I haven't forgotten the DEX, it is a critical component. I have just learned through experience that selling a DEX is a hard niche market.
Please, someone tell me the market value of Poloniex.. how much is their exchange worth? How much is BitStamp worth? BitFinex? The combined revenue of all crypto currency exchanges is less than $25 million per year. If we assume these exchanges operate with a 50% profit margin then that means $12 million per year in profit. Based upon a 5% dividend, this would put the combined value of all exchanges in the cryptocurrency space at $240M dollars and my guess is that is very high.
So if BitShares grew to become the only exchange in the entire market it would be worth at most 24x its current valuation.
For me the DEX itself has never been the actual product that I've been trying to sell people. I fully agree that there is only a handful of people who are interested in trading cryptocurrencies and that really is a small niche market.
Instead I've tried to sell all those financial instruments that the DEX enables or could enable in the future. Smartcoins are great for average Joe, they can have all the benefits that bitcoin has with price stability. With bond market, UIAs, FBAs, etc. they can eventually move pretty much all of their own personal economy to the Bitshares blockchain.
The next financial crisis is coming. Instead of just trying to help people who will suffer from it, we should be focusing on building a better financial platform. We have to be ready to welcome millions of people who will be betrayed by their banks and governments. IMO that is a lot more effective way of helping than just giving some money to suffering people.
For me Bitshares has been the best way to make profitable financial revolution. I hope it will remain like that in the future too.
I think somebody here has said "go big or go home". That's the thinking I'd like to apply to the DEX. Let's not get stuck into that what it could do right now for the cryptotraders, but let's try to use it for something much bigger financial instruments. Morpheus mentioned the derivatives market, I also consider it as the gold mine.
Just look at
this infographic.
Bitcoin is valued because of the COMMUNITY of freedom activists that are using it and promoting it. It has no revenue based valuation. A DEX doesn't inspire a community following like Bitcoin has.
Nope. I have to strongly disagree here.
While I still hang out with bitcoinists and agree that there are lots of good people there, I think the whole community sucks. Just look at how they are debating right now about blocksize. Full of arrogant people who can't reach a consensus on a civilized manner (of course a big deal here is that Bitcoin doesn't actually have any mechanisms to make decisions on the blockchain level like Bitshares has, that makes this whole thing more difficult).
And most of Bitcoin's value comes from people who don't care about freedom, they just want to get rich. They are waiting for price to go up. If you remove all these investors and speculators, Bitcoin will lose most of it's value immediately.
This is why I think Bitshares also needs people who just want to get rich. If we build a community that consists of only freedom fighters, it will be very small and poor community.
My initial reaction to this new vision is that you are shifting away from making the blockchain and businesses around it profitable to build some kind of hippiestyle "peace & love, let's help each others" community.
You have to also remember that building a community (mainly) for libertarians is really hard. Libertarians are like cats, it's almost impossible to herd them.