Assuming that the BBF applied for that hackathon, what reasons would there be for Binance to
not fork the BitShares Code and instead use the existing blockchain?
* forking is not trivial
* skilled and experienced (!) developers are hard to find
* we have an existing ecosystem (community, users) that can't be forked so easily
* BTS already has value, development of codebase basically pays for itself
IMO we have much to gain and little to lose from applying.
I completely agree with you.
I would add / explicit some points:
- Bootstrapping a truly decentralized / resilient community is hard and expensive (marketing to find witnesses, organize the governance, build trust...)
- Building a decentralized exchange when you are a centralized company has no meaning (even more if you are the unique gateway). They will waste a lot of time and effort to convince others to join. If decentralization really matters to them, it is smarter to join Bitshares platform.
- They will benefit of our worldwide decentralized infrastructure for free.
- They get closed source third party applications like cryptofresh, bts.ai, ... for free
- They will benefit of existing and future liquidity like bitspark, reserve fund, and other gateway bring
- They will be able to list to existing smart assets (bitXXX, hero, Hertz, bittwenty/bittwentix, nasdaq,...) and attract their volume for free
- They will benefit directly from the Bitshares (DAC/Financial Platform) marketing effort, and indirectly from other business marketing.
- Development effort could become a revenue instead of a cost! (= worker proposal).
- The development effort and cost is mutualized with all the others participants.
- Building open source / decentralized software is really different than doing a closed source centralized software, you need the (really rare) appropriate skills and experience on open source development, blockchain/event based systems and decentralization.
- By applying Bitshares community show their will to accept them in the community. It is not a wise move to fork a project that share the same goal as you and propose collabration, you fork because you have different ideas.
- They should worry about getting more time to focus on AML / KYC / tax compliance, not rebuilding what already exists.
- They already have the bridge between the dex and their cex
I think we should show them how they could setup their BNB token with the example of cyrptobridge or obits.
It can also be the opportunity to write an open source public example on how to build a deposit/withdraw gateway.
Imho getting a big influence is currently not so costly. You don't want to own too much anyway (this will kill the decentralized aspect). 30% should be the high cap. If you are active and big, many poeple will follow you (as a proxy, or vote in your direction). So 200M BTS should be enough. You should be able to get them with 30M-40M dollars max in current market conditions, which is nothing for a serious company.
I think blockchain industry is currently too fragmented, the future will be made of merges and acquisitions not forks. It is just a matter of time to see massive takeover bids on Bitshares.
I think we should apply for the contest. Bitshares as a financial platform have been made exaclty for that. If we don't win we should learn why and fix the issue.
Maybe it worth a community vote to see if everyone agree we should make some efforts on that direction, as this could have a major impact for the users, but also for existing business. I'm very curius to know the position of existing gateways on the topic...
Do we know why they state "Currently, decentralized exchanges are inefficient and difficult to operate for the average user."? What is their level of knowledge on Bitshares? I hope they did some research before starting this kind of project...