Also seeing this statement saying there might be up to 8% pa dilution of bts. Assuming this is incorrect, but can't find the authoritative statement about this
Bitshares now allows voters to elect paid delegates. Paid delegates get Bitshares with each block that they sign, up to a max of 50 BTS (voters must elect them at that pay rate for this to happen). This results in inflaiton of BTS.
This means that bitshares is now self funding. It can pay for its continued development, for marketing, and to recruit more developers, once the original I3 funds are gone. No matter what happens, bitshares can continue on and support itself.
The maximum possible inflation rate is 6.3% for next year. (50 BTS a block, for every block for a year is 157,680,000 BTS a year. 157,680,000 / 2.5 billion is 6.3% inflation).
However, that is the MAXMIUM. In order for that to occur, there must be 101 paid delegates all receiving max pay rate.
Thats not going to happen. What is actually going to happen is that voters are only actually going to vote for paid delegates for the dev team, marketing delegate, and a few others who are showing that they are adding value to bitshares. So in reality, with maybe 20 or so paid delegates, inflation will be about 1-2% a year.
In the case that bitshares were to actually hire 101 paid delegates, and have 6.3% inflation, what would that mean? It would mean we actually have 101 people working on coding and marketing of bitshares, that voters think are providing positive value. For example, maybe we hire all the devs in the crypto space, because we can actually pay them! IF that happened, and we had 6.3% dilution, it would probably be a good thing, because bitshares would grow a TON if that happened.
Once the market cap increases a lot, voters will not want to vote for full pay delegates any more, because it will be too much money. One full pay delegate would actually be able ot hire a whole team of devs, or fund a big marketing campaign, if the bitshares share price went up significantly.
At that point, we could expect dilution would be even less (or growth would be even greater!)
To summarize:
Max possible inflation is 6.3%
All of the inflation results in ACTUAL VALUE being created. It goes to developers and marketers who GROW bitshares.
Inflation is less than in bitcoin. Bitcoin uses "proof of waste", simply burning hundreds of millions of dollars a year to secure the network.
Bitshares uses REAL proof of work! Work for bitshares, and you get paid! This money results in real value being created, as opposed to bitcoin's mining which simply demonstrates that miners have wasted money.
This change is an extreme positive long term for bitshares, imo. And yet it has resulted in a massive selloff, because people dont understand yet, and they see dilution as strictly a negative thing, not seeing the potential. This is why now is an excellent time to be buying bitshares.