Satoshidice was a centralized company. They didn't sue the Bitcoin blockchain.
Also Satoshidice had other issues surrounding it. There is no evidence of any US government agency attacking a blockchain or any technology.

If on the other hand you start a company where you take people's money for "stocks" on a virtual exchange and then you sell the company well then yeah. But that isn't what Bitshares did.

Also no one really lost even in the Satoshi Dice example. If you look at the math of it the risk is very low and the fine is manageable. I don't think Bitshares developers are in any trouble because we don't own any shares in Invictus Innovations.

Refundable when and by what criteria?

You already need to pay 2 weeks of earnings or ~60k BTS to register a 100% delegate, that seems sufficient to me.

1.  Stock trading is a great market to enter eventually and exchanges are extremely important for liquidity, but I think the core value proposition of bitAssets currently is its usefulness for mainstream users for payments. 

The core value proposition of Bitcoin/altcoins as a payment system is to save the 3% credit card fees for merchants.

3.  People go into crypto trading because they want to trade crypto and believe in the value proposition of Bitcoin and other altcoins.   I'm sure some people get addicted to trading and would want to trade other assets, but most of the volume in crypto-exchanges/gateways is between Bitcoin & local currencies.  Also bitAssets on exchanges may not be as compelling because you can already trade into local currency from Bitcoin on exchanges.   The main value proposition for using the bitShares exchange vs another exchange is because it's decentralized, not because it has pegged assets.

4. Right now Bitcoin exchanges charge .2 - .5% per trade. (Competition will drive that lower)  Regular mainstream online brokerage accounts charge .5%-1% on an average trade of $1-$2k.   Settlement will be much faster using crypto.  Smaller and microtrades are compelling.  Not that many people worry about counterparty risk for securities.  There are advantages, but how compelling is it for investors or traders to switch? The biggest downside is there won't be much liquidity compared to regular brokerage accounts. 
The market size of retail online brokerage trading is maybe $10Billion/yr?  (Interactive brokers & E-Trade make about $1B rev per year)

5. We technically have a Forex exchange using bitAssets already.  Is there a lot of Forex activity?  I don't think there is much of any.  Most people just trade between local currency and BTS.  (I think there will be a lot of Forex activity eventually, but only after there is a core value proposition to use BTS for payments in various local currencies)

Quote from: werneo on April 12, 2015, 04:00:00 pm

BitShares cannot "take off" while bitcoin and the rest of crypto are in a bear market.

Yes, because that is number 4 on Stanimov's 7 deadly crypto natural laws:

"#4. only DarkDashTITANCOPYCoin can grow its market cap duting a bitcoin bear market."

In theory shouldn't it be possible to have autonomously issued assets? Assets issued by DACs themselves on the Bitshares blockchain in such a way that it cannot be a scam?

I think it's possible. Imagine for example you have a robo taxi which DAC which is owned by it's initial developers. They decide to build into the design the ability to "go public" by autonomously issuing assets which people could buy through Bitshares to either use as taxi service or to get profit sharing, discounts or whatever else.

I think in the context of the Internet of Things the UIA's make a lot more sense. I think in the current context UIA's should be collateralized and it's a mystery to me why Bytemaster changed his mind on that but my guess is it was to allow certain people in the community the opportunity to establish trust. That is fine but I wouldn't trust a UIA which isn't collateralized in some way or issued by algorithm (by a blockchain which no one fully controls). If you're giving money to a person it's just a gift or donation no matter how they try to tell you otherwise because code is law.

Volker on everything else I agree with you. I think Bitshares would be much more useful to people in western countries if it could be used to trade every kind of value, including stocks, CFDs, and even the most exotic stuff. We should have our own indexes we trade as well.

That is my Bitshares vision too, but the problem is most of the Bitshares Devs are from US and they are worry to implement something that may encounter govt prosecution.
Thus, Bitshares vision is limited and strict.

Just my few cents

Quote from: Volker on April 12, 2015, 11:36:37 pm

Traders and investors are the real customers, not merchants and shoppers. Merchants and shoppers don't necessarily need to hold bitUSD for a long time to do transactions. Nor do people using bitAssets for remittance purposes. These people hold bitAssets for as short a time as possible. They just want to be in the BTS system to accomplish their transaction. Then they leave the system.

In contrast, traders and investors either:
a) make lots of short term transactions (requiring frequent paying of fees) OR
b) hold their assets for a long period of time (taking those BTS out of circulation and also generating a yield that must be paid in BTS)

But traders are not interested in BitShares. Why? Just compare Bitshares to non-Bitshares trading platforms. Foreseeably, the most popular market-pegged assets will be government currencies, cryptocurrencies, and stocks. In the non-BitShares world, the most popular platforms for trading those assets (Forex markets, cryptocurrency exchanges, and stock brokerages) all have one thing in common: there is borrowing. The less volatile the asset (e.g. government currencies), the more borrowing is allowed. (Because no one is going to trade bitEUR:bitUSD unless they can trade with 20x margin.) The margin levels of course should differ depending on the class of assets traded (e.g. bitEUR:bitUSD should allow for 20x margin but BTS:bitUSD should only allow for .5x margin.)

The ultimate vision for BitShares, which I think we all share is:
Any person anywhere in the world with 100 BTS can hold, trade, borrow, or lend every major asset that exists in the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with zero counter-party risk, virtually no minimum deposit or withdrawal size, low fees, and total privacy.

Trading is the activity that BitShares excels at. We want this to be like a vacation resort; people come into the BitShares system with their $2000 and Bitshares offers so many amazing services that they spend that money playing in the Bitshares system for years while they borrow, lend, daytrade, and invest to their heart's content. Mr. Larimer is a BTS bull so he shorts bitUSD, bitCNY and every other currency into existence in exchange for more BTS. Mr. Bernanke is a stock market bear and offers to short the entire US stock market against his bitUSD offering 0% interest. Ms. Zhang from China wants to buy Berkshire Hathaway but it's not available on the Chinese stock market. Ms. Zhang gets some bitUSD and buys bitBRK from Mr. Bernanke. Mr. Volker risks lending Ms. Zhang some additional bitUSD at 10% annually as long as she is only allowed 3x margin or less and will be automatically margin called if her balance goes too low. Mr. Gates knows something about what bitUSD:bitMSFT will do next week and no one's going to know if he trades it. And Mr. Ackman thinks that the USD:Hong Kong dollar peg will break and the Hong Kong dollar will be worth 30% more after the peg breaks. So Mr. Ackman borrows 50 million dollars worth of bitUSD at 10% per year and buys bitHKD.

And it goes on and on and on. Are you guys seeing what I'm seeing? BTS will eventually be like like forex, Bitfinex, NASDAQ, Nikkei, and Hang Seng all combined, only better.  A one stop shop for trading anything and everything. And then we just make sure there are no clocks on the BTS client and let people waste away in front of their computer screens making trade after trade in complete capitalist ecstasy.

When BitShares can do this, the CPC (cost per customer) that we are so worried about is going to drop to 0 because BTS will be more addictive than World of Warcraft.

tl;dr - Forget about merchants and customers. We need collateralized lending markets to attract forex, cryptocurrency, and equities traders and keep their money in the BitShares system.
 
EDIT: made my examples more accurate

So lets start with the indexes. Also why don't we have BitNXT, BitETH and so on? Bitshares encourages people to leave to go invest in those because you can't invest in them on the internal exchange. Over focus on BitUSD is holding Bitshares back.

How about some focus on stocks or the stock index? If the liquidity could be there and the price feed could be found.

The killer feature bitshares is missing is credibility and trustworthiness. Changing the supply schedule is a cardinal sin and absolutely nothing has been done to legitimize it