In the US Scottrade is seen as a bargain basement trading firm at $7 per trade!! Seriously. Other houses charge $25+ USD PER TRADE!!. Let's get some perspective on what the market will bear.
I'm kind of shocked most of you people don't seem to understand what Bitshares actually is. Even Bytemaster doesn't seem to acknowledge it. Bitshares is a decentralized bucket shop (world first?). You are not trading real stocks or assets. You can't compare anything about it to real stock markets. It's a gambling market where you're betting against the somewhat decentralized but non-autonomous house that operates price feeds. You don't own real assets. You're not investing in real assets. All you're doing is gambling.
It's virtualy impossible for there to be a situation where there's X dollars invested in Y stock and the same amount of money or higher invested in the Bitshares prediction market of said stock because the prediction market offers you no real legal standing or ownership. You can't compare real stock markets to this because the value proposition of the real stock market is always higher. I'm not saying the market has no value, it's just nothing close to the real stock market.
As for the referral system, I stand by my statement that the referral system is currently holding the entire network hostage. 5 to 20 is a 400% increase. No real referral system places such a huge burden on it's base system. Going from 5 to 7 or 5 to 8 I could stomach, but the current system, no way, not ever.
There also needs to be more emphasis on the BTS native currency as an intstrument of value and trade settlement instead of market pegged or user issued assets, and the referral system's huge burden is an impediment to that. Gold isn't really a valid monetary instrument for the modern world, cryptocurrency is, so why would people do backflips over BitGold or a BitUSD? The cryptocurrency is the actual thing with a future. My statement on gold here:
I don't think precious metals are a solution in the modern world in the first place. They'll only be useful in a hard collapse where/if we go back to the dark ages. Precious metals have low granularity and high friction in use. They were useful in an age of barter where you show up at a market and want a chicken and the vendor estimates which coin in your pocket the chicken is most closely valued to. He then has to toss in a loaf of bread or something else until you both agree on value.
Most business owners don't run their own floor nowadays and nobody is even allowed to barter. Let's not forget gold backed currency is how fractional reserve was created in the first place. In other words, it's almost useless because the market demands higher granularity and lower friction.Yes, it's ok for short term hedging, but in the long run, it's mostly useless. Native cyrptocurrency is the long run asset/currency, not pegged assets. The pegged assets are more of a short term bandaid for acceptance or for stabalizing against a more succesful crypto like BTC.