Going USD->BTS without a centralized exchange would look something like this?
GATEBTC is proposed as a Bitcoin <-> BitAssets solution since GATEBTC can be exchanged for BTS, BitUSD or BitBTC etc using the trading features inside Bitshares decentralized exchange. This replaces the requirement to always rely on non-decentralized solutions like bter or btc38 to move value about.
Note though that there isn't currently a Bitshares market for GATEBTC and Bitshares assets, although it just needs someone to put in an order to sell! I do feel it's necessary to get the BTC/GATEBTC side of things established and build some experience with using it.
Shouldn't this be higher if the gateway is operational?
There's around 1.2 Bitcoin in the system at the moment - most transfers involve test-amounts of 0.01. Bitshares blocks isn't formatting the decimal places nicely, but it's possible to confirm balances,
> blockchain_get_asset GATEBTC | grep current_share_supply
"current_share_supply": 127750000,
= 1.2775
While the Gateway's bitcoin address,
https://blockchain.info/address/1saPpnK1QydmWA7Qq9wPGMooKtmvD3gnR shows a balance of 1.2759 BTC.
The difference of 0.0011 BTC is due to Bitcoin miner's fees when making transfers.
The Gateway could be changed to pass this cost to the end-user, but that would break the one-to-one ability to redeem which I feel is a really nice thing. At the moment I'm periodically burning a small amount of my own GATEBTC to keep them synchronized.