91
General Discussion / Re: Should we split BTS into a currency and a business?
« on: June 23, 2015, 11:08:35 am »If we the split the platform the into business (which gets to keep all the fees) and currency, I can't see a reason for the currency part to have any value above zero.
The business vehicle has a value because it can be treated as equity in a DAC.
The currency vehicle has a value - because of what?
A thorny question! My view is a currency has value because of its potential reliability as a unit of account and in transactions. Its the same reason that fiat has any value, or bitcoin, or any other alternative crypto. All of these have non-zero value today because of trust in the system of account. So I expect a super-fast non-pegged non-backed currency with a trusted supply mechanism on the bitshares block-chain would also have non-zero value. Also, such a currency might have immediate transactional utility in bitShares because it would be used as the denomination for funding, reserving, and payments within the DAC, for collateral backing and other purposes.
While I think that having negligible dilution is a major source of value for an asset that is to be used as a unit of account and store of value, it is of very little value to a business, or DAC, that is trying to grow toward profitability. What I was trying to do with this OP is show that if want want BTS to be a profit-earning system, we should not constrain funding so much that we cannot afford to create it. That's why I was suggesting to set BTS free, and that is really the core proposition of the OP.
It was then only really a secondary consideration as to whether people may want a currency substitute, and what that currency would be worth. But there is certainly an element of "currency value" in BTS that would be lost if we made BTS an unbounded DAC. That may be potentially retained if we set up a currency with all the same properties as BTS except dilution and profit participation (a trivial step), that can clearly outcompete other cryptos on performance.