In his book Zero to One Peter Thiel gives one advice that might be useful for Bitshares: start small and monopolize.
This means that a startup business should try to find a small audience that it can serve really well. Paypal did this with eBay powersellers – people who were selling lots of stuff on eBay. After three months of dedicated effort, 25 % of them were Paypal users. Before Paypal the payment processing of eBay deals was really a pain in the ass, so it made a big difference and it wasn't that hard to acquire new active users. Of course, when the sellers were using Paypal, also the buyers started to use it.
Can we find the poweruser group for Bitshares? Are there people who would greatly benefit from our services? If we find that group, devs should let them be the top priority for a while. After we have the initial traction, we can start to scale up and concentrate on other users/markets.
Actually PayPal apparently cheated it's way to those power users by tricking them into thinking a lot of buyers wanted to use PayPal.
In the book, Paypal Wars, Eric M. Jackson talks about how PayPal grew a base of sellers who accepted PayPal by creating demand for the service among buyers. When Paypal figured that eBay was their key distribution platform, they came up with an ingenious plan to simulate demand. They created a bot that bought goods on eBay and then, insisted on paying for it using PayPal. Not only did sellers come to know about the service, they rushed onto it as it already seemed to be getting popular. The fact that it was way better than every other payment mechanism on eBay only helped repeated usage.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140524020851-6170480-how-paypal-and-reddit-faked-their-way-to-traction?forceNoSplash=trueAs far as DACs go, they're an incredibly sub-optimal way to run a business. Their major advantage is how hard they are to shut down and sieze. So while there are a few promising areas, you really want to offer products and services some people would rather you didn't. The alternative is spending a fortune on development to recreate what often trusted and legal centralised options already offer & so having to compete against them on price.
No. 1 for me has always been gambling. You'll see in that article it also talks about how hard it is to gain traction in a two way platform (one that requires you to attract buyers and sellers) whereas with gambling, the blockchain is the house and only requires that you attract punters.
Given how huge a market gambling is, how many have online restrictions & a blockchains ability to vastly undercut margins in that area, be provably fair, private and safe. It's a no brainer that the first DAC billionaires will be created on the back of gambling.
(Augur will be taking a 5-10% sports betting cost and drop it to 1%. Centralized Lotteries which take up to 50% can be reduced to 1%. Centralized Poker sites which charge 5% which can be reduced to 1%. Dice and other games of chance can be reduced to fractions of percent too. Roulette will go from 3% to a fraction of a percent too etc.)
I still think crypto-currency itself can be improved on as through the use of revenue sharing models, referral programmes & profits even a crypto-currency can attract users and have a rocked out blockchain with BitAssets and other great innovations. I still think BTSX was on track to rapidly become a billion dollar crypto-currency. I must say elements of POW have grown on me though after detesting it for two years as I appreciate that coin holders want to be passive not active which DPOS and POS require & established POW coins would have great trouble ever changing their supply structure which is good as like BTSX that is what forms the backbone of their valuations. (Even DAC's, like BTS, primarily because of lack of legal fallback, convulse around issues pertaining to creation and distribution of shares and so prefer certainty in this area far more than their centralized counterparts.)
There's obviously a market for being able to keep, send, spend millions of USD/other privately all around the world in seconds outside the existing banking system. So in terms of BitShares power users. I would just continue focusing on being able to offer private, liquid, easy to use BitUSD, BitCNY and BitGold with easy off-ramps. Switzerland was built off the back of private banking & BTS will have the ability to offer
Switzerland on the blockchain. Uphold (formerly BitReserve) is supposedly the fastest growing money platform in the world atm through it's offering of centralized BitAssets accessible via Bitcoin. Despite their questionable structure, NuBits volume at times is also promising. So I'm confident the BitAsset market leader will be huge in a few years (though I still think it like Bitcoin may gain initial traction through gambling use cases.)
Topic: Who are (or who could be) the powerusers of Bitshares? (Read 4032 times)
