Soooooooo how about that Bitshares thing huh? 
WHAT do YOU want?
Privacy.
Ordinary people using it as an online banking system.
Traders using it for forex, speculation.
Savers using BitETFs and Smartcoins to store wealth.
I want to be able to store wealth privately on the blockchain, to trade, save, invest, speculate, to do with my hard earned money what I please.
I want to be able to pay online using BitUSD.
I want to be able to send 500 BitUSD to a friend who needs a break instantly, across the world.
I want to use the dishonest, corrupt, extorting banking system as little as I have to.
I'll take ownership of my finances.
Fantastic.. now on a scale from 1 - 5, because I counted 5 things there, what order of importance do you think those things should be introduced? 1 being MOST important, and 5 being least.
1 - privacy: It's the foundation, imo. If all financial operations are transparent, not many people will use the system.
It's the point that I've made before.. would you use your online banking system if anyone in the world could look up all of your transactions and balances?
Through multiple wallets, transparently proxying, setting up your own wss:// endpoints, it is possible to maintain decent privacy (all balances public but no one knows who they belong to, like bitcoin) .. but this necessitates a level of skill far above the ordinary user, and it is error prone.
And frankly, also as previously pointed out, if the idea was having N wallets with 1 account each, and never reusing a wallet/account after one transaction .. then it makes no sense at all to have named accounts!
It's ok that market orders are all public data (though if that could be improved, even better) since if stealth'd funds can be sent to/from these accounts for trading, then it is still possible to maintain privacy.
2 - Improve the platform for traders, as it is this sort of user who will likely (as far as I can see) drive usage of the platform up in the beginning.
A few things here:
2a: As mentioned previously on the thread, at least stop-loss orders ought to be available.. it's hard for any serious trader to consider the platform without that.
2b: Offer a broad selection of MPA individual stocks and ETFs, possibly focusing only on BitCNY and BitUSD markets for now.
2c: Push forward the idea of the crypto ETFs, tracking the top crypto performers, as was being discussed in the forum some weeks ago.. assuming the mechanics of the idea check out, afaik we'd be one of a few places where such a product exists (they had something similar over NXT a year ago)
2d: FOREX applications. Perhaps focus on a few hot ones in the beginning, such as BitUSD:BitRUR.
With decent marketing, this one could be huge.. have you seen the fees charged by most brokers recently? (same for stocks/etfs, really) It's absurd .. and if investors could get in easily (not so difficult through bitcoin, though it could be improved), and pay peanuts in fees.. I'm sure they'd be interested - at least a small part of that market segment (initially).
3 - Ordinary people using the network as essentially an online banking platform; Assuming privacy is already in place, frankly I think this needs a new wallet interface .. something more dumbed down, with less trading stuff, that looks more like an online banking interface.
That said, I don't think that new hypothetical dumbed-down wallet has to be a priority right now, as initially it will be people who're already familiar with crypto that (again, in my opinion) would be interested in using Bitshares to a) hedge against BTC price fluctuations (banking a "sure profit") and b) reduce their exposure/liability to the legacy banking system by maintaining fiat balances on the blockchain.
What that translates to is getting stealth done, and marketing bitshares as the online bank kind of thing, where crypto-traders can come to stash their profits. I think initially, with few exceptions, that'd be the target audience.
Paying online with BitUSD (to begin with?) goes anywhere in that list after privacy. I think there is a definite need here as well, right now it's already possible to pay in fiat-denominated amounts using crypto, but it tends to involve shapeshifting to bitcoin, and giving away ownership of said bitcoins to a third party.
So, I'd say in the online payments arena, we need one or more of:
a) A bitpay.com for Bitshares (or even enter into conversations with them to allow payments in BitUSD)
b) A btcjam.com for Bitshares (makes a lot more sense for the value to be denominated in fiat in this case!) - this would bring users and raise awareness of the platform as well. And I think it would blow the competition out in the water immediately..
c) All the good work that
@kenCode and his team are doing right now.
d) A Smartcoin-backed plastic card that uses the "direct debit" features that afaik are unique to the Bitshares blockchain
The way I see it, barring speculation, the value of our core token (BTS) will only increase and remain high once there are millions of dollars of funds being secured by the blockchain - and that means real users with real, real-world applications.
Traders, savers, investors, speculators.
To close, I also think that
@ccedk (and whoever else is involved! pardon my ignorance) has been doing a great job with the UIAs for ICO/IPOs such as, recently, OPEN.DGD. This is an excellent idea and hopefully it will carry on.
And finally, of things like the bond market, I have no opinion, as truly, I don't understand it.
edit: Forgot liquidity, but iirc this is already slowly being taken care of.
Topic: Now that Daniel Larimer (aka bytemaster) is gone... (Read 61668 times)
