This was very positive surprise. I've heard that many merchants were not interested in bitcoin because it didn't work with subscription based business models.

Gavin Andresen announces that he will be moving to Bitshares core development team.

MPA's will be created when somebody thinks that the price of BTS is going up. But what about in the bear market? What kind of problems might follow if lots of people who usually short lose their interest to do that?

Are there any other incentives to create MPA's?

Nice article at CoinDesk: With Decentralization, Where is the Money? (although no mention about BitShares)

If we are to strictly follow bitcoin’s first principles of decentralization, then very little to no money should be made by the centers.

Bitcoin, the system, is itself the quintessential decentralized and autonomous ecosystem today. And its center is poor, because it is non-existent as an entity. All of the revenues/profits are being made at the edges of the bitcoin network.

So, if we are to mirror bitcoin, we need to stay true to its decentralized characteristics and properties; not just as a matter of principle, but as a matter of operational integrity.

As it evolves, decentralization is not something that is categorically there or not there. It’s not a black or white situation yet. There are different flavors, shades and degrees of decentralization. It is becoming something we aim for and reach over time, not overnight.

you guys are playing with the master of devil's advocacy 

Sorry, I'm just a noobie myself too, so I'm using your thread to try to understand for what BitShares is good and for what it's not. 

I wonder if bitshares is really for you.

If you create indexcoin to bitshares exchange, you should have some incentives for people to start using it. In bitshares there are many other assets that would be competing with indexcoin – so what is the advantage of indexcoin compared to others?

If your most important goal is to create jobs and businesses, why not focus on a project like OpenBazaar? One really interesting area of development would be usage of market pegged assets in OB.

Newbie here, trying to figure out some real world applications.

UIAs would be like shares of a club. More shares somebody has, more voting power he has to decide how the club should be run.

Initial sale (for founding members) of UIAs would give the club some resources to rent a club house and to buy some furniture etc (or whatever they want to do).

If the club will be great and members really like it, it will attract more members. One could become a member by buying shares from somebody else, or the club could issue new shares.

The club could store it's assets as bitUSD to get rid of volatility of other cryptocurrencies.

What would be the best way to fund the club's ongoing costs like club house rent? Is there an easy way to collect membership fee automatically? Some money could be made by issuing new shares for new members, but that's probably not a good thing to do all the time.

What other benefits a club would get if it's run with UIA?