I leave town for one day and you all let the bottom fall out.
If there is a market need for what BitShares solves then BTS has a future. If there isn't a market need then it will remain small serving a niche. The need for BTS is in times of crisis where decentralized exchanges are needed because all of the centralized exchanges fall down.
.. then lets make try and make the front end as easy and intuitive as possible for the non technical folks who dont give a damn about trading and just want to salvage whatever worthless dollars they still have in to gold and silver. [/color] I can do this in less that 5 clicks with bitreserve.
BM just said bitshares gains it's value from being an exchange when all centralized exchanges fail... that would lead me to believe we should skip making it for the average idiot, and tailor it to traders.
Metatrader 4 is the best trading platform I have used. It's intuitive yet advanced. Indicators are easy to write in mql4 and the barrier to entry is low. There have been thousands of indicators created by regular traders. I know people think poloniex has a great interface, but to tell you the truth, it's garbage. It's boring, plain, and isn't even on par with basic broker platforms from companies like e-trade much less something like Metatrader.
If I showed the current interface to forex traders they would laugh. There are no indicators(not even a moving average), no ability to zoom or pan, orders can't be executed by clicking on the chart, there is no line on the chart indicating where your open positions cost is, no active P/L, no grid option, no dynamic scaling, no ability to change bar colors, no ability to change to line or OHLC style charts. And I can't stress enough that if you want to appeal to traders you need to be able to accommodate stop and take profit orders for open positions! This is by far the main and most important thing to get functioning if you want traders. Most of the other stuff a trader doesn't absolutely need to trade, but they need stops and take profits.
Seriously just look at metatrader 4... download it and open a demo account from one of the dozens of forex brokers that use metatrader as their platform (I use FXCM and Forex.com). Give it a test run and you will see what trading platform needs to be at a minimum. Unless we don't want traders, then all this is null and void.