BitShares Reform: Solving its Identity Crisis and Establishing a Brand.

[Akado]

We really need ui/ux team to go through are fix the wallet.

Moonstone is the answer for that, but until then... If they only deliver during the summer or later, we Will continue with this problem

[Empirical1.2]

What Bitshares is?

The simplest answer: Decentralized Exchange.

I think BTS should first and foremost be considered a Decentralized BANK & Exchange. The man in the street wants a safe place to store money but VERY FEW of them have ever used an 'Exchange'.

BitShares offers a bank account that earns 5% interest where funds can be transferred in minutes seconds anywhere in the world with more privacy and security than a Swiss bank account.  Your account can never be frozen, your funds cannot be seized, and the bank can never face collapse due to loan defaults or fraud.  All of this is made possible without requiring any employees, lawyers, regulatory compliance, vaults, buildings, and other infrastructure required by traditional banks.  Unlike existing banks, you can hold your balance denominated in gold, silver, oil, or other commodities in additional to national currencies.

 

*It's highly likely, the actual Fort Knox is quite empty but the idea/metaphor of BTS being your own personal vault is a strong one imo.
*I've crossed out interest but with a yield subsidy it's actually possible https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21641.0.html
*Also I'm aware there are legal issues with describing yourself as a bank. 

[liondani]

What Bitshares is?

The simplest answer: Decentralized Exchange.

I really think THAT is our problem!
Nobody believes we are DECENTRALIZED enough with only 23 entity's/witnesses the majority of them are controlled from somebody called... bytemaster (or at least they believe they are)...

simple as that...

PS try to think outside the box

[BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode]

My impression is I saw person A say [this is the problem I see] responded with [no everything is fine] and person B says [this is hard and inconsistent] responded with [were not perfect but getting better].

That doesn't seem like feedback is being listened to, that seems like hand waving and people just walk away.

You hit the nail on the head.. twice.. also with your last post.

Much of the discussion/feedback goes just like that.. no real feedback from real market research is done.. everyone just like to hear their ideas and validate them.

There are some good ideas sure.. but like you said.. its a handful of people validating their ideas among themselves deciding how the rest of the world works and what is a winning plan.

The identity problem as this thread hopes to solve is not something we need to fit what we have into.. it needs to be something people can identify with that we can then reach for. With a little business model canvasing and some real market research we could get it done right.

It's easier just to write on the back of a napkin though and declare it awesome. Easier often wins.

[Pheonike]

We really need ui/ux team to go through are fix the wallet.

[mike623317]

With all of these pending bail-ins and negative interest rates, a decentralized bank is huge. If we just had a BitShares Bank with a sexy front end and some nice on-off ramps i'm sure that in itself would be absolutely huge.

[noisy]

My impression is I saw person A say [this is the problem I see] responded with [no everything is fine] and person B says [this is hard and inconsistent] responded with [were not perfect but getting better].

That doesn't seem like feedback is being listened to, that seems like hand waving and people just walk away.

if you are referring to my answer on reddit... then you are absolutely right. I should handle this differently. Actually I deleted my old response and wrote a new one. Sorry for that and thank you that you remind me... that we should take care about quality everywhere.

[pam2]

Exchanges, hedge funds, banks, etc, all using BitShares via

This is not going to happen, because all of them need privacy among other things. They will rather wait when Hyperledger or whatever that IBM thing is called will be ready.

Banks might, but hedge funds, speculators, can be just about anyone. The fact it is decentralized means its trustless, there is no need for identity to be known during trades.

On more specific cases maybe contracts could be done. Still, that's something far ahead and who knows if we or someone else can't come up with the tech to achieve that.

We are still in the very beginning.

Don't we have stealth? maybe it could be upgraded in the future and be used for whatever needs banks need.

I would vote for bitshares to stay a financial platform for small people. Those oligarchs already have one and they are happy with it. Things like micro-payments, micro-investments, crowdlending, crowdfunding etc could be in demand if implemented correctly. This is imo, of course.

I agree, we have a great product with extraodinary features. We should work on easy of use. I see BitShares as an open financial platform for Small Business, Communities, Cooperatives and this is huge as market since they are not serve. Going for big businesses would not be a good strategy. Most of our products and assets target small business (POS, UIA, Referal Program, Reward Base Program, MAS, Decentralize Exchange).  Other crypto-platform have not build something that can be sold/present to local or small business. Our target market will keep us focus. We don't have an identity issue, BitShares is moving, but lack marketing and user friendly solution. Next week I'm starting a BitShares meeting group here in Montreal to share with some bitcoin community some Bitshares features and what make it different...Will love to show a nice mobile apps and get attendees send/receive some BTS, unfortunately our mobile wallet still in beta. I like the idea of presentating BTS as a share in in Decentralize Corporation.  Bitshares is easy to sell to non-crypto users or communities but we neeed to have ease of use. Do any one know about the cost of developing a great mobile apps?  kind like this ethereum bitcoin wallet... http://jaxx.io/

[Stan]

This is a fantastic thread full of thoughtful ideas presented in a constructive way.

I wish we had more of these.

[clemahieu]

My impression is I saw person A say [this is the problem I see] responded with [no everything is fine] and person B says [this is hard and inconsistent] responded with [were not perfect but getting better].

That doesn't seem like feedback is being listened to, that seems like hand waving and people just walk away.

[noisy]

And... here we have just yet another example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitShares/comments/48o71s/im_quite_sure_this_project_will_go_to_shit_if_it/

people want to have simplicity first! MVP!

[giant middle finger]

Darkthereum!

[noisy]

What Bitshares is?

The simplest answer: Decentralized Exchange.

This is strong, simple, and... anyone from cryptocurrency world understand words like "decentralized" and "exchange". Everyone can pitch Bitshares with simple single sentence:

"Never Ever.... MtGox"

Bitshares is aiming to solve the real problem... and you have to remember that resolving a problem - a fear of loosing money on centralized exchange - is the easiest way to convinced someone to try a "solution for a problem".

So... where is the problem?

Bitshares NEVER had an MVP version.

You might be surprised, by the definition what a MVP actually is, because you actually do not now, I am sure about that. I thought that I knew a definition... but I had to run my own starup and lost all my saving and funding to really understand what a MVP is.

"Minimum Viable Product" is not an alpha or beta version which has "all cool features" which are going to be LE-GEN-DA-RY.

No.

- Predition Market
- Bond Market
- Lending
- etc...

and all that staff should never be developed before a completed MVP version.

So what a MVP actually is?

This is that 20% of product, which brings 80% of users and income. But this is not enough. MVP is the foundations for further development.

What are the most two important properties of foundation? Stability and Easy of use.

Then you have to ask, do we actually have any of that properties? Sadly, no. At least not yet.


Let's start from the beggining:

Easy of Use

What the bitshares is? Decentralize Exchange.

When I want to use an exchange, the first thing is: I have to deposit some funds.

Question number one:
How can I do that? I have some bitcoins and some dollars.

Current sad answer:
you have to send BTC... and then you will get some OPEN.BTC or META.BTC... What the heck is OPEN.BTC or META.BTC? How it is different from BTC. Why I cannot just deposit a bitcoin and get an normal BTC?

If you want to deposit USD... exactly the same happen. What the heck is OPEN.USD?

Another bad answer is.... you have to buy BTS fist on another exchange, to issue some BTC by borrowing. What that mean? What that issueing is? Why I have to borrow anything? Wait a minute... this BTC which I wanted to buy is not a real BTC? What a SCAM!!!

That is the reason why we actually need a Sidechain. Not because it will be fancy.. etc... but because then we will have real BTC... no more confusion!

BTW.. Do we even measuring what is our "sign up"/"first deposit" ratio? How many of 100 new users actually deposit anything? On which page they decided to leave an exchange? Even small startups use some tools like Google Analitics to analyse that. How we can improve something what we do not know how bad it is?

Stability

Today I have pitched one more time one of the most important player on the Polish CryptoCurrency market - InPay. To give you a little bit more context... this is the first and only company in Poland, which got individual TAX interpretation from Nationall Tax Office, that in InPay's case mean.. bitcoin can be treated as currency. Every other Polish cryptocurrency company... are actually registered abroad, to avoid not clear TAX interpretation.



Every serious IT project know... that if you want to have small amount of bugs you should test you project regularly and offten. Right now none of bitshares/CNX repository do have integrated automated runner of unittests. Unittests should be run after each commit.

There are some good sings.. that we actually started to tests things before a release... I mean Stealth Feature. But that would not be possible without a public testnet... which was not present till January!

But testing features just before a release is actually too late! There should be no possibility to merge anything to main branch without Pull Request. Each Pull Request should get a Code Review and confirmation that manual "Quality Assurance" were performed on test net without any problems.

Summary:

Let's build first Stable Decentralized Exchange and Stable and Easy to Use Wallet.

Bitshares has no identity crisis.. Bitshares is a Decentralize Exchange.

[clemahieu]

FWIW my impression from BTS is it's centered around bells and whistles announcements from a small group rather than soliciting feedback from the broader audience and focusing on a beachhead use case.

Circling the wagons and trumpeting advertisements works for a time until people don't want to participate anymore.

[Thom]

People would immediately associate BitShares with financial markets...

I wouldn't exactly call that a "niche". I also think Empirical1.2 mis-characterized Bitcoin's niche saying it is "gold". It always has been currency, a payment system.

Akado you are expressing the same frustrations many of us here have had for a long time now. Your analogy of the CEO that lacked focus and liked to experiment is extremely apropos to how BitShares has been led so far. But in defense of BM & CNX nobody has figured out the crypto space for business yet, every single project has it's blindsides and failure points. The good news is despite such failures slowly but surely crypto is winning the infowar and waking people up. Bitcoin is far from perfect but it's working and has spawned the birth of a new era of freedom. It's truly exciting to be a part of this revolution, struggle tho we may.

I TOTALLY agree we need focus, and that correlates to strong leadership, but not like the CEO in your analogy. Stan & Dan have thus far failed to do what it takes to win hearts & minds of even the crypto enthusiasts let alone the bigger audience of the industry BitShares is trying to disrupt, "Financial Markets" with their inherent corruption and worship of regulation and authority.

I don't hold back my disappointment in Stan & Dan's leadership b/c their failure is obvious to almost everybody. Could I do better? Absolutely not. Are they grounded in sound principles and have a worthy goal. I believe their efforts are aimed at achieving it, or I wouldn't still be here, contributing as I can to make it happen. Have they given up yet or do they persevere and continue making attempts to attain that goal the best way they know how to? I give Stan & Dan major cudos in even starting BitShares, and even more for their stamina and unfaltering adherence to the core goal of building a true free market system for trading value without the heavy hand of regulatory compliance.

They could have ditched the principles and pivoted to a new goal, selling out to fully and totally embrace those espoused by Identibit but chose instead to draw a line of demarcation between total regulatory compliance and identity registration and the roots and foundation BitShares laid down from the start which is to provide a free market solution b/c that's what the world needs. Everyone serious in the crypto space that is awake to what is wrong in this world knows that and wants to disrupt the financial status quo to empower freedom loving individuals and dethrone the sick, corrupt oligarchs that only want to enslave mankind.

I am totally shocked at why BitShares continues to be the black sheep of crypto and overlooked for any consideration aside from disdain and ridicule.

As Rodney Dangerfield often complained, "What will it take to get some respect around here anyway?"

I just don't know.