First of all I wanted to say hi to everyone here and thank you for your insight. Second, a little disclaimer, as I and Jakub are good friends, together in business, and we talk/argue a lot about anything IT/crypto etc
That said, Jakub, I second your observations.
From a trader's perspective (closest to "my perspective" I think), bitUSD is nothing more than a BTS derivative, and although clever, it realistically has little to do with perceived safety of holding onto fiat USD. I might be stating the obvious, but lets not forget that bitUSD is not backed by U.S. military power, IRS, NSA or other shady actors working to preserve fiat USD integrity. These guys couldn’t care less about bitUSD, or worse, if stakes become high, could turn aggressive towards bit assets as means od bypassing their banking system.
So as long as BTS's rubber is still touching the road, bitUSD is actually tied to USD. However if things get shaky, and liquidity falls below a workable threshold, the "USD" part of bitUSD could as well be labelled "Donald Duck” or “princess Kenny", and it wouldn't make much difference - the dollar sign in bitUSD is a consensus thing and nothing more. I know its hardly revealing, but it brings us to what I understand is Jakub’s main point, that it's liqudity and resulting adoption that makes BitShares and bitUSD stand a chance in the market.
As of yet, the whole in-out process of dealing with Bitshares is quite geeky and complicated (we went through it a number of times), can be nerve wrecking (mailing chinese exchanges about evaporated BTC transfers using google translate
) and for now, serves little purpose, except gambling on BTS valuation by using its internal derivatives, otherwise untradable with the outside world.
So I second Jakub's question, about how hard would it be to establish a service exchanging USD to bitUSD (even at a slightly skewed rate, given additional BTS collateral risk)? And do you guys agree that it is the only way out of the ditch we seem to have got stuck in?