Quote from: profitofthegods on June 09, 2015, 02:22:13 pm

Its a chicken and egs scenario and that makes it difficult, for sure. But they may use it initially for sending money to friends and family, especially with gateways being launched. Hopefully some online shops will start accepting it before too long, and new options such as recurring payments will help with that as will the referral program if those shops think Bitshares may appeal to their customers because they can get paid for introducing them. It will be a slow process at first but it will accelerate as more customers bring more shops on board and more shops introduce more new customers.

The referral program encourages both merchant and user adoption. Merchants integrate bitusd and refer users to the platform (getting paid for doing so). To achieve this dynamic, you must first financially incentivise the merchant to recommend bitusd as a payment option in the first place.

Take porn for example. Porn merchants are known for having to pay outrageous fees (10 - 20 percent). They won't recommend bitcoin because a) it's too volatile and b) recurring payments are impossible. Bitusd offers an alternative that will make them money on referrals, doesn't take 10 - 20 percent, is stable and allows recurring payments. That's a solid sell assuming easy on/off ramps.

Another example is Latin America where demand for USD is high but supply is low. With a referral program, you'll start getting organic user adoption there.

BitShares is not an alternative to PayPal and it won't be for quite some time.

I don't disagree with most of that, and those are great example uses. I'm not really sure if you're disagreeing with what I said or just the comparison with Paypal, but you acknowledge that the referral program provides an incentive to merchants as well as the reduced fees compared to what some are paying now, but seem to be saying merchants still need some additional financial incentive on top of that? I think that's enough of an incentive, and I think customers also need an incentive.

BitUSD and other market pegged assets will likely be used in the same ways bitcoin is currently used. Prediction markets, gambling, buying "alternative" items, etc. It won't spread to mom and dad until a decade of more out. Please note that I'm not encouraging these activities, I'm just being brutally logical.

I think you lack ambition. With a decent set of wallet options 2.0 will be able to start competing against the likes of Paypal. Yes it will probably take a decade or longer to get any major market penetration, but that's no reason not to start now.

I also think it will be difficult to compete against Bitcoin and other cryptos for those markets. Gamblers don't care too much for stable value, buyers of 'alternative' items want strong privacy which isn't really provided by 2.0, and prediction markets are still a very minor use case even for btc.

I would also like to see something like this, with the flexible value as favdesu says, if it is at all possible.

You are comparing to Bitcoin, but things like BitUSD will never appeal to users of Bitcoin and shouldn't be trying to appeal to Bitcoin users. BitUSD should be an alternative to things like Paypal where the consumer doesn't pay any fee at all.

Why would somebody choose to use BitUSD and pay small but not insignificant fees, when they can use Paypal and pay zero fees?

Is it not possible to re-balance some of the fees towards merchants instead of consumers, eg by finding some way to force merchant checkouts accepting BitAssets to issue a pending transaction which is free to approve or deny and placing all the fees on issuing the transaction and none on approving or denying it, (as I suggested here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16794.msg214909.html#msg214909)?

I was just thinking about the high fees issue again when going for my run this morning. I really think consumer fees this high will harm the chances of mass market appeal, but at the same time I really do like the referral program.

Would it be possible to force shopping carts to use a kind of pending transaction, and to place all of the fees on the person initiating the transaction, allowing the consumer to approve or deny it at no charge?

Under a system like that a person going to their wallet and making a transfer would still pay a fee, but a person going to a shop and clicking buy at the checkout to make a transaction would not pay a fee - the merchant would pay instead. I really think moving the cost burden from the consumer to the merchant would get rid of a massive barrier in the way of average Joe public adopting this technology, whilst potentially still maintaining the required level of total fees paid.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin already massively favour the merchant over the consumer, and the result of this is lots of merchants starting to use it but not so many consumers. But on the other hand, favouring the consumer may not reduce the number of merchants getting involved. Many retailers have mark ups of 50-200%. I don't think payment processing fees are a major cost burden on most retailers, but acquiring and keeping customers is. If consumers want to use Bitshares then merchants will come on board to get that extra business. Since the cost to them would still be comparable to the cost of credit cards or paypal, I don't see how that would be a problem. Also, the referral program already ads a potential extra level of monetization to merchants' checkouts, because they can add a link for people to create an account if they don't use Bitshares already.

An additional benefit of re-balancing fees towards merchants rather than consumers may be that referring a merchant account would be a lot profitable than referring a consumer, possibly allowing people to make money from marketing merchants solutions or on-boarding new retailers.

Expired orders.     Right now BitAssets work with "forced settlement at the price feed" after 30 days.    So the totality of the change is to change it from 30 days to 0 days and then prioritize by collateral.

Not sure if I understand this or not - does 0 mean that shorts will always be forced to settle at the feed price, even on the day they shorted, or that they will never be forced to settle?

I was just thinking while looking at the orderbook: Right now 70,000 is >0.5% of all BTS held in collateral within this forced settlement queue. Given that a lot of BTS is probably held long term, or at least not being actively traded today, this probably represents several percent of all actively traded BTS at the very least.

Surely if the present situation continues, with shorts refusing to settle at feed price and this figure therefore building  up, then pretty soon the amount of actively traded BTS on the exchanges is going to really plummet and the price will have to rise due to the laws of supply and demand?

Quote from: BitcoinJesus2.O on May 15, 2015, 01:12:41 pm

Yield is only OK, once we have guaranteed liquidity (walk before you run).

Of course both is better.

As long as we are offering the most competitive (stable-coin) product.

Guaranteed liquidity plus variable yield would be an absolutely incredible offering (if SuperDan could pull it off)

Most of the interest should flow to bts holder and the delegate.
As they support and serve for the bitasset holder.
And some interest should be saved as money to save the market. This can make the peg more tight.
There should no interest for bitasset holder, because they just hold the cash. If they want interest, they should rent the money to the bank or bond market.

As long as investors are made aware of how it works, greater demand for BitAssets should drive up the value of BTS, because a higher value of BTS will be required to short the assets into existence. Demand for BitAssets should therefore be encouraged, and BTS holders should expect to profit from the increasing value rather than needing additional dividends.

Current problems with the peg are at least partially due to insufficient new investors. That is something that can be remedied.

I think eventually BitAssets with yield will be a big draw for Bitshares, perhaps the biggest.

Bytemaster replied to my PM saying that Bitshares.org will be getting re-worked with some additional content in the not to distant future. He accepted my offer to help with the optimization once they've done that.