We welcome with open arms any input, ideas, or suggestions

Here we go. I was at a friends house and we started talking about tech. He then asked me what I thought about Ethereum, and he also mentioned ripple. He is just an observer of crypto with no stake in anything, but he confirmed that he has heard loads of press about those other projects and none about Bitshares. When discussing why that was, he showed me ethereum.org, and he praised its clarity and speed at telling the visitor what he needs to know about ethereum. At the top of the page it has headers for:

What - clearly explains what ethereum is

Ethereum is a platform and a programming language that makes it possible for any developer to build and publish next-generation distributed applications.

Why - clearly explains why I should care about ethereum

Most of the services you use today have something in common: they are centralized...

We then compared it with bitshares.org, my passive observer friend said that he couldnt tell what on earth Bitshares was. There are no quick links at the top for What and Why. Instead there are links to TV - he doesnt want to watch 30 minute TV episodes, he wants to know what BitShares is in 20 seconds or he is closing the page and going elsewhere.

His comments after reading the content on bitshares.org were:

Avoid the outrageous fees... As Good As Cash

- so why is this any better than Bitcoin?

Any Currency

- other projects give you multiple currencies, why is this better?


Anyway this is the honest feedback that my friend gave me about the site. We need to explain the core appeal of BitShares more succinctly.

As long as both parties were "one-time" users for "personal use" and not a business that advertised for general use then I think our built in escrow features will be all that is necessary.

Are you saying a centralized website to list buyers/sellers of BitUSD is not actaully neccessary? Will you be able to see sellers from inside the client for example? That would be ideal for everyone.

Edit: I imagine the listing could be based on the BitShares mail system. You open the client and check for Bitmessage-style broadcasters from BitUSD sellers, and do a p2p escrow trade directly from the client. The message would be generated with metadata about what escrow agent the seller trusts etc. This is far better than someone running the risk of operating localbitusd.com

Vitalik's vision is awesome:

imagine a world where Mist could be used to access Ethereum, Bitshares, Maidsafe or any other major decentralized infrastructure network, with new decentralized networks being installable much like the plugins for Flash and Java inside of Chrome and Firefox.

I would love to have a browser that lets me easily install any trustless opensource protocol I want, instead of closed binary plugins that harvest personal data.

If they try to enforce their trademarks against us, it will backfire and give us publicity. I say bring it on. You cant enforce trademarks against a blockchain.

http://cointelegraph.com/news/113214/the-nakamoto-institutes-first-podcast-rebuts-buterins-defense-of-competing-cryptocurrencies

In their criticism of Ethereum, The "nakamoto institute" guys made an interesting point: stocks pay dividends and bonds pay interest, which is why those things are worth holding. A currency doesnt pay either so its only worth holding if you know its network effect will increase its value, therefore all other crypto-currencies are snake oil (according to them).

Bitshares being a crypto-equity gets the economics right, and someday soon we will reach a point where payed delegates are no longer needed and dividends start coming in. Then according to their own arguments on competing crypto-currencies, they should be in full support of BitShares.

Maybe on-chain games could be implemented by users when BTS scripting becomes available.

Might want to test this one a bit before we start sending people here.

Also, if it was legit the admin should be a known member of this community.

What do you mean usd and bts balances are not explicitly associated in pairs? All I was describing with my second case is that everyone has an account, and the data record for each account stores a quantity of bts and a quantity of usd, which can be positive or negative, but with margin limits.

Does he mean that all balances are freely tradeable against each other?