Basic problem with land ownership and cryptotokens is that you still need some kind of authority that has power to cancel or force ownership changes. If you lose your private keys with few hundred BTS, that's not a very big problem. But if you lose your private keys that own the land where you live, that's a really really big problem.

Tim Swanson has a good paper on this, I suggest you read it first: Watermarked tokens and pseudonymity on public blockchains

But the GPS thing might be still useful... I started to think games like Ingress, where the objective is to conquer real places. With tokens tied to GPS coordinates it might be possible to build a backend for a really interesting game.

We have two levels of focus: The whole system and individual features.

System

With the system I mean the blockchain and how it is governed. We have the best blockchain, let's keep it that way and make it even better. This means that we can't just focus on individual features but to remember also look at the system as a whole. We need to nurture it as a whole system. Let's make it more antifragile.

From the blockchain governance point of view we are still lacking at least GUI for committee. Is something else critical still missing?

We need more committee members. Let's find more real members and drop all inits this year. Shouldn't be too hard to achieve?

Marketing has been bad. It would be a good start if the website and blog were updated regularly. No need to have flashy videos or other gimmicks, just tell what we are up to, so outsiders don't get the picture that project is dead.

When we communicate better the strengths of our blockchain and all the possibilities it offers, I hope we can attract more users, developers and investors. Now it's like this amazing blockchain is just our little secret and nobody else knows about it.

Fee Backed Assets are going to be really important part of funding new features. Let's make sure that everybody knows that FBA exists and how it can be used.

Individual features

If we want to get the blockchain profitable, we need to have profitable features. This should be the focus for everybody.

No need to get everybody to work on same feature at the same time, we can have lots of different projects. But when you are thinking about business idea or should you start developing something or should you invest, try to focus on short term profitability.

Hopefully FBA will bring lots of funding money on the table, but it's not going to fund everything. Something is still left for the workers. When thinking who should you vote to be funded, focus on if the feature will be useful for somebody in the short term. If it is useful, it will bring money in. Right now we need just some profitable examples for others to be inspired to do their own thing in the Bitshares blockchain.

Stealth is already coming, that's awesome, it has been wished by so many that it probably is useful. Point of sale system might get more store owners interested in Bitshares, which is very promising.

Recurring and scheduled payments are great for any kind of subscription based service. As far as I know, there is no competition in the cryptosphere. We should probably prioritize these and try to monopolize the market.

What comes to the exchange itself as a feature, I think it's kind of vague to say that we should focus on making it better. Better for what? An exchange can be used for many things. Of course the user experience etc. should be polished, but besides that there should be more clear objectives. Who wants to use it right now and bring profits for Bitshares? Let's go after those people and serve them first.

Features/businesses that I have mixed feelings:

Any kind of crowdfunding platform. Right now there is lots of competition, it might be hard to get any meaningful traction fast. But on the other hand, would it really be that hard to try something in small scale? Like forking Mike Hearn's Lighthouse to work with Bitshares?

Features/businesses that I would delay:

Prediction markets. Let's face it, Augur is already leading. They have lots of intelligent people and a big chunk of money. If we are seriously going to go for prediction markets, we need a good team and enough money backing the project. It's not only the technical side, but it has to be marketed as well. There has to be website/webwallet dedicated to it, with good UI and videos to explain how it all works. So far I haven't seen any serious plans to actually make it all happen with Bitshares. So don't hold your breath while waiting PM bringing profits for Bitshares. Not going to happen soon. Probably some day, but not in the near future where I'd like our focus to be now.

Features/businesses that I would ditch for now:

All market pegged assets for cryptocurrencies (including bitBTC). These are only useful for traders, and not even everyone of them will use these. Remember, Bitshares exchange is a derivatives exchange, so all these MPAs are derivatives, not the real thing. For normal cryptouser bitBTC is inferior to real BTC because they can't use it anywhere else than in our exchange. So it will bring only little value for small group of people. That's why I'd like to see more focus on trading with gateway-BTC (and other gateway-altcoins). On the other hand, fiat/gold/silver-MPAs are useful for all people, so we should emphasize those markets more.

Feel free to add your own analysis for different features, services, products and other business ideas.

Btw, one very low risk way of providing liquidity is CCEDK's bitEUR/EUR market. Not much have been happening there lately but if you put buy and sell orders maybe other people will get interested too.

Bytemaster offered his vision for the next year in a blog post. It wasn't exactly what I was hoping for, so this is my attempt to offer an alternative.

While I don't want to exactly oppose the idea of Mutual Aid Societies (MAS) that will be Bytemaster's focus on the 2016, I consider it to be highly risky. The biggest reason is that I predict that it will require an enormous amount of work until it can bring any meaningful profit for Bitshares. In my opinion, MAS project should be delayed for at least a year or two.

Secondly, I don't find the hippie style rhetoric very convincing. I don't oppose helping people and spreading peace and love to the world – but first and foremost we are trying to do business here.

So what is my vision?

Bitshares has always been to me a way to do a profitable financial revolution.

I don't propably need to warn you that the next financial crisis is lurking behind the curtains. You already know that, you've been waiting for it for a while now. It may or may not hit in the 2016, but we have to be ready for it.

Millions of people are going to be betrayed by their banks and governments. They will crave for better, fairer and more transparent banking and financial institutions that can replace the old and corrupted ones. But are governments going to make them? Of course not, they will just bail out the old ones.

I firmly believe that Bitshares can offer powerful financial tools for average person. We can be the platform where people can come to find help when their national money systems start to shake.

For all of you compassionate hippies, doesn't this sound good? Mutual Aid Society might give you brief relief when you suffer from economic crisis. But in the long run it's much more important to get the economy running again, this time preferably with more stable and secure foundation.

For all of you greedy bastards, doesn't this sound good? You'll have an unrestricted financial platform where you can make money by serving all these people looking for better services that will help them to keep on going with their lives. Make a new useful financial instrument, market it well and you can become filthy rich.

We all are both of those. We want to help other people, but we also want to get rich. Bitshares will enable you to do both at the same time.

This requires focusing on profitable services that common people can use. I can't stress enough that profitability should be the guiding principle here. If we are not making money, we are not offering a good service.

Why for a common people and not for the banks, you may ask? Because in reality banks are not interested in open blockchains that they cannot control themselves. It's useless to keep wishing that some day a big bank will come and move all their financials to our blockchain. Not going to happen.

That's why we have to think how we can create services and financial instruments that are useful for ordinary people.

We can help them to make business with price stable currencies, webwallets, point-of-sale systems, stealth transfers, etc. We can let anybody be a trader – no questions asked, just open the wallet and start trading. We can offer saving instruments for people who are afraid that their national currencies will fail, but aren't ready to invest in highly volatile cryptocurrencies.

Why Bitshares, then? What is our "unfair advantage"?

We have the best blockchain at the moment. Because of formalized governance model we can actually make all kind of changes quite painlessly. We can adapt and add new features. Just look at Bitcoin right now – they have been fighting about blocksize for months without any progress. With committee and workers we can implement any changes to the blockchain very easily. Fee Backed Assets will give more flexibility to the funding, no need to do everything as charity.

And we don't even have to fight over blocksize. Why? Because we have the fastest blockchain already. We are ready to welcome millions of users.

The Bitshares exchange will be the centerpiece of all this.

Let's embrace the fact that Bitshares exchange is a derivatives exchange rather than try to change it to be something else.

If we use the exchange only as a platform to trade other cryptocurrencies, I agree that it will not be very profitable (we have been discussing this on the forum lately). But the whole global derivatives market is HUGE. We should be going that direction rather than trying to capture the small niche market of altcoins.

Our exchange is very versatile platform that can be used to create and trade basically any kind of derivative. Let's focus on that and think how we can create markets that don't exist at the moment in the cryptosphere.

On a sidenote: I think that we should stop using the term "decentralized exchange" or DEX. Decentralization isn't really that good selling point for the exchange. Most people don't give a crap if the exchange is decentralized or not, they just want to know if they can make money by using it. That's why I suggest that we use just "Bitshares exchange" or BEX. Of course it still is decentralized and we can tell that to potential customers if they ask, but let's not emphasize it as the most important feature of the exchange. The point is all those hundreds of financial instruments that already exist or can be created easily.

So what should we do?

Anything that will bring paying customers. Focus on all projects that look promising. Our main objective should be getting out as many useful products and services as possible, as fast as possible. Many of them will fail, but with continuous trial and error I believe we can find something that will bring profits.

When evaluating business ideas, ask first how fast they can bring real users and real profits. I would rather see many small products that make money from the day one, rather than big ideas that might be very profitable someday far in the future.

Don't expect big banks or corporations getting interested in our products and services. Develop and market them for common people and small businesses.

Our market cap has been falling for too long. Time to get it up again.

I'm not a developer or a rich person who can fund all of this. This has been my attempt to inspire you all to build a better, profitable and useful blockchain for 2016.

Who is with me?

I'd like to see more posts on the blog. Nowadays nobody outsider knows what's happening in Bitshares because everything is in here on the forum. If somebody doesn't know what to search for, it's kinda hard to get onboard with development. Hangouts are nice of course, but I have found it difficult to get anybody outsider listen to an hour of talking.

Also the technology page on the website needs continuous updating to reflect what's been done and what's unfinished and when it might get finished.

I've been planning to get some referral income, but I want authoritative texts to link to. I can get people somewhat interested to Bitshares but I can't be the only source of information. It's awkward to say "there is not much info on this right now, try to find something on the forum or listen to this hangout where it was discussed a little bit..."

Let's take one example: Fee Backed Assets. Great tool to fund development and possibility for investors to make money.

Is it mentioned on the website? No, not anywhere.

Is there a mention on the blog that we have this kind of feature coming? No. Actually it hasn't been updated in a long time. There is not even a mention that 2.0 has come out.

If the website and official blog aren't updated, for most people it is sign that development is freezed and nothing is happening so they lose their interest.

We also have a larger, but somewhat related problem that the blocksize debate has made blatantly clear- governance. It seems nearly impossible to get the community to agree on anything outside of trying to increase adoption and the underlying value of the bitcoin token.

This is why I have very little faith in Bitcoin right now. It just doesn't have a governance mechanisms that could be used to solve blocksize or any other problem.

Bitcoin doesn't only need a governance model for the foundation, but even more it needs a governance model for the blockchain. A highly valuable blockchain cannot be governed like an anarchistic opensource project.

Bitshares has witnesses, committee and workers who all can be voted in or out. I consider it as a gold standard for the blockchain governance at the moment – I haven't seen anybody proposing anything better.

Communities that share a common philosophy are potential customers we can serve.  We have suggested two or three.

But how fast you can serve them? That's my biggest problem with MAS. I'm really skeptical that you could get thousands of paying members in 2016. You still have only a vision and (as far as I know) nothing concrete has been done.