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Messages - Volker

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1
General Discussion / Re: We are failing selling our products
« on: May 09, 2015, 04:01:45 am »
Quote from: fuzzy on May 07, 2015, 03:19:31 am
Quote from: NewMine on May 07, 2015, 02:44:48 am
Quote from: fuzzy on May 07, 2015, 02:24:41 am
Quote from: julian1 on May 06, 2015, 11:14:54 pm
Quote from: Volker on May 06, 2015, 09:09:39 pm
There may be a fundamental mismatch in the product and the customers who are likely to use BitShares. Cryptocurrency users are risk-taking technophiles. But the USD, EUR, CNY, GLD are all "old man" investments. Getting into the BitShares system in order to store my USD as a bitshares-based CFD and getting a 1-3% yield is not something that's interesting.

The old, conservative hard-money guys like Peter Schiff or Jim Rogers who like gold are not coming anywhere near something like BitShares. They don't even trust bitcoin. They would trust bitSILVER even less.

Honestly, I'd be far more interested in peer to peer lending on BitShares at usurious rates. Or trading exotic assets like leveraged Chinese tech stocks. I don't have access to those markets and they are thrilling. bitUSD isn't thrilling or lucrative to me. It looks good on paper, but how many of us actually want to hold bitUSD. Obviously not that many, given its market cap.

+5% We don't want to tackle dark-markets because that would create legal exposure for delegates. We don't want to do stocks, because then we'd be exposed to securities laws. We don't want to do gambling products, because of how we're told Chinese regulators would react. We're trying to change branding from DAC to decentralized Co-op to further distinguish our intent. There's an issue here that's not being correctly addressed.

If someone can mine Silver and Gold to their doorstep instead of bitcoin, that might change.  Not positive though.  This is a very interesting thread.

Are you saying POW mining will bring in users?

Yeh...at least until Bitcoin dies from its inability to govern/fund itself.

Mining definitely adds users but I don't think miners are the most productive users for the ecosystem as a whole at the end of the day.

2
General Discussion / Re: We are failing selling our products
« on: May 06, 2015, 09:09:39 pm »
There may be a fundamental mismatch in the product and the customers who are likely to use BitShares. Cryptocurrency users are risk-taking technophiles. But the USD, EUR, CNY, GLD are all "old man" investments. Getting into the BitShares system in order to store my USD as a bitshares-based CFD and getting a 1-3% yield is not something that's interesting.

The old, conservative hard-money guys like Peter Schiff or Jim Rogers who like gold are not coming anywhere near something like BitShares. They don't even trust bitcoin. They would trust bitSILVER even less.

Honestly, I'd be far more interested in peer to peer lending on BitShares at usurious rates. Or trading exotic assets like leveraged Chinese tech stocks. I don't have access to those markets and they are thrilling. bitUSD isn't thrilling or lucrative to me. It looks good on paper, but how many of us actually want to hold bitUSD. Obviously not that many, given its market cap.

3
General Discussion / Re: [speculation thread] Silence before the storm
« on: April 16, 2015, 06:37:09 pm »
Do you think they have free time to work on side projects?

Look at the milestones
https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares/milestones

They're past due. The dev team is focusing on putting out 1.0

4
General Discussion / Re: Privatizing BitAssets
« on: April 16, 2015, 02:40:53 pm »
Quote from: btswildpig on April 16, 2015, 01:59:26 pm
Where is the wheel of the bike ..........
Is it lack of incentive to promote the bike , or it's really hard and deep labor cost to promote a bike without a wheel ( hence higher customer support cost) ......

Let's not forget someone had huge marketing bonus incentive before .......


BitShares does not have a solid product that needs advertising. There is a long list of reasons why people prefer to use VISA, Paypal, Bitfinex, Huobi, Paypal, ApplePay, Square, gold ETFs, etc. more than BitShares. It's not just a chicken and egg problem. Those services have better user interfaces. better leverage/borrowing and lending, advanced order types, working mobile wallets and point-of-sale technology, easier access, etc.

Bitassets provide a yield, sure, and less counterparty risk, but that's not enough. I'm not trying to be negative, but the product isn't finished. It's alpha-stage software that crashes often on two of my machines.

Marketing an unfinished product might actually hurt BitShares. The last thing we need is 1337usd and sexUSD and dozens of crap, failing currencies cluttering the client.

5
General Discussion / Re: Privatizing BitAssets
« on: April 16, 2015, 01:54:09 pm »
Quote from: Empirical1.2 on April 16, 2015, 01:48:37 pm
Quote from: joele on April 16, 2015, 01:40:14 pm
Quote from: Empirical1.2 on April 16, 2015, 01:15:21 pm
Quote from: joele on April 16, 2015, 12:37:47 pm
Quote from: jcrubino on April 16, 2015, 12:28:39 pm
Quote from: joele on April 16, 2015, 12:14:37 pm
The peg Assets is 2 products and 2 private companies competing.  Like same toothpaste, but different company Colgate and Pepsodent. :)

Like Bitcoin, litecoin, peercoin, dogecoin, feathercoin, justacoin, weiredcoin, all the NXT clones, etc.

Yes, and Bitshares is the Blockchain, all these are Assets and they pay fees.

BitReserve have their own BitGold, so will BitGold.com and soon many 2.0 crypto-currencies including Ethereum will probably have their own decentralised versions. (There are also multiple USD products on the market.) They will all be competing to become the dominant digital gold.

It will probably end up with the same type of distribution as Bitcoin where the market leader has 80%+ market share.

Introducing BitGold competitors onto our own blockchain would mean our BitAssets would not only have to try and get market share from every other contender on the market but will even have to cannibalize the BitShares customer base.

I think BM realises this, but hopes free market competition would rapidly find the best BitAsset model for BTS which will then also be competitive against all the other competitors. 
Quote
Ultimately the market would settle on one or two variants and the rest would die off or be special purpose.   

New BitGold on Bitshares blockchain is part of the team of Bitshares, this BitGold will only compete with other BitGolds and not with Bitshares, the success of any of these BitAssets is also the success for Bitshares and its holders.

Imagine on the Dogecoin blockchain, there was no Dogecoin but instead 'Doge1', 'Doge2', 'Doge3' & 'Doge4'. All of them trying to promote themselves to a similar market as Dogecoin used too. The results might be that combined their CAP's might be greater (unlikely because of the way network effect works) but individually they could all be weaker and have no chance of being widely adopted. The only possibly way it could be good, if say 'Doge3' was such a popular, good model that all the other Doge's died and then Doge3 then started competing against Bitcoin. But otherwise distributing your user base among multiple versions of the same product (Like BitGold1, BitGold2, BitGold3 etc.)  instead of getting the community and DAC to focus on developing one is probably not advisable.

Agreed. You'd be splitting up the network effect in exchange for an incentive to make markets and advertise your pet asset. But "Dell is now accepting UncleJimbosUSD!" will never be a headline. And it will be confusing. Normal people aren't going to use a currency because you're advertising it.

6
General Discussion / Re: Privatizing BitAssets
« on: April 16, 2015, 01:37:54 pm »
So the reasoning for this is that people don't have an incentive to market bitassets, right? Lack of marketing is not the reason why people aren't using bitassets.

Here's something from Elon Musk that might be relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU7W7qe2R0A&t=1m52s

EDIT: Time was wrong.

7
General Discussion / Re: Privatizing BitAssets
« on: April 16, 2015, 01:12:36 pm »
Quote from: luckybit on April 16, 2015, 01:10:35 pm
Quote from: Volker on April 16, 2015, 12:12:45 pm
There needs to be some minimum number of people providing a feed for any asset. And they should not have any incentives to collude.

If it's groups of people instead of people then you reduce the probability of collusion. It's rare for entire groups of people to collude but it's not rare for two people to collude.

Yes. It's also not rare for 1 person to pretend to be 10 people.

8
General Discussion / Re: Privatizing BitAssets
« on: April 16, 2015, 12:12:45 pm »
There needs to be some minimum number of people providing a feed for any asset. And they should not have any incentives to collude.



9
General Discussion / Re: Need $10K bitUSD, will pay actual USD with 5% premium
« on: April 15, 2015, 07:23:00 pm »
I was recently offered a job as community liaison by tsaishen, but I'm strongly recommending against this. Buying bitUSD for a premium is a huge waste of money.

1. If you have BTS, then you can create bitUSD by shorting bitUSD and then buying your own shorts. I'd expect you to have lots of BTS in reserve if you expected your activities to double the price of BTS.
2. If you don't have BTS, then you could offer your would-be employees BTC. I would accept that if I'd received that offer.
3. You could've offered to pay us would-be employees by Bank of America bank transfer, Western Union, Paypal instead of involving other forum members. Again, I would've accepted.

It's troubling that none of these ideas, which would've saved you money, hadn't occurred to you.
I'm going to reject your job offer for failure to satisfy my sole condition of acceptance.

To everyone else:
Do not send any money.

Please don't contact me again.

Thank you.

10
General Discussion / Re: I think Dogecoin is about to have a large rise
« on: April 15, 2015, 02:25:41 pm »
Litecoin and SCRYPT are both toxic. DOGE should divorce LTC and change its algorithm.

11
General Discussion / Re: BitShares?bitshares ? bitShares ?
« on: April 15, 2015, 06:20:27 am »
I'll say "BitShares" to refer to the protocol/software/community and "bitshares" to refer to the actual asset (BTS). But sometimes I'll say Bitshares or bitshares to refer to both. We'll never agree.

12
General Discussion / Re: Not everyone is selling at a loss
« on: April 15, 2015, 06:03:21 am »
Quote from: starspirit on April 14, 2015, 04:27:46 am
Guys, I believe Volker means to buy borrow bitUSD to buy bitBTC, using the bought bitBTC as collateral, i.e. trading on margin as at bitfinex. e.g. Have $100, borrow $300, buy $400 of bitBTC, $400 of bitBTC serves as collateral on the $300 borrowing.

Yes.

13
General Discussion / Re: Not everyone is selling at a loss
« on: April 14, 2015, 01:17:29 am »
Quote from: arhag on April 14, 2015, 12:43:03 am
Quote from: Volker on April 13, 2015, 04:07:35 am
Today I have zero use for BitShares. Let me lend bitUSD to traders on bitshares at 20% annually and I will put $20,000 into bitUSD tomorrow. Let me borrow bitUSD against my bitUSD collateral to buy bitBTC and I will stop using Bitfinex tomorrow.

I don't understand. You want to borrow BitUSD on a BitUSD collateral? How does that make sense?

Are you asking to borrow money from the blockchain that is not more than 100% collateralized? That's a big no no. The blockchain has no ability to force you to pay. The blockchain cannot sue you in court if you refuse to pay your debt. The only thing a blockchain can do is seize the digital assets on the blockchain that you lock up as collateral to back your debt.

Similarly, you can lend BitUSD to other people who do not collateralize their loans (I am not talking about margin trading which is possible with simple tweaks to the BitAsset rules) but when your counterparty is an anonymous person, there isn't much you can do if they refuse to pay the debt. Who are you going to sue? The most you would be able to rely on is hurting the reputation of their pseudonymous identity. No big deal, they just make another one. Until we have identity verification on the blockchain, uncollateralized lending is not interesting.

The system would automatically liquidate my position if it fell below a certain level where I wouldn't be able to pay my lender back. It is what Bitfinex does.

14
General Discussion / Re: Traders and investors are the most important userbase, not merchants.
« on: April 13, 2015, 07:59:26 pm »
Quote from: merivercap on April 13, 2015, 06:42:58 pm
Yes bitUSD is hard to obtain right now because it's a new asset.  I even have trouble getting it.  You can't expect it to take over the world overnight.  It takes work.   Why do you think payment startups like Stripe & Braintree & Dwolla exist if it is 'not much more useful than paypalUSD'?  Why would Square start Square Cash?  Why do you think Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft (who is getting MSB licenses in 50 states btw) are all getting into the payments space?   Why do you think Bitpay has raised the 2nd most VC funds after Coinbase who's also in the payments space.  Is this all for giggles?  It's nearly a $100B/yr market.  The big advantage with crypto compared to the other solutions is you bypass the banking system inefficiencies and fees.  (BTW we should really go after BitPay.  Once the bitShares platform is stable and has a strong level of merchant/user adoption they might consider supporting bitUSD.  Also there are other Bitcoin hedging solutions that are popping up they may lean towards.)

I think Paypal, Square, Bitpay, Coinbase, Circle, Stripe, Google wallet, Facebook wallet, etc. are all going to be competing very fiercely in the merchant/shopping arena, and I think that they have a lot more money than we do and a lot larger userbases than we do. These guys have giant warchests and if they're willing to burn money to get users like Google did with Gmail in the beginning, it's going to be really tough. BitShares can be much more competitive in the asset trading and lending arenas where competition (like Lendingclub, eTrade, BTC-E) is far weaker and where BitShares can break new ground and really shock the world with what it can do.

Quote
Store of wealth and why?   What makes cryptoassets a store of anything?  Why is Bitcoin not worth zero?  I have my own answers, but it would be interesting to know your perspective. 

I have the standard Erik Voorhees answer on this one: it's scarce and useful.
So yes, the asset must be useful for something (e.g. merchant payments, trading, remittances), but once the asset has established itself as something that can store value, the store of value use case can potentially dwarf any other use case. This is true for gold even when including jewelry and coinage as industrial uses (which are borderline store of value uses). It was true of silver at various points in history, but it's not scarce enough anymore. But we don't need to worry about giant Peruvian BTS deposits being discovered. BTS is scarce by design. If BTS is useful, then it can become a great store of value.

15
General Discussion / Re: Why BitShares isn't Taking off and What we are doing about it.
« on: April 13, 2015, 06:58:29 pm »
Quote from: luckybit on April 13, 2015, 04:34:05 pm
Quote from: bytemaster on April 13, 2015, 01:18:29 pm
From what you all tell me of Dark, it looks like they are supporting their price NuBits style, offering interest to encourage holding.  As long as the interest rate is above the long-term price decline everyone holding is breaking even.

I got to thinking about why it is so hard to bootstrap a business in crypto and it is because NEW investors are always bailing out OLD investors which sucks up all of the capital.   We can easily resolve all of this by placing unclaimed BTS from delegates INTO a yield fund for BTS holders.   Having a yield fund would encourage people to move their money off of exchanges and to hold it for longer periods of time. 

The side effect of a yield fund is that it wouldn't actually debase ANYONE except those who are looking to cash out short term. IE: transfer of value from those who want short term liquidity to those who are in this for the long run.

In effect YIELD == DRK model.  Whether or not this is a good idea remains to be seen.

This is an interesting idea.

Unclaimed delegate funds would otherwise not be in circulation, right? Wouldn't adding a yield introduce new dilution? The idea is to reduce BTS in circulation so that unchanged demand results in higher prices.

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