Thanks guys, very impressed with all the answers. Its a good community it seems. I am sure I will have more questions in the coming days as I think over investing, but for starters.
Glad to have you! I respect ripple as well, its a good technology that's actually being put to use.
If it had a market cap more similar to BTS, I would have bought a lot of ripple. But as it is, with an eventual supply of 100B XRP, counting the ripple labs stake, the true market cap is about $850M or so now, or about 50-60x the market cap of BTS. As a result I consider BTS severely undervalued in comparison. (Though I do think Ripple should be worth more at present, because it is further along. Bitshares is still a beta product awaiting release). Is ripple really 50 times more likely to succeed than BTS? Thats what the market cap valuation is saying currently. I disagree, therefore I hold BTS. But if BTS was worth $850M and ripple was worth $15M, I'd sell some BTS to buy XRP. I do own a few ripple because I like to own a bit of any decent cryptocurrency with good features. NXT also, and some others.
1.) Ripple is centralized now, yet they are in the process of testing and creating decentralized nodes to remove this centralization. I am no die hard XRP fan boy trying to spread FUD into the BTS community, but when this occurs, what benefit will BTS have over XRP? XRP has the same abilities to create IOU's and pegged assets. To me it seems the best angle BTS has would be to go the consumer/public route while Ripple continues to make way with FI's.
Thats a good step. Benefits of BTS over ripple that I see are:
* No centralized control of the supply. The largest holder is probably the ~3% that the lead dev controls. There are probably a couple entities around this range. Thats less than Satoshi owns, so imo it is a reasonable distribution.
* Financial Institutions have incentive to use Bitshares and convert all of their customers into Bitshares users, because in bitshares 2.0 they get a cut of all the fees of those they refer, up to 80%. Therefore a financial institution that uses Bitshares as its backend gets 80% of the fees. The bitshares blockchain gets the other 20%. Compare this to ripple where a financial institution adopting the ripple protocol, which is asked to buy XRP tokens in order to use ripple.
* Bitshares 2.0 claims to be able to support 100k transactions per second at 1 second confirmation time.
* Perhaps most importantly, again, BTS is 1/50 the price of XRP for the same percent stake in the network, so even if XRP is better, if you think its less than 50x better than BTS, you would be justified in at least diversifying some.
2.) Using XRP as an example, $1 is widely considered the bench mark of success, the end value so to speak. However the broader range I have seen has been between 1 and 7 USD. Mathematically speaking, I believe like ~$20 dollars is the uppermost limit of feasibility. Do you guys have any such speculative values for BTS? What is your "end value"?
There is only about 1 BTS per 40 XRP in eventual existence. Or maybe 30:1 if you count possible future BTS inflation (if shareholders vote for it). So if Bitshares succeeds at the same level you are hoping for $1 XRP, you would be looking at $30-40 BTS. That said, $1 would be plenty to blow the minds of most BTS holders, I think.
If you consider that BTS is the collateral used to support the creation of market assets in the Bitshares blockchain, and thus a minimum value of BTS is required to support the existence of these assets, if you imagine that Bitshares was to completely, 100% succeed, and gain a significant chunk of the trade of current financial systems such as forex, nasdaq, etc, then to represent all these assets on the bitshares blockchain, the value of BTS would need to be huge.
Back in the day (last summer), when BTS valuation was decent and people were excited about hte price, there was a saying among the chinese BTS community "BTS is worth 500 dollars properly properly". Because the chinese character for dollars and the character for knives is similar (?), this would get mistranslated as "500 knives properly properly", which was pretty funny. So someone would ask what people thought one BTS would be worth if it succeeded, and they would answer "500 knives".
Fantasizing about future BTS prices has sadly been lost in the brutality of the bear market. The price now is at a massive discount to where most of the community got in. A significant discount to the IPO price even. Newcomers get in so cheap nowadays.
Topic: Questions from a beginner (Read 4629 times)
