What I am confused is why Charles said we have "IPO in a Box" and therefore to not pursue Music/DNS aka "low hanging fruit". Yet he loves the idea of yet another coin. Charles, any way to clarify for us what you see in creating yet another coin that has same functionality of an existing coin ?
Lot of straw man in your paragraph soup here. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding in what I'm asking so let me try again. After the recent spike in Bitshares price, I started thinking about what market cap really is measuring considering there are so many factors unique to this space in the price of a token like BTS or BTC. Mastercoin is worth several million as a network, but has roughly 500-1000 dollars in trading volume effectively meaning the tokens can never really be sold. So price and liquidity are both required.
In reality, what I'm looking for is the notion of incumbency value of the entire network, which probably is best measured as the sum of nodes in the network given each node has at least the following characteristics:
1) Network resources contributed for a given time interval
2) Virality of the node
3) Some measure of the cost to move the node to a new network (its stickiness)
4) The overall wealth of the node's controller
5) The willingness of the node to contribute resources from his wealth to the network or to enhance network functionality
I am certain there are more factors to identify, but in any event, what I'm looking for is a metric to appraise how valuable a particular coin is given its node set as well as the cost of moving the node set to a new network. Then we could more accurately price the value of a coin without referencing a meaningless fiat benchmark that ripple can manipulate at any time for example. Also you can price the cost of node acquisition (and no it's not the market price of the tokens they hold because you want people not tokens, tokens can be conjured at any time with a fork click).
Litecoin seems to me to be the perfect testbed for experimentation as the network is poorly maintained, has a large population, and there is a lot of potential incumbency value there. As for using the code base of Bitshares, there is no way I'd ever attempt to maintain a full C++ codebase. It's like asking to take care of an 800 pound bull with diabetes and anger management issues.
Finally, I'll mention cryptoequities. They are completely different from cryptocurrencies in that they are attached to a real entity directly or indirectly. If I want to have an IPO, then I currently have to go to Goldman Sachs and kiss the golden ring. With an IPO toolkit, you could have a custom sale connected to any terms and conditions and enforce them in the real world via Unidroit and also all the exchange mechanisms necessary to avoid having to use a traditional stock market. AGS honoring in exchange for maintenance and support of the custom chains would potentially a very profitable model. You just have to worry about fungibility of the Bitassets between chains (google's BitUSD needs to be worth as much as overstock's) or at the very least there needs to be a bridge mechanism for market makers to even prices via arbitrage strategies (ripple is using this approach for gateway IOUs).
Think strategically people! This is a business that will DEPEND on strategic partnerships and forking code to increase our brand recognition, portfolio diversification, positive marketing by forcing altcoin value to be based off of valuable dev-driven innovation--hard to beat bitshares here!--is the only way to move forward. Why do you think Ethereum is trying to get all platforms to work under their common umbrella?
I think people here have more fun labeling me a jaded scientist that should be avoided at all costs. You are correct in the umbrella strategy. There needs to be effective heterogeneity in the cryptoscape.