Ive been thinking about this lately and I am beginning to conclude that we may be taking on Bitcoin  too directly and this may not be the best short-term marketing strategy  (more on this in a coming post).  With that said, I think maybe Bitshares should be positioned as Bitcoins, equity/asset sibling.  ....."Bitshares does for Equities what Bitcoin does for currency".   Using Bitcoins name recognition to boost the attention to Bitshares.  Going with this tactic, we would avoid any direct comparisons with Bitcoin that puts Bitcoin in a negative light (this we will leave for a later growth phase ).  The main hook here is that Bitshares is Bitcoin for equitys.... This is 90% of Bitshares' features anyway.  The unique benefit here is that currently in the market these features are not being provided by any significant project.  unlike currency which is captured by the 10 ton behemoth that is Bitcoin. 

So this is were Bitshares can quickly become recognized as a top provider without having to face much phycological resistance from the market.  We will just forgo (for now) any talk about the other 10% capability of Bitshares (bitUSD) as a superior currency.  True this will be more of a challenge for us as a community because most people understand the "currency" crypto play well enough, but few can relate to how crypto can improve asset trading and equities.  So we start at the top and draw parallels all the way down: the benefit the Bitcoin provide (currency)   the benefit that Bitshares provide (equity)......... speed, security, privacy, potential market, how world finance can improved, how the system cuts out the middle man and is more fair......on and on.   

Quote from: Empirical1.1 on September 26, 2014, 02:12:42 pm

GoCoin processes Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin and GoCoin is part of PayPal announcement.
So PayPal announcement is good for Dogecoin was my understanding

I have similar thoughts:
Doge merged mine with litecoin a few weeks back which gave it a renewed life to a ailing network.

Its appears to be rising now from the Paypal deal with Gocoin which supports acceptance for Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin.  Its possible, the price impact has been greater on dogecoin because it has uplifted the coin as a more "serious" form of payment, whereas Bitcoin and Litecoin always had that front face.

    Right now 4 among the 5 top five competitors on CoinMarketCap, have had very positive "mainstreaming" news come out in the past week.   Bitcoin, Litecoin and Doge will be (in some way) accepted by Paypal.   Ripple has sealed agreements with U.S. banks for the first time.   Out of the top five, only Bitshares has not had news.  Granted we are much younger than any of these players and I'm sure some good news will come in good time.......... (Just thinking out loud, it would be great if we could seal the Overstock deal!  ) 

If you saw what brian+cass+marketing bros were up to I think you'd be ok with waiting another month or so before a "big" push. I hate vague promises of "something big is coming", but actually...

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

We will quickly start loosing our launch benefit window for marketing by the end of Sept IMO.  I hope whatever they have cooking is VERY substantial.  Enough to overcome this lost opportunity.   

Quote from: Ander on September 24, 2014, 06:55:20 pm

I'm now in the process of converting 1/3 of my bitcoins to bitshares.  (Not ready to go all in because bitcoin is still so much larger and thus less risky. If bitshares is indeed better, then my holding of it will grow in time to surpass my bitcoin holdings).

I'm doing a similar thing, but bitshares can be superior and still fail, for example if enough momentum isn't captured via lots of marketing.  There's a lot to do in the next 6 months!

 

Quote from: biophil on September 23, 2014, 02:50:39 pm

It's now clear that NuBits is the first true competitor to BitUSD. The race will be decided by these three factors, in no particular order
1. Community
2. Interest paid on the asset
3. Price Stability

4. Marketing

 

More press about the problems facing Bitcoin mining.
 
http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/falling-bitcoin-price-is-the-perfect-storm-for-centralization-of-bitcoin-mining/

Great work on the Video!   Excellent balanced approach.

Users are frustrated by the lack of communication surrounding the new v0.4.16 shorting mechanics:

Quote from: Gentso1 on September 21, 2014, 11:59:59 pm

yea it would be nice to know things like this BEFORE or at least once they are implemented......idk maybe under some kind changes to this version or something like that.

I realize developer time is at a premium, but there should be some official announcement channel to tell us about the changes in upcoming Mandatory Upgrades [1], such as the new shorting mechanics.

I am aware of two existing channels for this purpose, but one of them does not mention short issues at all [2], and the other merely says "Revised consensus market engine shorting mechanics" [3].

If we want traders and investors to take our markets seriously and make investments in our ecosystem, we need to provide a channel to tell them about major changes like this one.  Without requiring them to wade through many pages of irrelevant forum discussion, of which only a small handful of posts will contain accurate, up-to-date information.

IMHO such a channel should have an RSS feed and anyone should be able to submit improvements to the descriptions, but the description should be approved by the developers for accuracy, brevity and clarity before it can be posted.  I like the idea of using a Github repo with version-controlled Markdown files and accepting pull requests.  But a wiki, forum thread, or documentation file(s) in the main BitShares repo would also be reasonable choices.

My post in the pre-change discussion [4] or the help that I gave to the above frustrated user [5] contains the sort of description of the mechanics I'm thinking about.  But before the project adopts content from either of those posts as an official or semi-official description of how the system works, I would want the description to be reviewed for accuracy by bytemaster, vikram or another developer who's actually written or reviewed the patches which implement the new mechanics.

[1] The term "Mandatory Upgrade" is preferred to "Hardfork" for marketing reasons.

[2] https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=7067.30

[3] https://github.com/dacsunlimited/bitsharesx/releases

[4] https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9029.msg117125#msg117125

[5] https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9159.msg118819#msg118819