Hello everyone!
For quite some time now I wanted to give my opinion these hot topics. There are various altcoins out there and we can learn from them, but also have more confidence in our powers and superiority.
Most people would agree that liquidity is key, and dilution would have limited downsides (if any) compared to upsides. I have to confess that I hate the term dilution. Everytime I hear this term, I think of about an insolvent company that is creating many shares. What many people don't understand is that the dilution we are talking about is miniscule and will happen over a period of time. I am not an expert and correct me if I am wrong, but not many companies create shares every day like Bitshares.
I was once reading a thread on which people were talking about diluting bitshares by more than 10% and I admittedly got scared because I didn't know how the reserve pool worked. There is a ~6% cap per year, which even if all the funds were used for different purposes, it would have little to no impact. So the main thing that we should talk about isn't about how to change the 6% to a higher number or how to use as much of it as possible, but how to slowly start funding more and more projects and keep the inflation low so that it doesn't scare investors (as that would require more and more dilution, with less 'money' in return), but not too low that developement is staying behind.
Now on our competitors :
Dash : the block rewards are split in the following way - 45% miners, 45% Masternodes ( ~15-16% APR per masternode) and 10% to projects that get voted (one superblock every month). Dash's current inflation is ~13%. First of all we can change that 10% to whatever suits us, with a maximum cap. As the price of Dash changes through time and there are projects voted before and after pumps, that is highly problematic, as people have to wait for a month, until they get their share from the Super Block. That means that some people get more money than they should and others less. Then an external fund is needed to tackle these issues, which isn't ideal. Also, most of that 10% of the rewards that were 'collected' over a month are dumped immediately so that the people don't 'lose' money. Finally, their inflation is a lot higher than our dilution and they are still doing fine. They have 3500 masternodes or more. That means 3.500.000 are sitting just to provide instant transaction and privacy.
Bitcoin : Well, not much to say about bitcoin. My only point is that bitcoins inflation is higher that what people think, as many coins have been lost etc etc. The current bitcoin inflation is ~8% and if we consider 1/4 of the bitcoins being lost etc, then that goes up to 10%. 10% just for security.
http://www.coinbuzz.com/2015/03/31/23-bitcoins-mined-13-may-lost/https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/thousands-bitcoins-lost-time/http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/11/22/approximately-70-of-all-bitcoins-have-not-moved-in-6-or-more-months/#comment-3483271NuShares : As someone mentioned on an other thread, NuShares look more like a ponzi. The can create money out of thin air, without any restrictions from the protocol. We should definitely discard the idea of having limitless access to the reserve pool. However, they have some other really good ideas like parking rates for NuBits (something like bonds, which is a way to prevent people from selling all their coins in periods of market crisis, i.e everyone selling NuBits). They also have share buybacks (they have bought more than 200.000$ worth of NuShares, using Bitcoin which they got by selling NuBits). That is a good concept and we could use in the future for assets or even buying BitShares with BitAssets. Also they focused only on one currency, the USD. I see there is a lot of need for CNY markets (BTC38 usually holding 3 times or more Bitshares than Poloniex) , however the USD is a much stronger currency and i would suggest to avoid CNY for the sake of stability. It would be great to see everyone using the BitUSD and BitBTC especially when it comes to Blocktrades, Metaexchange and Openledger to achieve higher liquidity.
I will be happy to see any solution implemented that community will agree on to. Every liquidity solution will have pros and cons, but there is no way that Bitshares will be harmed by it.