Team Bitshares is going to have some stiff competition.
How many years away is this from completion?
Personally, I've never liked the idea of sidechains. Maybe I simply don't understand why the bitcoin community won't one day decide, "No sidechains for you!".
To anyone : Is that a real possibility or not? How do you know? Did you predict Gavin Andresen would decide to fork bitcoin without developer consensus? If not, how can I trust your opinion?
Reading over the reddit thread of this blockstream announcement it seems that bitcoin still has the scalability problem of ~7tx/s
Petertodd + others commented that sidechains do not solve the scalability problem, anyway.
From how I understand sidechains to work, there are 'gateways' that are trusted to facilitate trade between side chains.
I'm not convinced this system can match up to the performance of BitShares, or come close to 100,000 transactions per second for quite some time.
Still there are plenty of calls of the death of altcoins!