At the request of yangsbo from the Chinese community, I am posting a translated version of https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9868.msg128292;topicseen#msg128292 here.

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Bitshare was launched several months ago. The market has opened up. As a long btsx, I see btsx's speed of development and potential. I also realised its hidden or not-easily discovered risks and danger areas.  This can be treated as Steven Xu's personal opinion. I am sharing this article with you and those who love to discuss our path of development.

BTS fan has undying support for it. They even made interesting quotes about it.  Indeed, these quotes have a certain degree of support to it, lasting a long R&D phase. As a BTS fan with a dream, I think we need to consider the core values. We explore BTS development direction, deriving from its core needs.

First point. We like to discuss bitcny and bitusd - these are 3i's recommended official assets. Steven's opinion is that we need to clearly identify who are the customers of bitusd and other virtual currencies. We need to find out what are the benefits these customers are looking for, analyse their needs and use the findings for targeted R&D and marketing. For simplicity, I will use two groups of customers for discussion sake.

Firstly - the Enterprises including IT companies and electronic merchants eg Dell and HP. Secondly - the end-user consumers. I categorise this way for simplicity and conciseness - easy to read.

For Enterprises:

Frankly, I do not see the possibility where the current bitusd and other bit assets will be used in a large scale manner. The main difficulty lies with enterprises need to comply with legal and regulatory rules. They cannot use bitusd (like USD) to pay suppliers nor use it for working capital and pay bank loans. From a legal standpoint, it is not possible to use bitusd. If Company A uses bitusd to pay Company B as a load repayment, Company B will say, how do companies issue invoices and pay tax with bitusd?  There are no answers to these questions. There are technical ways of improvement eg giving bitusd's holder interest.
But they cannot solve a fundamental problem. Indeed, enterprises find bitusd and other virtual currencies cumbersome. I do not see a solution to this problem. Let's tentatively see it as something that would attract the consumers.

For the Consumers:

Now lets looks at the consumers' end.  In the ecosystem, the producers' link is not connected. THe entire chain cannot operate. When one bought bitcny, it cannot be spent. Without an "exit path", bitcny has no practical use. No consumer will use it. Even if there came a day all enterprises accept bitcny, it would not have any competitive advantage unless there is some special offer to use it. What would be the competitive advantage over current paypal and unionpay network? Paypal has first-mover advantage and has established a trusted reputation. As a late comer, without innovative feature advantage, it is only a mean of payment. It does not help much with just 'trading market' thin advantage.  Users of bitcny are risk-averse or they would have use bts to spend rather than bitcny.  This is why internal trading of bitusd and bitcny are always far below 1 or even 0.8 of the real currencies - a weird phenomenon.   BM and 3i has been trying to force a peg through technical means. Steven believes this is a futile attempt and bound for failure. The will of the market cannot be changed. We cannot use the same way of the 90s China centrally-planned economy to "plan" bitcny's value. We should leave it to the market players to find its value.

At this point, are you (bts fan) being affected and feeling sad? Stay calm. Steven has no 'dark' thoughts on bts. Steven Xu and others - HackFisher, "咕噜" have in-depth exchanges of ideas. Steven Xu would like to recommend a bts's future development path to I3, Mr Stan and all bts fans:

Develop enterprise bitasset with practical interest and bts interest platform in a win-win solution.  Using this solution, it can indirectly support market discovery of bitusd's and bitcny's values.

At the moment, the seemingly uninteresting third-party issued bitassets contain limitless business opportunities. There was an article that mentioned about bitusd debit card a few days ago. I shall borrow this concept and expand the ideas on it. Let's take for example a big electronic company or a supermart with its own financial membership system. What can bts help them? What do they need? Their immediate concerns are their customer acquisition and sales revenue. Acquiring customers: We can use bts platform to divert some users to them. Although the user base in bts is currently not big and the value is not much, once the flow is established the situation would be different. How do we divert? We make use of bitasset distribution capability. Use it to help enterprises issue their debit cards. If electronic merchant A issued a billion bitassetA and it provides a top-up service, customers can top-up/buy bitassetA. The balance in the customers' accounts has equivalent values that can be used to buy merchant A's full range of products.

To acquire customers and improve sales, merchant A can use part of its sales profit to provide discounts and some promotional items. With these benefits, the consumers would naturally exchange fiat  for bitassetA. The needs for bitassetA's existence are formed. Bts now has a small 'exit path'.  BitassetA can be exchanged internally to btsx, then to bitCny, and lastly to fiat via third-party exchanges.

This completes the entire bitassetA market exchanges. Although the whole process can be abit tedious, the exchange can take place. In this chain of commercial exchanges, merchant A does not need to take legal risks because it only issues/sells bitassetA. It does not need to take responsibility for subsequent exchanges to fiat. There is no illegal raising of funds or fraudulent use of its customers' monies. It only has to fulfill its obligation of bitassetA to its products conversion. BitassetA exchanges are on the bts platform. So, does bts platform has any legal risks.  Fundamentally NO. This is because it exchanges bitassetA and btsx/bitcny.  This is not fiat. The only legal responsibility lies on third-party exchanges bitcny <-> fiat. I recommend let this heavy responsibility be taken on by btc38 or other similar exchanges.
They are in this trade. In fact, bter has started such trading.

Let's look at the other end. What are the benefits that bitassetA can bring to merchant A's consumers and bts. Merchant A sells bitassetA and acquire funds. The fund has valuable use. Bts can enable user diversion, expanding the user base and increase sales. This is what enterprise businesses want - in exchange of losing abit of the profit. The consumers get their discounts and gain from bitasset's interest.  In addition to payment processing, it provides for value-protection, value-add. Bts now has its 'exit path'. With more enterprises joining in and issuing bitassets, market volume increases. The consumers can freely buy/sell new bitassets. This brings in more demands for btsx and bitcny. Arbitrage activities increases demand for bitcny. Bitassets trading activities would bring the whole market to live!
The entire ecosystem can grow healthily. Our objective can be met.

I have narrated a grand vision and I hope you would be excited with. How can BTS proceed from here? Presently, bts does not have a professional team in China which does enterprises solutions R&D and promotion. I recommend organise and build up such a team soon. If this is not achievable in the short term, we can look into working with third-party companies. This is a gold mine. If HackFisher or others setup a enterprise-solution consulting firm in China. There is a huge market out there. Just imagine, China Unicom and China mobile phone cards can be bought and exchange in bts. Electricity usage fee can be bought and trade in bts.
Water utility bills..walmart membership card becomes bitasset. Consulting firms that focus on such solutions have a good future.

The above is a discussion on bitasset. If we are to go deeper to analyse and identify enterprises' needs, we can discover more bitasset distribution needs.Bitshare can in fact realise a part of the societ cash<->iou exchanges, attract the consumers and expanded the enterprises' customer base. How to further discover the bitasset's capabilities. This article is to initiate a discussion. Please share your views. 

Things are going well on the marketing campaign.  We are getting further on funnel and page development.  We are close to making a good deal for offramp on the funnel, so we have onramp - funnel, offramp.

We will be targeting people that are in lateral markets for the time being, while working on mainstreet funnel for 2015.  Our goal is to not go after everyone right now, but to expand past crypto fans right now.  To go after crypto only is like hitting on our sister or cousin.  You might bag em, but you really run out of options fast.  Like the analogy?  It is an incestuous circle, as I mentioned to people while in Las Vegas this week.  Going after crypto only right now only gets us so far...it's like playing in a public swimming pool, that is located next to a lake...located next to an ocean.  We wanna hit the lake...the people in the pool will find us regardless...and the ocean is the next stop.

Thanks for making clear the objective.  I like the idea of going beyond the crypto sphere.  Too many altcoins are just focusing on this small circle.  I would love to hear more how we are going to swim into the lake.  I wonder how is the water there. 

...
Just trying to re evaluate some possible risks, although I am pretty confident that III have much more dedicated people to do that instead of us.

What I am not so sure is that if these risks are identified and solutions are in place how and if these would be communicated to us in order to take as well the necessary precautions...
...

We need to be aware of possible risks and take the necessary measures and precautions.  This need to be communicated.   

@ Adam - Ah, I guess you may be right. For some reason Angelshares didn't cross my mind.

The Feds couldn't confiscate DAC tokens, as each person owns their own private key to the crypto they sent in for AGS. It wouldn't affect future snapshots either as AGS distribution is known and the ledger is distributed. Worst case scenario is Invictus gets fined and even worse case scenario would be that the AGS development funds get confiscated, although I am leaning more towards just a fine.

If there would be a fine in a worst case scenario, I hope it would not be big and cripple III financially.  We need III fully functioning. And what will happen to the current MUSIC pre-sales and future fund raising via crypto?

http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/2iu5xc/caution_counterparty_team_warns_of_fincen/

Quote from: newtree on October 10, 2014, 08:24:51 am

嗯，分析得很到位，先做好该做的。问题是你要翻译到英文社区啊：）

本人英文不好，阅读还可以，写就不行了。请哪位热心的大大帮忙翻译到英文社区去，求求3I别整这个又整那个了，搞太多精力分散了最后就是捡了香蕉丢了西瓜，安全易用的钱包是现阶段的王道。谢谢！

我已经帮你翻译和张贴在英文社区 - https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9883.msg128450;topicseen#msg128450   

Delegate bitcube

bitcubedns@gmail.com

Thank you!