Theres a reason why commercials have glooking girls.. avg joes say hey i want that..

We are blinded by symmetry

Haven't read the whole thread yet, just saw "feedback wanted," and dug in. Hope there's still time for feedback on this, looks like I'm late to the thread. Even if not, there may be other uses for this text to continue improving.

Quote from: bytemaster on December 06, 2014, 06:21:49 pm

Benefits of Becoming a BitShares Gateway

The BitShares network allows anyone to issue digital assets known as User Issued Assets (UIA).  These assets can be used to track shares in a company, deposits in a bank, reward points, among other uses.   Once an asset has been issued it can be freely traded against all of the other asset types on the network including the fully collateralized market issued assets, which are capable of tracking the price of real world assets like the dollar, and the price of an ounce gold. 

UIAs and collateralized market pegged assets are not the same thing, right? UIAs being like BitShares ME and the later being the more interesting, more generally important advancement, so I would start by describing those instead of UIAs first. I think it's important to be more clear about what you mean when you say "fully collateralized market issued assets."

Is the fact that the assets are collateralized important enough to point it out? I kind of feel like by including that as a selling point in the wrong context we could be misleading people into thinking they're insured, when really if the system fails (we're pretty damn sure it wont but they aren't), they're still boned. The collateralization really only makes sure there'll be a buyer later, and regulates the supply. It doesn't impact the price. It's just an extra needlessly confusing long word taking up space.

Are we stuck on "User Issued Assets" as a name? When I read that it invokes imagery from the Nxt client of a bunch of worthless assets that may or may not have been created by some random joker and may or may not be worthless tomorrow. How about "individualized value tokens?" I think it could get confusing referring to two different stores of value under the same "asset" umbrella.

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This guide will provide a brief overview of the business opportunities available for those who wish to become a BitShares Gateway.   A Gateway provides the service of bridging external assets such as fiat dollars, gold, silver, and Bitcoin into the BitShares network.   This service is critical to the success of BitShares because the vast majority of value moving into and out of the BitShares network must flow through a Gateway. Benefits to the providers of such services include several extra added income streams since not just one asset is being traded, access to a more stable and interest producing way to store value digitally than a young and volatile cryptocurrency, and the reputation and potential speculative gains that come along with being an early adopter of a promising new advancement in cryptocurrency.

I feel like this is a better introductory paragraph for the whole paper, consider cutting and pasting to the top of the whole thing. It tells succinctly why you're writing, what and a gateway is. I dislike the third sentence though. Coinbase probably doesn't care about what is critical for BitShares success, they care about their own asses! Not to mention implying that something is critical to the products success also implies there's a decent chance the product could fail (if the critical condition is not met). You might instead say it's an important role. And instead of saying why the service is critical to BitShare's success, spell out some of the benefits for Coinbase instead.

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Generating Revenue as a Gateway

Gateways have many ways of generating revenue.  The most straightforward method is by charging transaction fee every time someone moves value through your service.   You can also make money by charging users a fee every time they move one of your assets on the BitShares network and from market fees on the BitShares network.   In addition to transaction fees of various sorts, gateways also have an opportunity to generate revenue interest on the float they hold for their customers.

This is good, but I wonder if it's redundant. Their business model is being a gateway, I'm sure they are aware that that's how they would make money off this. Better to focus on new ways we could bring them revenue, by bringing more people into the fold by solving problems Bitcoin hasn't yet, by introducing multiple new potential trading pairs instead of just one, and by generating interest on their holdings.

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How It Works

Every single Bitcoin exchange is already performing a similar role to a gateway.  Users transfer funds to the exchange, the exchange tracks how much it owes each user, and when a user asks for a withdraw the exchange sends the funds back.    While the funds are on the exchange users can quickly and safely perform trades with other users of the same exchange.

A BitShares gateway does the exact same process, the only difference is that the database that tracks the users deposits to the exchange is the BItShares blockchain.   When a user transfers fiat dollars or bitcoin to a gateway, the gateway responds by transferring an IOU asset issued by the gateway back to the user.    When the user returns the IOU to the gateway the gateway sends fiat dollars or bitcoin back to the user.   (What is the benefit of this?)

The IOU asset is tremendously useful to users in the BitShares ecosystem because it serves as a very flexible multi-party escrow asset.   Users will use an IOU USD from your gateway to trade against BitUSD and/or IOUs from other gateways.    Users want to store value in BitUSD because it is mostly free of counter party risk, but when it comes time to convert BitUSD back to fiat USD they will do so through a gateway.   

I think a simpler explanation is in order here, the whole IOU thing is confusing and cumbersome. Instead of trying to paint the picture with the whole IOU thing, consider just being like, "users register in the bitshares network similarly to how they do at your exchange. Instead of providing an escrow service and trading platform, your role would be to interface with the bitshares blockchain to effect trades directly on the blockchain. the only trust that need to be placed in your hands is that of handling fiat money, but from the end users perspective nothing has changed, except there are more (stable) assets to choose from now."

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Legal Compliance

Any company that takes deposits from customers and facilitates transfers among customers is heavily regulated in most countries.   These regulations include license requirements, bonds, insurance, know your customer laws, and anti-money-laundering compliance among others.   The BitShares block chain provides gateways with all of the tools necessary all necessary tools and resources to comply with these regulations.

If you are in this business you are already maintaining a database tracking user deposits and your database is probably logging every single transaction and balance change.    Your database knows exactly who is owed what at any point in time.   You also have the power to seize or freeze user balances at the demand of law enforcement.   BitShares provides you with all of these features as well as including the following features:

  1) Ability to white list public keys that may control a balance of your asset.
  2) Ability to freeze all funds and stop all trading of your assets
  3) Ability to transfer any balance of your asset from any user to any other user
 
In other words, if you are operating a legally complaintcompliant crypto currency exchange, then you can easily expand your business to becoming a BitShares gateway.  then the next logical step to expand is to become a BitShares gateway and embrace all the new steps forward the BitShares network has to offer. We make implementation easy, so you can focus on your customers.

The Security paragraph sounds good. But again, I would try to move away from the IOU example, it's cliche. There has got to be a better way to explain this.

General thought: perhaps there's a way we could insert a subtle suggestion that when there's enough volume bitUSD will be interchangeable with the dollar completely, and they would have the option to restructure their business entirely around reselling bitUSD which can then be used to trade for other cryptos, or converted back into a dollar. You already kind of pitched it above as a security benefit (which is fucking brilliant, by the way), but you could also pitch it as a way to simplify their own infrastructure. If we can do a better job of emphasizing the benefits of this, then we could end up with people who might not otherwise be interested in bitshares buying bitusd so they could buy bitcoin.

I'm sure I can come up with more input on this, and I will come back, it's a very important document. Brain hurts for now though.

Quote from: NewMine on December 03, 2014, 07:08:25 am

You guys are avoiding the 500 pound gorilla in the room.  You think you can create an open source voting system, show a couple people how cool it is and then make money off it? You are entering a world you know nothing about and, FMV knows nothing about based on their résumé.

EAC, HAVA, Secretary of State, election like load testing, 3rd party testing and County acceptance are huge hurdles I don't see Bitshares clearing.

Oh, and don't think for one second that Dominion or ES&S won't jump on your open source code if it even looks like we are the slightest of competition and beat us to the punch. You are entering a world were real world money is on the line and believe me, those companies are not of the altruistic types. With cryptocurrency, you are going after states whose egos will let the little guy try there thing. But a companies earnings on line is a whole different game.

You also have nobody involved in real politics consulting or guiding you. This is your biggest mistake. In politics, things happen through and because of who you Know or because who you know is owed a favor, not because of what you think you know or what you think you can offer will change the world.

The sharedrop will turn out to be a huge mistake in hindsight as VOTE will never be what you think it's going to be unless you hire a Consulting firm, aka a lobbyist, or a seasoned insider with connections to begin pulling weight.

You could also start telling us your plans. So far, no plan that was kept secret here had ever needed to be a secret to begin with after the revelation. Saying there is a plan, or über secret stuff to come most likely means there is no good plan or stuff to come yet.

Or, I would like one reason anything on an open source project should remain a secret to the people floating your meal ticket.

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If you think for one second our plan depends upon governments accepting what we are doing...then you have completely misjudged our strategy.   We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.