you want to give it a shot, you just gotta pony up a bit'o'bts and give her a twirl.  Maybe you'll be voted in ! The best marketers are those who get the job !!  --- Remember that !

my 2 cents.
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Offline merivercap

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1.  Stock trading is a great market to enter eventually and exchanges are extremely important for liquidity, but I think the core value proposition of bitAssets currently is its usefulness for mainstream users for payments. 

2.  The core value proposition of Bitcoin/altcoins as a payment system is to save the 3% credit card fees for merchants.  $3 Trillion+ credit card volume is nearly $100 Billion/yr in fees.   The remittance market has $500+ billion dollars in volume and at an avg 10% rate you are talking about $50 Billion/yr in fees.   

3.  People go into crypto trading because they want to trade crypto and believe in the value proposition of Bitcoin and other altcoins.   I'm sure some people get addicted to trading and would want to trade other assets, but most of the volume in crypto-exchanges/gateways is between Bitcoin & local currencies.  Also bitAssets on exchanges may not be as compelling because you can already trade into local currency from Bitcoin on exchanges.   The main value proposition for using the bitShares exchange vs another exchange is because it's decentralized, not because it has pegged assets.

4. Right now Bitcoin exchanges charge .2 - .5% per trade. (Competition will drive that lower)  Regular mainstream online brokerage accounts charge .5%-1% on an average trade of $1-$2k.   Settlement will be much faster using crypto.  Smaller and microtrades are compelling.  Not that many people worry about counterparty risk for securities.  There are advantages, but how compelling is it for investors or traders to switch? The biggest downside is there won't be much liquidity compared to regular brokerage accounts. 
The market size of retail online brokerage trading is maybe $10Billion/yr?  (Interactive brokers & E-Trade make about $1B rev per year)

5. We technically have a Forex exchange using bitAssets already.  Is there a lot of Forex activity?  I don't think there is much of any.  Most people just trade between local currency and BTS.  (I think there will be a lot of Forex activity eventually, but only after there is a core value proposition to use BTS for payments in various local currencies)

6. I think stock trading will do well if integrated into BitShares over time, but right now we need to focus and I say focus on bitUSD (and bitCNY).  There's hardly much liquidity in BitGold & BitSilver now so if you add bitBRK or any other bitStock it will be even less liquid and the more you add the more you spread yourself thin.

7. If you want to promote the trading aspect, I would start by promoting Forex trading with bitAssets first to see how compelling that is to mainstream investors & traders. 


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Offline Volker

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In theory shouldn't it be possible to have autonomously issued assets? Assets issued by DACs themselves on the Bitshares blockchain in such a way that it cannot be a scam?

I think it's possible. Imagine for example you have a robo taxi which DAC which is owned by it's initial developers. They decide to build into the design the ability to "go public" by autonomously issuing assets which people could buy through Bitshares to either use as taxi service or to get profit sharing, discounts or whatever else.

I think in the context of the Internet of Things the UIA's make a lot more sense. I think in the current context UIA's should be collateralized and it's a mystery to me why Bytemaster changed his mind on that but my guess is it was to allow certain people in the community the opportunity to establish trust. That is fine but I wouldn't trust a UIA which isn't collateralized in some way or issued by algorithm (by a blockchain which no one fully controls). If you're giving money to a person it's just a gift or donation no matter how they try to tell you otherwise because code is law.

Volker on everything else I agree with you. I think Bitshares would be much more useful to people in western countries if it could be used to trade every kind of value, including stocks, CFDs, and even the most exotic stuff. We should have our own indexes we trade as well.

Listing a fully automated DAC as a UIA is interesting, but probably too complex to think about right now. A taxi company still has assets in real lifer that are owned by people, so a fully online DAC would probably be better. But there are always going to be trust issues with a UIA and, as a rule, half of them will turn out to be scams. BitShares just doesn't need that market. There's not much to be gained. If a company wants to raise money let them go somewhere else. We'll have enough problems just dealing with ordinary bugs and black swan events.

That is my Bitshares vision too, but the problem is most of the Bitshares Devs are from US and they are worry to implement something that may encounter govt prosecution.
Thus, Bitshares vision is limited and strict.

Just my few cents

Yes, but aren't bitUSD and bitCNY already CFDs? The Chinese government will not be happy with people freely trading bitCNY because the Chinese yuan is not supposed to be freely traded. The US does not want Americans trading any CFDs at all. The only reason why BitShares developers are not being prosecuted is because BitShares is small.

The developers need to decide now what countries they want to live in and what risks they are prepared to take. When Americans are trading pre-IPO Whatsapp or Snapchat shares with 3x leverage, the SEC definitely won't like it. But even if Americans are just trading very large amounts of BTS:bitUSD, they won't like it either. Probably the best way to protect yourselves as developers would be to move operations to Panama or Gibraltar (or a jurisdiction where this stuff is tolerated) and go all the way. Then make the official policy that Americans may not use some of the bitAssets. Redirect American IP addresses to a limited-feature client on the bitshares.org website.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2015, 03:36:36 am by Volker »

Offline joele

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That is my Bitshares vision too, but the problem is most of the Bitshares Devs are from US and they are worry to implement something that may encounter govt prosecution.
Thus, Bitshares vision is limited and strict.

Just my few cents

Offline luckybit

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In theory shouldn't it be possible to have autonomously issued assets? Assets issued by DACs themselves on the Bitshares blockchain in such a way that it cannot be a scam?

I think it's possible. Imagine for example you have a robo taxi which DAC which is owned by it's initial developers. They decide to build into the design the ability to "go public" by autonomously issuing assets which people could buy through Bitshares to either use as taxi service or to get profit sharing, discounts or whatever else.

I think in the context of the Internet of Things the UIA's make a lot more sense. I think in the current context UIA's should be collateralized and it's a mystery to me why Bytemaster changed his mind on that but my guess is it was to allow certain people in the community the opportunity to establish trust. That is fine but I wouldn't trust a UIA which isn't collateralized in some way or issued by algorithm (by a blockchain which no one fully controls). If you're giving money to a person it's just a gift or donation no matter how they try to tell you otherwise because code is law.

Volker on everything else I agree with you. I think Bitshares would be much more useful to people in western countries if it could be used to trade every kind of value, including stocks, CFDs, and even the most exotic stuff. We should have our own indexes we trade as well.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2015, 02:32:09 am by luckybit »
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Offline Volker

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I am glad to see others interested in the index approach.

Just some thoughts:

    While it could be run using the CFD model very safely, I think an Open Transactions or Hyper Ledger as a ledger for a reserve to  actual tokens is the most legit way to go.

    Save CFD's for SPY for DJI and NASDAQ.

    The key to keeping a reserve is limiting the redeemable time from entry of the assets as well as the value flow in to maintain calm markets.

I'd prefer a system of pure CFDs. And not just indices. Everything. Corn futures. Tesla. Everything. Why? It requires the most BTS and the least trust in issuers.

If people want to trade user-issued asset tokens representing BRK or AAPL on BitShares, they can do that in a separate tab. A Chinese group is working on that now with BRK. In any case, it doesn't do much for BitShares in terms of fees, and it exposes BitShares to a ton of negative press if asset issuers turn out to be scammers. How much will BitShares earn from fees when people are buying and selling shares of scamAAPL for 2 cents per transaction? How much will be lost when BitShares is mentioned as the platform where scamAAPL issuers ran away leaving scamAAPL holders with useless tokens? Quite frankly, I would prefer to see user issued assets deleted from BitShares entirely. Let people use NXT, Open Transactions, Counter-Party, or whatever if they want to issue assets. We can already see the disastrous history of user issued assets on Havelock. Almost every asset turns out to be a scam, including ASICMiner. I'm telling you, we don't want any of that crap on BitShares.


« Last Edit: April 13, 2015, 01:23:38 am by Volker »

Offline jcrubino

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I am glad to see others interested in the index approach.

Just some thoughts:

    While it could be run using the CFD model very safely, I think an Open Transactions or Hyper Ledger as a ledger for a reserve to  actual tokens is the most legit way to go.

    Save CFD's for SPY for DJI and NASDAQ.

    The key to keeping a reserve is limiting the redeemable time from entry of the assets as well as the value flow in to maintain calm markets.

Offline Volker

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Traders and investors are the real customers, not merchants and shoppers. Merchants and shoppers don't necessarily need to hold bitUSD for a long time to do transactions. Nor do people using bitAssets for remittance purposes. These people hold bitAssets for as short a time as possible. They just want to be in the BTS system to accomplish their transaction. Then they leave the system.

In contrast, traders and investors either:
a) make lots of short term transactions (requiring frequent paying of fees) OR
b) hold their assets for a long period of time (taking those BTS out of circulation and also generating a yield that must be paid in BTS)

But traders are not interested in BitShares. Why? Just compare Bitshares to non-Bitshares trading platforms. Foreseeably, the most popular market-pegged assets will be government currencies, cryptocurrencies, and stocks. In the non-BitShares world, the most popular platforms for trading those assets (Forex markets, cryptocurrency exchanges, and stock brokerages) all have one thing in common: there is borrowing. The less volatile the asset (e.g. government currencies), the more borrowing is allowed. (Because no one is going to trade bitEUR:bitUSD unless they can trade with 20x margin.) The margin levels of course should differ depending on the class of assets traded (e.g. bitEUR:bitUSD should allow for 20x margin but BTS:bitUSD should only allow for .5x margin.)

The ultimate vision for BitShares, which I think we all share is:
Any person anywhere in the world with 100 BTS can hold, trade, borrow, or lend every major asset that exists in the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with zero counter-party risk, virtually no minimum deposit or withdrawal size, low fees, and total privacy.

Trading is the activity that BitShares excels at. We want this to be like a vacation resort; people come into the BitShares system with their $2000 and Bitshares offers so many amazing services that they spend that money playing in the Bitshares system for years while they borrow, lend, daytrade, and invest to their heart's content. Mr. Larimer is a BTS bull so he shorts bitUSD, bitCNY and every other currency into existence in exchange for more BTS. Mr. Bernanke is a stock market bear and offers to short the entire US stock market against his bitUSD offering 0% interest. Ms. Zhang from China wants to buy Berkshire Hathaway but it's not available on the Chinese stock market. Ms. Zhang gets some bitUSD and buys bitBRK from Mr. Bernanke. Mr. Volker risks lending Ms. Zhang some additional bitUSD at 10% annually as long as she is only allowed 3x margin or less and will be automatically margin called if her balance goes too low. Mr. Gates knows something about what bitUSD:bitMSFT will do next week and no one's going to know if he trades it. And Mr. Ackman thinks that the USD:Hong Kong dollar peg will break and the Hong Kong dollar will be worth 30% more after the peg breaks. So Mr. Ackman borrows 50 million dollars worth of bitUSD at 10% per year and buys bitHKD.

And it goes on and on and on. Are you guys seeing what I'm seeing? BTS will eventually be like like forex, Bitfinex, NASDAQ, Nikkei, and Hang Seng all combined, only better.  A one stop shop for trading anything and everything. And then we just make sure there are no clocks on the BTS client and let people waste away in front of their computer screens making trade after trade in complete capitalist ecstasy.

When BitShares can do this, the CPC (cost per customer) that we are so worried about is going to drop to 0 because BTS will be more addictive than World of Warcraft.

tl;dr - Forget about merchants and customers. We need collateralized lending markets to attract forex, cryptocurrency, and equities traders and keep their money in the BitShares system.
 
EDIT: made my examples more accurate

So lets start with the indexes. Also why don't we have BitNXT, BitETH and so on? Bitshares encourages people to leave to go invest in those because you can't invest in them on the internal exchange. Over focus on BitUSD is holding Bitshares back.

How about some focus on stocks or the stock index? If the liquidity could be there and the price feed could be found.

Yes, we should have every currency, every cryptocurrency, every index, every commodity, and every stock in existence on BitShares. But first we need lending in place to attract the traders and the liquidity. Look at the trade volume difference between Finex/OKCoin and BTC-E. People need and want margin trading for most of my examples to work. We need collateralized lending in place, not just shorting and yield. No one will trade bitBTC:bitUSD on BitShares when they can get 3x margin on Finex. But IF they can trade bitUSD:bitBTC on BitShares with near 0% fee with margin trading paying interest (of which the BTS network takes a cut) BitShares will be very attractive.

I will volunteer  to provide liquidity shorting every asset in the world against BTS, including BTC, Google, and Berkshire Hathaway once collateralized lending is in place and BitShares becomes the trading paradise that it has the potential to become. Because when BTS becomes the one-stop trading paradise of the world, nothing will compare to its growth.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2015, 12:28:24 am by Volker »

Offline luckybit

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Traders and investors are the real customers, not merchants and shoppers. Merchants and shoppers don't necessarily need to hold bitUSD for a long time to do transactions. Nor do people using bitAssets for remittance purposes. These people hold bitAssets for as short a time as possible. They just want to be in the BTS system to accomplish their transaction. Then they leave the system.

In contrast, traders and investors either:
a) make lots of short term transactions (requiring frequent paying of fees) OR
b) hold their assets for a long period of time (taking those BTS out of circulation and also generating a yield that must be paid in BTS)

But traders are not interested in BitShares. Why? Just compare Bitshares to non-Bitshares trading platforms. Foreseeably, the most popular market-pegged assets will be government currencies, cryptocurrencies, and stocks. In the non-BitShares world, the most popular platforms for trading those assets (Forex markets, cryptocurrency exchanges, and stock brokerages) all have one thing in common: there is borrowing. The less volatile the asset (e.g. government currencies), the more borrowing is allowed. (Because no one is going to trade bitEUR:bitUSD unless they can trade with 20x margin.) The margin levels of course should differ depending on the class of assets traded (e.g. bitEUR:bitUSD should allow for 20x margin but BTS:bitUSD should only allow for .5x margin.)

The ultimate vision for BitShares, which I think we all share is:
Any person anywhere in the world with 100 BTS can hold, trade, borrow, or lend every major asset that exists in the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with zero counter-party risk, virtually no minimum deposit or withdrawal size, low fees, and total privacy.

Trading is the activity that BitShares excels at. We want this to be like a vacation resort; people come into the BitShares system with their $2000 and Bitshares offers so many amazing services that they spend that money playing in the Bitshares system for years while they borrow, lend, daytrade, and invest to their heart's content. Mr. Larimer is a BTS bull so he shorts bitUSD, bitCNY and every other currency into existence in exchange for more BTS. Mr. Bernanke is a stock market bear and offers to short the entire US stock market against his bitUSD offering 0% interest. Ms. Zhang from China wants to buy Berkshire Hathaway but it's not available on the Chinese stock market. Ms. Zhang gets some bitUSD and buys bitBRK from Mr. Bernanke. Mr. Volker risks lending Ms. Zhang some additional bitUSD at 10% annually as long as she is only allowed 3x margin or less and will be automatically margin called if her balance goes too low. Mr. Gates knows something about what bitUSD:bitMSFT will do next week and no one's going to know if he trades it. And Mr. Ackman thinks that the USD:Hong Kong dollar peg will break and the Hong Kong dollar will be worth 30% more after the peg breaks. So Mr. Ackman borrows 50 million dollars worth of bitUSD at 10% per year and buys bitHKD. And he will pay the bitUSD back after the peg breaks or he gives up.

And it goes on and on and on. Are you guys seeing what I'm seeing? BTS will eventually be like like forex, Bitfinex, NASDAQ, Nikkei, and Hang Seng all combined, only better.  A one stop shop for trading anything and everything. And then we just make sure there are no clocks on the BTS client and let people waste away in front of their computer screens making trade after trade in complete capitalist ecstasy.

When BitShares can do this, the CPC (cost per customer) that we are so worried about is going to drop to 0 because BTS will be more addictive than World of Warcraft.

tl;dr - Forget about merchants and customers. We need collateralized lending markets to attract forex, cryptocurrency, and equities traders and keep their money in the BitShares system.
 
EDIT: made my examples more accurate

So lets start with the indexes. Also why don't we have BitNXT, BitETH and so on? Bitshares encourages people to leave to go invest in those because you can't invest in them on the internal exchange. Over focus on BitUSD is holding Bitshares back.

How about some focus on stocks or the stock index? If the liquidity could be there and the price feed could be found.
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Offline Volker

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Traders and investors are the real customers, not merchants and shoppers. Merchants and shoppers don't necessarily need to hold bitUSD for a long time to do transactions. Nor do people using bitAssets for remittance purposes. These people hold bitAssets for as short a time as possible. They just want to be in the BTS system to accomplish their transaction. Then they leave the system.

In contrast, traders and investors either:
a) make lots of short term transactions (requiring frequent paying of fees) OR
b) hold their assets for a long period of time (taking those BTS out of circulation and also generating a yield that must be paid in BTS)

But traders are not interested in BitShares. Why? Just compare Bitshares to non-Bitshares trading platforms. Foreseeably, the most popular market-pegged assets will be government currencies, cryptocurrencies, and stocks. In the non-BitShares world, the most popular platforms for trading those assets (Forex markets, cryptocurrency exchanges, and stock brokerages) all have one thing in common: there is borrowing. The less volatile the asset (e.g. government currencies), the more borrowing is allowed. (Because no one is going to trade bitEUR:bitUSD unless they can trade with 20x margin.) The margin levels of course should differ depending on the class of assets traded (e.g. bitEUR:bitUSD should allow for 20x margin but BTS:bitUSD should only allow for .5x margin.)

The ultimate vision for BitShares, which I think we all share is:
Any person anywhere in the world with 100 BTS can hold, trade, borrow, or lend every major asset that exists in the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with zero counter-party risk, virtually no minimum deposit or withdrawal size, low fees, and total privacy.

Trading is the activity that BitShares excels at. We want this to be like a vacation resort; people come into the BitShares system with their $2000 and Bitshares offers so many amazing services that they spend that money playing in the Bitshares system for years while they borrow, lend, daytrade, and invest to their heart's content. Mr. Larimer is a BTS bull so he shorts bitUSD, bitCNY and every other currency into existence in exchange for more BTS. Mr. Bernanke is a stock market bear and offers to short the entire US stock market against his bitUSD offering 0% interest. Ms. Zhang from China wants to buy Berkshire Hathaway but it's not available on the Chinese stock market. Ms. Zhang gets some bitUSD and buys bitBRK from Mr. Bernanke. Mr. Volker risks lending Ms. Zhang some additional bitUSD at 10% annually as long as she is only allowed 3x margin or less and will be automatically margin called if her balance goes too low. Mr. Gates knows something about what bitUSD:bitMSFT will do next week and no one's going to know if he trades it. And Mr. Ackman thinks that the USD:Hong Kong dollar peg will break and the Hong Kong dollar will be worth 30% more after the peg breaks. So Mr. Ackman borrows 50 million dollars worth of bitUSD at 10% per year and buys bitHKD. And he will pay the bitUSD back after the peg breaks or he gives up.

And it goes on and on and on. Are you guys seeing what I'm seeing? BTS will eventually be like like forex, Bitfinex, NASDAQ, Nikkei, and Hang Seng all combined, only better.  A one stop shop for trading anything and everything. And then we just make sure there are no clocks on the BTS client and let people waste away in front of their computer screens making trade after trade in complete capitalist ecstasy burning up fees while simultaneously soaking up BTS supply (into bitAssets).

When BitShares can do this, the CPC (cost per customer) that we are so worried about is going to drop to 0 because BTS will be more addictive than World of Warcraft.

tl;dr - Forget about merchants and customers. We need collateralized lending markets to attract forex, cryptocurrency, and equities traders and keep their money in the BitShares system.
 
EDIT: made my examples more accurate
« Last Edit: April 13, 2015, 12:12:54 am by Volker »