In rgcyrpto's blog, he states that the most effective way for us to promote bitshares is to provide useful services to people. This makes an enormous amount of sense.
Given that the community most likely to be early adopters of bitshares is the bitcoin community, and this should be our early target. So the question is: what service can bitshares provide to them?
Consider the mindset of a typical bitcoiner, what do they want?
* They want real bitcoins, where they have access to their own keys. This is critical. They dont want goxBTCs, IOUs from an exchange that they cannot verify is not running a fractional reserve, etc.
* They want to be able to trade between bitcoins and fiat safely, without risk of the exchange thy use being hacked.
* They dont want competitor altcoins which attempt to be the ultimate currency to succeed and replace bitcoin. But altcoins which are perceived as working with bitcoin, not competing: other applications of blockchain technology which support bitcoin are given a pass.
How can Bitshares position itself to be successful in the bitcoin community, given these things?
The answer is of course the Decentralized Exchange, but with an important twist.
I said before that bitcoiners want REAL BTC. That is, they want to control their own keys to bitcoins, and be able to verify that they do not have IOUs in a system which is actually running a fractional reserve (such as MtGox ran for years after they were first hacked).
The bitcoin community would love a true decentralized exchange that they do not have to trust. The problem is that we do not yet fulfill all of their needs. When someone uses the bitshares decentralized exchange, they can get exposure to the price of bitcoin via bitBTC, but they cannot buy actual BTC that they are given actual private keys to, and this is what the bitcoiners really want. They want to both have private keys, and be able to trade into fiat.
The bitshares decentralized exchange can provide the trade into fiat part fairly easily. The crypto community is not attached to real USD or CNY or whatever, and bitUSD/bitCNY/etc are perfectly fine as a replacement, if there is sufficient liquidity and market making such that someone can provide an instant conversion service at close to no spread (like what btc38 is doing, allowing deposits of bitCNY as if they were real CNY).
The trickiest part of this is: How can we provide people with the actual private keys to real bitcoins, if they buy on the bitshares decentralized exchange? Is this achievable? Could it be done either now, or with the development of a new feature? I remember that the devs worked on a feature to allow people to send bitcoin to a bitshares address. This could be part of the puzzle.
Is there a way for a bitcoin private key to be securely stored within the bitshares blockchain? Such that it could be traded among people for bitUSD, and then accessed with one's bitshares private key, allowing someone to take control of their bitcoin that they buy on an exchange?
This could be the first highly profitable DAC. Bitfinex, Okcoin, Huobi etc are all very profitable.
Imagine if Bitshares itself could become like them, allowing people to trade real BTC, and capture a piece of this market.
The Bitshares DAC could take a small percent of every trade, in the form of either BTC and/or bitUSD. It could undercut the other exchanges in terms of fees while providing decentralization.
It could take the profits gained through these trades and distribute them among all BTS holders as dividends, becoming the first truly profitable DAC. Either by dividing the actual BTC among holders, or by taking the bitUSD received as fees, converting to BTS, and burning the shares, causing the others to be more valuable.
The BTS market cap would need to grow to support the higher volume of bitUSD/bitCNY etc that is being used to trade the BTC. The BTS value would be supported by real profits paid to holders.
I do not know if this is possible, now or later, or what it would take to achieve it. I dont have the means to realize this, but the community as a whole might, so I present this to you as an idea. Is this possible? Is this something we should be working towards, either now or in the future after more features are developed?
Thanks for reading!
TL;DR: We need to become an exchange like huobi/bitfinex/etc, have people trade real BTC on the bitshares blockchain, give them access to the real bitcoin private keys, securely on the blockchain in some way, and provide a safe decentralized exchange for real BTC. Profits generated from trading would be paid to BTS holders.