An issue of shared order book strategy just came to my head. In short, if we try to get small exchanges adopt BitShares first, we will probably harder to get the big ones.
Say if we have already 3 small exchanges happily operating on top of BitShares. One day, come in another big exchange, which is bigger than the combination of the 3 small ones, guess what will happen? I guess, either the small ones be unhappy that some customers may go to trade with the big one, or the big one will be unhappy that it have to accept tokens issued by the small ones and/or have to ask the small ones for approval when need to issue shared tokens / withdraw from shared collateral. Will this cooperation schema succeed?
Anyway, at least the small ones should be able to survive at very first. When we're getting bigger and bigger, I don't know if the small ones can still survive.
Thoughts?
Presumably the smaller exchanges have some strategy for getting folks to sign up from some other universe (national demographic, affinity group, marketing twist, etc.) Otherwise why start a new exchange? They surely aren't trying to compete on initial liquidity.
By getting there first, the smaller exchanges have a chance to be the referrer for people who also use the bigger exchange. So the late comers will not be able to claim those already-referred customers unless they change their account name.
Small exchange owners
want their users to use big exchange products and services because they get the network fees from users they signed up.
So having bigger exchanges come in is mostly upside. New exchanges still have their unique source of new users and now have the depth of the bigger exchange to offer them.
Meanwhile, the bigger exchange has access to the new customers from the smaller exchanges who want access to the big exchanges more mature products and services.
And anyone can compete to provide the best Exchange Backed Asset (EBA) as a reserve currency for trading against the union of everybody's assets. (Being big is one reason to trust an EBA, but bigness alone isn't decisive.) Putting up a better form of multi-sig controlled collateral and transparent 100% hackproof backing could be done by any sized exchange.
And since all EBAs are sold into existence, any size exchange can innovate in what to do with the assets they receive "on deposit" for their EBAs. So the best technology wins, not the deepest pockets.
Before long, some EBA will emerge as the perfect "checking" (not saving) currency that you hold and use for a short time exposure to a counterparty because of its perfect peg and blazing speed. (Savings are held in counterparty free MPAs).
Best of both worlds and you can move between them in 3 seconds.
Since nanocards can tap any bitshares account, you can spend any of these at any merchant immediately.
After that, exactly what do you need other cryptos for at all?
The BitShares Exchange Network, for the first time, lets Exchange Backed Assets serve as real merchant currencies not just poker chips limited to use on a stove pipe exchange.