Very interesting
In terms of cost breakdown, I got this from a Forbes article...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/arjanschutte/2015/01/21/insurance-7-trillion-goliath/I think effective management & 'good enough' risk profiling and validation for a global market would be incredibly hard for a decentralised blockchain to achieve. Look at how hard it is for BTS shareholders to add value and manage the blockchain, or how inefficiently and slowly we managed a very small group of delegates.
I imagine if there is potential here, you will see existing centralised MAS's & new ones created that incorporate the blockchain to increase efficiency and reduce costs vs. decentralised versions. (If your identity will be known and the insured risk fairly traditional then a decentralised blockchain would provide little additional benefit.) Also insurers invest their funds which a blockchain MAS would be unable to do until there was a bond market.
If there were risks you couldn't usually get traditional insurance for, then a decentralised blockchain MAS could be good, but insuring yourself against said risks may open you up to increase scrutiny.
Take a random sample of 1000 people. Try to sell them dex vs mas and I bet you will have 10x success with mas.
Dex is nice, but there are better cex alternatives.
Prediction markets could be big.
You could sell MAS better, however, how long do you think it would take to do one vs another? MAS seems to be based on a society concept which honestly seems very far fetched atm. It could be done, yes, but the amount of time wouldn't be worth it. This simply because atm we only seem to have CNX to work on stuff.
So would you rather wait for them to develop MAS and not doing anything else and wait for X years or have stuff that can be delivered first and easier like DEX, first and help that bootstrap MAS in the future?
You need to take time into consideration which no one seems to care about. You think competition will just sit around for a couple of years while you build and wait for MAS to work? By then you've already been surpassed. It's a new "market" you say, but so what, if we can have other stuff done first and get shareholders confidence back by delivering something useful and profitable first, why doing something as risky as that, waste precious amount of time? It can be done, imo just not now or we could fall behind. We have something half done (DEX) are we going to forget about that?
That way we will loose the time we spent on building the initial first half of the DEX and the time building MAS which may or not work. If DEX is half finished and can have real utility for users (or so I believe), pausing that to purchase something else that risky is not worth it atm. At least let's finish what it was started first so we can have better conditions to accommodate people while we work on MAS on the future. That way while MAS is being built we might already have a bigger ecosystem and better structure to support it, thus giving MAS itself more chances of succeeding. That's the rational path imo. But in the end it's always up to the voting results of working proposals so...
Good post. BM was actually one of the first to think of/start BitAssets, but its competitors like Uphold and NuShares, more recently Tether that have been more successful with them.
I'm unsure whether DPOS, Titan and even BTS 2.0 were worth the time involved vs. making the most simple implementation BitAsset possible but with a focus on liquidity, then using those NuShares type profits to build on top of.
As it stands though we now have a great blockchain that has come at a high cost CAP wise. I think now is the time to focus on liquidity or even implementing NuShares type design to generate some profits to pay for other things as opposed to the time and opportunity cost involved in bringing something like MAS to market.
BM has said other things can be done concurrently and he is obviously passionate about this so hopefully we can do both...