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'ĂȘtre.
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.