Floating rate is not as good for adoption. It will most likely be much less than 5%. There isn't that big of a cost to lending money in a controlled and automated environment as bitshares x. 5% interests on savings is much more competitive than traditional banking systems. I imagine that at some point a floating rate will be used, but I think that 5% is a good incentive for people to store money in the bitshares bank as opposed to traditional banks given the uncertainty of associated with this emerging industry of DACs
Won't this cause everyone to want to hold BitAssets and force the price of the assets through the roof?
That's exactly what I think. IMHO the only major flaw with BitShares X at the moment.
If you get 5% on everything it will inflate the price of most BitAssets significantly - especially those where you normally don't fetch high interest (Gold, Silver, JPY etc.)
I tried to estimate by how much in the thread I posted the link to earlier.
This has been discussed before... It doesn't matter whether or not the price of bitassets are "inflated." Within bitshares you trade in derivatives not actual assets. Parity doesn't matter, correlation matters. Pegging the interest rate at 5% may have some unforeseen and undesirable effects to the stability of prices from short term perspectives but the long term trends should be consistent with a steady 5% return on all assets.
I can't tell if the 5% interest is necessary for adoption of bitshares or not. Even if people dont get a higher yield on there money than a typical savings bank, the advantage of holding your money in bitshares rather than a bank is that you can hold your money in completely liquid assets. I think that 5% interest perturbs this advantage of bitshares because then prices are less stable and at a given moment that you want to pull your money out of a particular asset, that asset might be relatively undervalued by the markets (the asset can also be overvalued).