Bytemaster offered his vision for the next year in a
blog post. It wasn't exactly what I was hoping for, so this is my attempt to offer an alternative.
While I don't want to exactly oppose the idea of
Mutual Aid Societies (MAS) that will be Bytemaster's focus on the 2016, I consider it to be highly risky. The biggest reason is that I predict that it will require an enormous amount of work until it can bring any meaningful profit for Bitshares. In my opinion, MAS project should be delayed for at least a year or two.
Secondly, I don't find the hippie style rhetoric very convincing. I don't oppose helping people and spreading peace and love to the world – but first and foremost we are trying to do business here.
So what is my vision?
Bitshares has always been to me a way to do a profitable financial revolution.
I don't propably need to warn you that the next financial crisis is lurking behind the curtains. You already know that, you've been waiting for it for a while now. It may or may not hit in the 2016, but we have to be ready for it.
Millions of people are going to be betrayed by their banks and governments. They will crave for better, fairer and more transparent banking and financial institutions that can replace the old and corrupted ones. But are governments going to make them? Of course not, they will just bail out the old ones.
I firmly believe that Bitshares can offer powerful financial tools for average person. We can be the platform where people can come to find help when their national money systems start to shake.
For all of you compassionate hippies, doesn't this sound good? Mutual Aid Society might give you brief relief when you suffer from economic crisis. But in the long run it's much more important to get the economy running again, this time preferably with more stable and secure foundation.
For all of you greedy bastards, doesn't this sound good? You'll have an unrestricted financial platform where you can make money by serving all these people looking for better services that will help them to keep on going with their lives. Make a new useful financial instrument, market it well and you can become filthy rich.
We all are both of those. We want to help other people, but we also want to get rich. Bitshares will enable you to do both at the same time.
This requires focusing on profitable services that common people can use. I can't stress enough that profitability should be the guiding principle here. If we are not making money, we are not offering a good service.
Why for a common people and not for the banks, you may ask? Because in reality banks are not interested in open blockchains that they cannot control themselves. It's useless to keep wishing that some day a big bank will come and move all their financials to our blockchain. Not going to happen.
That's why we have to think how we can create services and financial instruments that are useful for ordinary people.
We can help them to make business with price stable currencies, webwallets, point-of-sale systems, stealth transfers, etc. We can let anybody be a trader – no questions asked, just open the wallet and start trading. We can offer saving instruments for people who are afraid that their national currencies will fail, but aren't ready to invest in highly volatile cryptocurrencies.
Why Bitshares, then? What is our "unfair advantage"?
We have the best blockchain at the moment. Because of formalized governance model we can actually make all kind of changes quite painlessly. We can adapt and add new features. Just look at Bitcoin right now – they have been fighting about blocksize for months without any progress. With committee and workers we can implement any changes to the blockchain very easily. Fee Backed Assets will give more flexibility to the funding, no need to do everything as charity.
And we don't even have to fight over blocksize. Why? Because we have the fastest blockchain already. We are ready to welcome millions of users.
The Bitshares exchange will be the centerpiece of all this.
Let's embrace the fact that Bitshares exchange is a derivatives exchange rather than try to change it to be something else.
If we use the exchange only as a platform to trade other cryptocurrencies, I agree that it will not be very profitable (we have been discussing this on the forum lately). But the whole global derivatives market is
HUGE. We should be going that direction rather than trying to capture the small niche market of altcoins.
Our exchange is very versatile platform that can be used to create and trade basically any kind of derivative. Let's focus on that and think how we can create markets that don't exist at the moment in the cryptosphere.
On a sidenote: I think that we should stop using the term "decentralized exchange" or DEX. Decentralization isn't really that good selling point for the exchange. Most people don't give a crap if the exchange is decentralized or not, they just want to know if they can make money by using it. That's why I suggest that we use just "Bitshares exchange" or BEX. Of course it still is decentralized and we can tell that to potential customers if they ask, but let's not emphasize it as the most important feature of the exchange. The point is all those hundreds of financial instruments that already exist or can be created easily.
So what should we do?
Anything that will bring paying customers. Focus on all projects that look promising. Our main objective should be getting out as many useful products and services as possible, as fast as possible. Many of them will fail, but with continuous trial and error I believe we can find something that will bring profits.
When evaluating business ideas, ask first how fast they can bring real users and real profits. I would rather see many small products that make money from the day one, rather than big ideas that might be very profitable someday far in the future.
Don't expect big banks or corporations getting interested in our products and services. Develop and market them for common people and small businesses.
Our market cap has been falling for too long. Time to get it up again.
I'm not a developer or a rich person who can fund all of this. This has been my attempt to inspire you all to build a better, profitable and useful blockchain for 2016.
Who is with me?
Topic: An alternative vision for Bitshares 2016 (Read 4625 times)
