What if we peg crypto currencies instead? Promoting other cryptos? Keep an open mind for a moment...
The primary community likely to be first movers in the space we are currently operating in are crypto-enthusiasts. I think it might pay better initially to focus on what these people love, rather than trying to attract more distant users we do not understand well into the space through BitUSD. This will happen in time, but expand from the initial community first by giving them what they demand. I learnt this concept from the first video at this thread...
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10178.0.
So once we get the current pegged assets, including BitBTC, working successfully with a tight peg and good liquidity for sellers, I'm wondering if pegged cryptos is a more fruitful path in the short term, appealing to the community right on our doorstep, instead of trying to convince a community of gold-enthusiasts, stock-traders, currency traders, merchants etc that they should be doing something very different to what they are used to.
If we offered pegged crypto-currencies to what is currently almost a $6bn market cap industry, the benefits offered to the crypto community are:
1) they can trade major crypto-currencies (any we choose to peg) in the same way as they do on other exchanges
2) there is no counterparty risk (no GOX moment)
3) they only have to deal with a single wallet to trade all of their cryptos
4) with the 30 day short expiry rule, there may also be more liquidity available than on other exchanges (as long as shorts are willing to issue)
This is a combination of features the crypto community has been absolutely clamouring for since the Gox insolvency if only they could get it. One might argue that adding a broad set of cryptos could dilute interest in (proposed) BTS. But on the contrary, it might introduce them to BTS, and when they see BTS outperforming their other cryptos, that will be a positive. Also no SEC risks...
I'm not a technical expert in this field, so I might be missing a lot of problems. But some possible difficulties I've thought of so far:
- how do you get a reasonable price feed if the BTS exchange draws interest and liquidity away from other exchanges
- how do you encourage shorts to offer the supply (they are the issuers) because they take on risk of volatile 'borrowing' sources that they may not find desirable in supporting each market.
Has this been proposed before? Thoughts?