I posted this buried in another thread but it deserves its own thread IMHO. Sorry if this is boring but I just get so frustrated with the price and I see this as a way to keep people using our blockchain.

Can we make the BitBTC:BitUSD market one of the featured markets? It doesnt matter if it has low-volume right now, people need to know about it before they will use it. BitShares is after all supposed to be a way to trade Bitcoin without counterparty risk, and people overwhelmingly want to do that with the cost basis in dollars, not in BTS.

Our competitors are thinking about how to write a contract for it: https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1435/anyone-interesting-in-options-futures-cfd-market-contract We already have this market setup but for some reason we are not advertising it. Our implementation with the supporting wallet website will of course be better than some random ethereum script.

We need to publicize this market everywhere: https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/market/BitBTC:BitUSD/Guest/buy
Add to that the upcoming bond-market, and the BitBTC:BitUSD market will be impossible for traders to ignore BitShares because its so useful.

The change is a one-liner (I tested it locally):
$scope.featured_markets.push "BitUSD:#{main_asset.symbol}"
$scope.featured_markets.push "BitCNY:#{main_asset.symbol}"
...
$scope.featured_markets.push "BitBTC:BitUSD"


I have some £ and I want to buy BitShares with it. Buying via BTC sucks because it adds a spread to the cost.

Is there a schedule for when we can do an escrow from inside the wallet? Bytemaster talked about this in a mumble a while back.

With a traditional crypto exchange, you only need to worry about them getting hacked making them unable able to cover their deposits. With a gateway, you have to worry about them getting hacked, and when they issue you an IOU on the blockchain for your deposits, you have to worry about getting hacked yourself and losing that as well.

Assuming that an exchange is secure, its trading website would be much easier to use and more secure than downloading specialist wallet software to trade yourself on a blockchain. The only advantage gateways have is that you can quickly trade the IOUs for market pegged assets to free yourself of counterparty risk, but first weve got an uphill battle to convince people that works.

Will gateways actually become popular and be a preferred option?

I was reading Bitfinex's explanation of margin trading:
https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/howitworks

And its totally doable inside a blockchain. Owners of BitBTC or BitUSD can lend it out as liquidity providers to traders, who borrow those funds to trade on the internal exchange with margin. Liquidity providing is a great low-risk income stream if you prefer not to trade.

Bitfinex's unique feature of margin trading is probably why its the number 1 biggest Bitcoin exchange right now. Its a killer feature. Add it to the BitShares blockchain with all the extra security benefits that brings, wait for their inevitable Goxing and its moontime for BTS, as long as we have a nice lightweight client by then.

http://cointelegraph.com/news/113214/the-nakamoto-institutes-first-podcast-rebuts-buterins-defense-of-competing-cryptocurrencies

In their criticism of Ethereum, The "nakamoto institute" guys made an interesting point: stocks pay dividends and bonds pay interest, which is why those things are worth holding. A currency doesnt pay either so its only worth holding if you know its network effect will increase its value, therefore all other crypto-currencies are snake oil (according to them).

Bitshares being a crypto-equity gets the economics right, and someday soon we will reach a point where payed delegates are no longer needed and dividends start coming in. Then according to their own arguments on competing crypto-currencies, they should be in full support of BitShares.

I have been doing some long overdue reading on Maidsafe, and the ability to pay some Safecoins to host large quantities of data on a decentralized Bitcloud is something that I want to be a part of.

For two reasons I think we should have a BitMaidsafe asset:
-I see Maidsafe being a strong competitor to BitShares (just in terms of market cap).
-I dont yet understand how their wallet system works, and I trust BitAssets because I know I can redeem it later 1:1 for Safecoins. This after all is the point of BitShares - store your savings in anything that you want.

Can we create a BitAsset for Safecoin?

On a side note, I think drltc made a proposal a while back that BitAssets get created when delegates agree on the asset description, without the large fee. How's that going?

Has anyone thought of making custom printed notes that contain a private key with say 10 BitUSD ?

I would love to be able to print these out and sell them at Bitcoin meetups.

The UK bank notes contain the famous phrase "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds.", meaning they used to be redeemable for gold, before central banks went full retard. We could paraphrase that with a real promise: "I promise to pay the bearer $10 worth of BitShares".

The printed note could also include the url for where to download the wallet and redeem your funds.

Ive spoken to an artist friend and Ill see if I can get some mockups, if people here think this is a good idea.