The original dream of BTS consisted of making a profitable DAC, thus increasing the value of the BTS token.
There is a stupid easy way to do so, and it has been under our nose the whole time. This will be a controversial proposal, but I have no doubt it will send Bitshares to the moon, and pull it out of the downward spiral it is on.
The proposal is simple. Delegates should get paid nothing... zilch, nada. It should be a volunteer-based, non-profit venture. With no inflation, each token holders' equity will increase proportionally with every token that is burned.
I posit that there are enough stakeholders with enough skin in the game to run delegate nodes for free. Stakeholders of which that are incentivezed enough due to their holdings of BTS tokens to not try anything stupid, and of course they could be voted out quickly if they did.
Only one small tweak would need to be made to the codebase (other than reducing delegate pay to zero, which I think can be done by comittee.) Eventually, all coins would get burned in fees, leaving no BTS tokens in existence. A stock split every so often would be needed to issue tokens proportionally to all stakeholders so this never happens.
A profitable DAC = An appreciating BTS token = Happy investors = More investors entering the ecosystem = Trickle down effect to liquidity in BTS' DEX
Ez game