ByteMaster - First off, let me state unequivocally that you have my full support. Before making the decision to go full bitshares I dug deep and read everything I could find by you, dating all the way back to original plans for protoshares. You are highly intelligent and know how to pull things off that have never existed before.
As an outsider looking in though, I think BitShares has a number of problems that are keeping new users away. I want to bring these to your attention because if they get fixed, I think user adoption would skyrocket.
There are several steps to problem solving, especially a problem of this nature...
You are taking the first step, which is identifying the problem.
Step 2 is identifying solutions, which is also something you're asking for.
So that's good!
You state that the problem is "Taking Off", but that's really a few different problems isn't it?
The first problem is user adoption. "Why don't more people use bitshares?" The other problem is "Why is the price so unstable?"
Note that I said "unstable", if the price is rising or falling dramatically and unpredictably, that is a problem. Low prices that just stay in a narrow range are actually no problem at all. High prices in a narrow range are also not a problem.
Therefore the question of "Why is the price not achieving stability"
The final part of the "taking off" question is actually "what compelling reasons would a person who might need bitshares, elect to use something else?"
As an outsider looking in. When I want to know about a new crypto or altcoin, the first thing I do is google it.
When I do a google search on bitshares, these are two of the first things that pop up...
http://prestonbyrne.com/2014/08/17/dont-walk-away-run/http://www.coindesk.com/bitshares-decentralized-exchange-crypto-2-0/The issue with the first URL is obvious, this guy is tearing your product apart. I know you can look at that and say "yeah, umm it doesn't work that way anymore". One of the reasons we selected BitShares rather than discounting it and moving to something else, is that I discovered that he has a competing crypto platform in development. I find that sneaky and it has made me very suspicious of his motives. I had to dig deep to find that out though.
I consider my efforts to be exceptional, meaning I highly doubt a potential user is going to dig that deep.
The fact remains, his rant is so high up on the google search rankings that in your case, it is directly costing you business.
The problem with the second URL is a bit more insidious. The subtext here is that you had a damaged brand but instead of fixing something fundamental, you decided to "rebrand". This type of thing makes a potential investor nervous and probably caused a lot of potential new users to rabbit. Reading the article I realize what you are really doing is "brand consolidation", but the click bait headline there doesn't make it sound that way and if you're new to bitshares it just confuses the heck out of things.
Speaking as someone considering ownership for the first time. My initial impression was, "We don't want a re-brand, we want the original thing!"
A rebrand is confusing. I think what happened here is that you managed to turn the BitShares brand into the "New Coke" of the crypto world.
If you were really going to "rebrand", I think maybe you should have done a darkcoin and completely renamed the product. Oddly enough I sold all my dark/dash as soon as my wallet changed names, I actually liked the darkcoin name, more than the product
For the love of god, please don't change it again! There is nothing you can do about the branding right now other than to spread the new brand as far and wide as you can. If you choose an SEO buzzmonkey to go around and spam the planet with it, people will get sick of it really quickly though and then brand burnout will set in rather than brand burn in.
If it were my baby I would hurry up and add an affiliate system to the webwallet (would also be helpful if the official webwallet had functioning trades BTW). Also in the webwallet advertise the forum here as the "help and resources" section. That would add a lot of community traffic, and your existing community (possible exception of newminer) would gladly help you on board them.
I would also do what CEX.io did, create an attractive interactive banner that your community can launch. Preferably something that ties in some stat from their own web-wallets, such as current interest rates on pegged assets. (note I have no idea how you would actually go about pulling that off). It would be great if you could add a sweetener to the deal such as "Get 10% bonus BTS when someone clicks your banner and opens a new account."
Let your community do the advertising for you. Heck if you did something innovative in this space, you would probably own the entire crypto market! You have a fantastic product and you have a solid community now!
Your existing users are mostly die-hards who have been here since the beginning. There are people here who have already taken $10k - $20k hits just because you have their respect. Give these guys a proper affiliate system and you'll need to look at server upgrades within a week or two just to handle the traffic.
Furthermore, most of the resources like the wiki are out of date. Speaking as someone who is actually trying to build something on top of your product, it is horribly off-puting when I go to read up on how things work only to see a big red "This information is out of date and no longer accurate" at the top. Ok it's inaccurate. Where can I go get the current scoop? I dunno. I ended up having to read the source code to figure things out. Most project managers considering your platform are abandoning you at this stage. It's something you can do, should be easy to do, please fix it right away.
You have created a "money" product, we would all appreciate it if this product worked correctly every time, little things like having to manually subtract the fee from a trade in the wallet, really detract from the usability of one click trading. If there is a fee, just charge it. I've put in all my money on the trade. If there are insufficient funds to execute that trade, then just have UI calculate the max trade, because that's kind of the assumption. Back to the order screen, if there isn't enough depth to support my order, it would be great if there were way to just buy the entire market out right there without having a huge chunk left sitting over in "unfilled" orders.
Also the tiny "confirm" button pops up under sales. Give me a GREAT BIG DIALOG that says "Hey MORON, you are about to trade all your BTS for the price of a single grain of rice, are you sure this is a real thing you want to do?"
Operationally there is more that can be done as well.
Instead of focusing on marketing you are relying primarily on a subset of your user base called delegates.
These guys are supposed to be doing the marketing because it's supposedly in their best interests.
But in reality it's not in THEIR best interests, it's in the best interests of the community at large.
The part you missed is that there is no way to tie a delegate's marketing efforts to a delegate's income. Yet the only way to mine BTS is to become one of the "blessed". That method is off putting to libertarian crypto-anarchists who view it as a "mini-fed", and it's unattractive to the small time miner who might otherwise like to put their efforts towards securing the network, since you need so many resources + network effects just to get into the blessed "delegate" category. This has the effect of encouraging delegates to only do the minimum to become one, and will probably end badly.
My opinion is that the current delegate functions should be broken up into several separate functions that can all be sub-delegated, then compensated for independently. Also again, income should be tied to the users they bring in, not the number of blocks that they sign, if they are also going to be tasked with bringing in new users.
I've looked at the code though and it would probably be a huge effort to retool just to break delegates into categories like that.
So if you're going to have delegates doing everything they currently do, then doing everything should be enforced at the software level, not through user voting.
"Oh so you're a delegate who isn't publishing a price feed?"
Sure let users vote them in, but when they start to suck, the network itself should give them the boot.
The place where all of this is falling down is the delegate process itself.
Once a delegate is in place, they have no further incentive to continue to advertise outside the community itself. No company wants to step into anything and advertise "for the good of everyone". Especially when they can be voted out at a moment's notice and thus loose all future income.
Your final problem is that the price of BTS has been on a downward trajectory since inception.
The price is falling because you are printing WAY too much money for the market to absorb right now.
This new money is effectively devaluing the BTS of every person or company that takes a chance and decides to hold any.
You need to find a way to slow production right now, and mop it up so that the price ceases to fall, or even your diehards are going to walk away to something else. People don't want to buy an asset in continual decline. I personally hold some 50,000 BTS, but I hold it exclusively in bitUSD right now. If the price continues to decline, I'm going to end up with a whole lot more BTS, which is a great thing for my business from a liquid assets standpoint, since we are selling BTS to our customers at a fixed price, but makes it a real hard sell to convince my customers to buy a bunch.
Stop printing so much money, cut the block rewards to next to nothing.
It will force out delegates that are doing this out of direct self interest.
It will attract those willing to do it as a community effort and also those for whom running a delegate is a loss leader.
For instance, our business plan requires us to run at least one delegate node anyways, and I can envision half a dozen other commercial interests that would run one as a loss leader as well.
Even without it being a loss leader. delegates can make money a lot of ways including trading fees and UIA creation fees.
I assert that terminating the block reward so new money is not printed every few seconds, would cause the value of existing currency to rebound and stabilize.
Finally, you need to work to mop up all the current excess.
You need this...
We are building one of these...
We hope it will help, and we're pretty confident that it will. However we don't expect to be the only players in this space.
In summation...
If you want BTS to take off you need to make it attractive and easy to use.
Pricing and community are huge components of that attractiveness.
Liquidity is a direct component of pricing.
Get more gateways and other commercial interests on board and dump the delegates not actually contributing.
Finally, ease of use and exposure are key to community building.
Fix those and your problems are gone.
Just my 2 BTS.
Topic: Why BitShares isn't Taking off and What we are doing about it. (Read 45105 times)
