I know this has been discussed in other threads which I can not find, however what is/was the reasoning for having all the gateway specific assets? Why can they not just use BitBTC and charge a fee on deposit or withdraw?
Well for one thing the gateways make no money on the trades made in bitassets. They make ALL the money on the IOUs.
Secondly, it is easier to issue IOUs because they do not require any collateral. I can create a LISK IOU without having any LISK and start trading.. or maybe I got say 1000 LISK but create 100,000 for trading.. these are some options that are not easy to do with bitAssets.
Thirdly, without liquidity, you have traders gone wild who sell assets at 10-20 even 40% above current price feed price and if there is no liquidity, you are stuck either shorting it yourself into existence which means locking up twice/three times the value in BTS, or paying those crazy market prices.. funny thing though, when the market is set like that, nobody wants to use them. How does a gateway take things like BTC for bitBTC then without losing a huge amount of money?
Anyways.. those are just a few of the more visible reasons.