Ethereum has a big market cap because for years everybody was fantasizing about what this could become. but in reality it is not used for anything right now... and as there is almost no scalability I think it will never be used for anything but speculation...
I partially agree with this, but I also think it is foolishly too confident of a statement. I have my own problems with Ethereum's design. But it is important to remember that Ethereum is a moving target.
They are actually spending funds to innovate (admittedly that is easier to do when their holders aren't dumping their asset to oblivion). The Ethereum devs are doing research on improving scalability, and they currently have the capital to sustain that. I think it is foolish to discount the possibility that they might succeed in changing their designs in the future to fix scalability problems.
Lisk is a lot smarter in several things than Ethereum and it might be used someday for something.
I have strong opinions on platforms like Lisk. They are doing it all wrong IMHO.
If you are interested, first read Dan's post:
https://steemit.com/lisk/@dan/why-lisk-is-inferior-to-ethereumand then read my comment on another similar project (Rise) here:
https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@liondani/rise-crowdsale-is-open#
@arhag/re-liondani-rise-crowdsale-is-open-20160602t145546425z
Also Bitcoin is on top because of its liquidity. Chinese cannot enter and exit Bitshares without moving the price at this point. They use it for protection from devaluation from CNY... but you cannot pump even a million USD in Bitshares without doubling the market cap. So for this type of usage they have to use Bitcoin until volume and market cap goes up for BitShares.
You are talking about liquidity of the BTS token. Sure that isn't very liquid but ultimately I don't think that liquidity is the main issue. The bigger issue is the lack of liquidity in the markets on our DEX for tokens like smartcoins and other UIA assets. So how do we bootstrap liquidity? First, the platform must be attractive enough for traders to use. Why are traders not using the DEX? That is something we need to figure out.
The truth is that, despite what people in the cryptocurrency crowd say, decentralization is not valuable enough to them to put up with a product that is not as good as what they currently use. We need to figure out what those deficiencies are from their point of view, and fix them. Is it the UI? I really don't know, I'm not a trader, but let's find out what actual traders do prefer and change it to that. Is the lack of margin trading? If we are confident that is the real reason for lack of adoption, then maybe we should adopt that feature. But we better be confident, because it is a lot of work to build that feature properly and I would rather leave that for much later (hopefully after some gain in marketcap). The product needs to be as nice to use for a trader as their current centralized exchange and ON TOP of that it needs to be decentralized. Otherwise, they will stick what what they know and are comfortable with.
Or maybe they recognize that the decentralization isn't really all that decentralized for their purposes. This goes back to the counterparty risk with UIA assets (like OPEN.BTC) that I talked about earlier. Sidechains are the technological solution to that problem.
But even if we fix all those problems, it is still not enough to pull them away from what they are comfortable with. You need to give them some incentive to take the leap. That is where subsidizing liquidity of some key markets comes in. This is necessary to motivate traders to move, in mass, passed that hump everyone experiences when trying something new and different from what they are used to. If many of them move to our DEX and start tightly trading assets to capture some of those rewards, the liquidity will greatly improve and so other traders will be more interested to use a DEX with liquid markets. Once the market is bootstrapped and there is liquidity, the subsidies are weaned off and reasonable market percentage fees are added in so the DAC can make some revenue. Hopefully inertia continues to keep liquidity fairly strong and people still continue to use the DEX because it has liquid markets and is decentralized. Of course to do this requires both implementing the liquidity features in the blockchain (not super difficult to do) and more importantly (and more difficulty) getting BTS holders to accept
funding it from the reserve pool.