Emphasis should be on UIAs, not SmartCoins (at this initial stage)

[Samupaha]

I quote myself from another thread:

What is the value of bitBTC? Why would anybody want to acquire it?

For a common user bitBTC doesn't offer any benefit. It can be used only in the Bitshares exchange, compared to real BTC that can be used for many different things like buying stuff online.

So basically bitBTC is useful for only (1) traders, (2) who use Bitshares DEX and (3) want to avoid counterparty risk that UIA-BTC has. That's a quite small market segment. Do we really want to serve them well in this point or rather focus on other things that might bring greater benefits for more users?

This means that we should forget smartcoins for other cryptocurrencies. There is just no use for them. Bitcoin has so big market cap that it is in "maybe" category, but every other is just waste of resources.

Also, what if we have a smartcoin for a small market cap coin, and that smartcoin will gain huge traction? That means everybody will sell the real coin and buy the smartcoin, which will of course create a chaotic situation and the price will crash.

And we have to remember that (in theory) there is no upper limit for how much smartcoins we can borrow into existence in the Bitshares blockchain. If we have a smartcoin for really small market cap coin, we can get into a situation where there exists more smartcoins than real coins. Only limiting factor is how much there are BTS in the markets to be used for creation of smartcoins. Right now we have so small market cap that this isn't a real threat, but it might be in the future when we grow huge. Market manipulators might use this as a weapon against smaller coins.

So we should be using smartcoins only for assets and currencies that have way more bigger market cap than us, like USD, EUR and CNY.

[JonnyB]

What has been agreed with regard to the UI? When does it get open sourced and how much is the community paying for it to CMX?

[Xeldal]

I agree UIA is under utilized and under appreciated as a stepping stone to smartcoins.   

I agree that UIA are the only way we will get traction to begin with, however having mulitple gateways is confusing.

when I go on openledger why can I see the tradeblock and metaexchange gateways. It's confusing.

Also all the "markets with stars"  should trade as pairs only with OPEN.BTC so it replicates the experience of trading on poloniex

Thats a fair point.  If its purely an OpenLedger wallet, it would serve there interests to prominently feature its own products.  As it is, its more of a generic wallet featuring all products, which could be confusing.    OL may wish to continue supporting the other gateways/bridges for referral income purposes but I would understand if they decided to heavily gear the UX towards OPENxxx Assets and markets.

If the UI code is freely available, I'd expect to see many iterations available all specifically tailored to their own particular offerings.

[JonnyB]

I agree that UIA are the only way we will get traction to begin with, however having mulitple gateways is confusing.

when I go on openledger why can I see the tradeblock and metaexchange gateways. It's confusing.

Also all the "markets with stars"  should trade as pairs only with OPEN.BTC so it replicates the experience of trading on poloniex

[rgcrypto]

I am too getting to this conclusion but for a different market than the financial system.

[Louis]

 

Very good point.

UIA have so many possibilities if you really think about it.

[jakub]

Why use smart coins at all? Should the community be encouraging the use of UIA coins? Yield was the reason to buy and hold them in bitshares 1.0 (it didn't make sense to short them in that case, though)

Smartcoins are great invention but you have some good points here. Maybe we should try to get as much UIAs to the exchange first, and after we have more users and better overall liquidity, we'll move to emphasizing smartcoins.
Smartcoins seem to be quite difficult task when we have only few users. Or maybe the whole concept still needs some tweaking to get the incentives right?

I've just had a conversation about BitShares with a friend of mine and we arrived at exactly the same conclusion as Samupaha and maqifrnswa stated above - at this stage UIAs are the key, not SmartCoins.
It sounds like blasphemy, especially to me as I've always thought SmartCoins are the single most important product of BitShares, its raison d'être.

This conclusion came to me as I started to "sell" BitShares to business people. And it turns out they don't really care about bitUSD or bitEUR.
But when I tell them we could have eBay.USD or Apple.USD or your-local-brand.EUR and transfer & trade these assets on one platform - then I get their attention, they immediately start thinking how those UIAs could be used for marketing purposes for their issuers.

For them bitUSD is the same as "BitShares.USD" - an asset backed by an unknown blockchain entity with a relatively low market valuation.

That was a bit of an eye opener for me. Maybe we are currently putting emphasis on the wrong product.
We (the community) value SmartCoins because we think it is such a brilliant invention.
But for the outside world SmartCoins are nothing more than UIAs backed by something which is very strange & risky and additionally has low valuation.

I think time will come when SmartCoins can realize their full potential but this time is not now.
First we need multiple UIAs issued by some established real-life entities to prove BitShares potential as an efficient and safe exchange
And once the BitShares DAC gets a decent recognition and market valuation - then SmartCoins will be able to start playing their (well deserved) role.

So we have the perfect product (i.e. SmartCoins) but we are trying to sell it too early in our business development cycle.
First we need to build our empire as a decentralized exchange for UIAs. And once we are successful with that, SmartCoins will start to shine as the most desired assets on the BitShares platform because they are guaranteed by the platform itself.