These price swings are so healthy in the long run.

There are many coins that have yet to have  their loyalties and confidence tested.

There are also many coins that previously competed with Bitshares, that died off long ago.

That was awkwardly phrased. What I meant was, does anyone remember Nubits?

There is at least one possibility to exchange BitBTC and BTC in the DEX, without any need of Gateway or third parties.

For example: A has 0.1 BTC and B has 0.1 BitBTC and both want to exchange them. For this, A and B deposit an escrow of 0.12 BitBTC each in the  witness account. A and B report their bitcoin addresses to the DEX and both close the operation. The DEX checks periodically if the bitcoin has been transferred between the specified addresses and if so and there is a confirmation, returns the escrow to A. It also checks if BitBTC has been transferred. In that case it returns the escrow to B and the operation ends completely.

It is necessary to have BitBTC to buy BitBTC, but as it is possible to iterate the procedure, a very small amount is enough. The Dex could handle this iteration, performing the interchange in stages.

The witness account is a third party, but I like the method, and this thread.

I want to trade bitETH. That should be so simple, compared with the wider liquidity problem. And there's a chicken and egg aspect to the liquidity problem.

Frankly, there are coins that you can't short on Poloniex. Bitshares should serve those clients.

1. I'm sure Bitshares appreciates your interest, and would be a reliable platform for clockcoin liquidity. Basically you need to convince a committee somewhere somehow to enable it as a bitAsset (and they don't even support Ethereum yet). Or you can speak to someone like OpenLedger.info, to support your coin of choice, or create your own GateWay and issue your own asset (which can be costly).

2. You can certainly interface with the DEX programmatically.

These price swings are so healthy in the long run.

There are many coins that have yet to have  their loyalties and confidence tested.

There are also many coins that previously competed with Bitshares, that died off long ago.

It's definitely there, somewhere in 'wallets' on Bittrex.

distributed autonomous food production, so I actually spent the last couple of years going out and building that company (not blockchain based, but traditional VC-backed) 

Awesome.

 • is there an equivalent of a BTS block explorer that one can check progress of transactions

https://cryptofresh.com - but Bitshares transactions are quicker than cryptofresh (or poloniex) is likely to load, at times like this.

 • is there an equivalent of a BTS paper wallet (I exported the backup wallet but it's electronic. Nothing like seeing a bunch of numbers & letters in your face for the feeling of security)

There was one, although I'm not ready to recommend it. Ultimately, a paper wallet is just a print out of your numbers & letters..

 • you know the account name that you create in the BTS client. Is that the 'address' that one should use for withdrawing to from the exchange ? (It's what I used)

Yes, isn't it elegant?

 • you know how in Bitcoin people create multiple addresses for different purposes (trading, cold wallet etc). Is that also recommended practice in Bitshares or do we just hold everything under the one account ?

I think this is a personal decision, but it does seem reasonable to segregate things to suit your own record-keeping.

Kinda excited about Peerplays.