Questions from a BitShares Newbie
I've been playing with BitShares for the last few weeks, and it's really interesting stuff. You can read more about shorting the USD here: Playing in the Margins: bitUSD and BitShares on Open Ledger.
Advanced technologies come with advanced challenges. How are "normal" people supposed to catch up with years of development to know what's going on and how it got that way? I could spend months reading through the 150,000+ posts on https://bitsharestalk.org/. I could spend hours in https://telegram.me/BitSharesDEX asking stupid questions. It's hard to know where to start. I guess I'll just keep working through the wallet help for the basics: https://bitshares.org/wallet/#/help
I know just enough to know the BitShares decentralized exchange and wallet in one is an amazing idea. The number one rule of cryptocurrency is to control your own private keys. If you don't control the keys, you don't own that asset. If you have cryptocurrency on a normal exchange, they control it. They own it. You have to trust them to give it back to you when you request it. BitShares solves that by keeping the keys in your browser (or the app) while also connecting you to a decentralized exchange. No trust is needed and the fees are tiny compared to normal exchanges which not only take a percentage of each transaction, but they often charge fees for withdrawals as well.
Right now one of the biggest problems I see is lack of liquidity. If the BitShares system had more volume, I'd do all my trading there. Without enough people using it, the spread on the buy/sell walls is too great.
So this morning I was looking into some trading bots. There's stakemachine by Xerox and BTSBots by Alt. I'm a bit overwhelmed. I went to create a new Bitshares account and it said I needed to pay for it, but first needed a lifetime membership account at the cost of 17,611.61748 BTS (currently over $140). I realized I could just open an incognito browser tab and create a new account there for free using the facet. So why would I pay for a membership? The trading fees are so low that even 80% back on them would take a very long time to make a 17k+ bitshare payment worth it.
I recently read this great post by @cryptoctopus Inspiration to Advertise and Market BitShares Decentralized Exchange (DEX) where they said:
Right now, there is no marketing behind the project even thou the product is awesome.
That's how I feel about this also. It's amazing technology, but it's confusing because it's so advanced.
It's tempting to just move on to simpler things. But for some reason, I can't. I think this, like Steemit, is important. I think decentralization provides hope for the future with more freedom and voluntary interactions.
So let me end with some newbie questions / observations which might be helpful for those who've been around BitShares for a long time.
Why should anyone purchase a lifetime membership? What are the benefits of doing so? Will the price of a membership always be the same or has it (could it) change over time?
The Advanced vs. Basic mode is helpful on OpenLedger, but things are still a bit complicated, even for people who are familiar with using a cryptocurrency exchange. For those who have never used one (many just buy from Coinbase), it can be overwhelming. How to fix this? I don't really know. Maybe links out to professional training videos explaining all the features?
How can we get people excited about an asset which has mainly just gone down in value over the last 3 years?
Again, I think BitShares is an amazing system, but I feel like I'm hoping against hope that the rest of the world will realize this also and invest in it seriously to bring up the price. A test of the technology last month showed it can average 333 transactions a second! How are more people not really excited about this?
Part of me wants to promote this system more, but I also don't want others to buy in and end up as bag holders if the price just keeps going down.
What do you think? What advice do you have for BitShares newbies like me?
or do i get something wrong here.? pls correct me if i'm wrong
I think that's
MAX TXSand I was talking aboutAVG. TXS (LAST 100 BLOCKS)Answers to all of your questions:
A lifetime membership enables the account to save 80% of all its fees for the lifetime of the account, and allows the account to earn referral revenue from the fees of new accounts that it refers. This can represent a significant revenue stream for developers that onboard new users with their apps, like @chris4210 with blockpay. It saves a large amount of money when creating user issued assets, which cost over 7300 bts for a 5 character asset name, or 1400 with a lifetime membership. This will save back the lifetime membership cost in 3 assets.
The best training resource for starting in bitshares is Chronos
This is IMO the best explanation of the benefits of BitShares:
People can get excited about bitshares because it has the best decentralized exchange capabilities in the entire cryptocurrency space, has the fastest blocktimes in the entire cryptocurrency space, and is the only cryptocurrency to enable market pegged assets, or smartcoins, for holding stable value. It currently has a strong startup scene, with BlockPay, OpenLedger, PeerPlays, Apptrade, and many others planning to utilise its network in the future. Bitshares incorporates an entire stock market ecosystem onto the blockchain, that is easier to use for creating digital assets than ethereum tokens.
A great way to learn about bitshares is to read the whitepaper here: http://docs.bitshares.eu/_downloads/bitshares-financial-platform.pdf
You can explore the blockchain and see just how many assets there are here:
https://cryptofresh.com/
Thanks for a great reply. I understood much of #1 but it didn't add up for me until you mentioned app developers and how that can work for them. That makes a lot of sense. Would you say it only makes sense to become a lifetime member if you plan to release your own assets? Otherwise the math just doesn't make sense to me.
Is the whitepaper kept up to date (unlike the Steemit whitepaper)?
Thanks for the videos, I'll check them out.
Bitshares is great, and it's way ahead of its time.
You ask a bunch of good questions. Having a decentralized exchange is huge right? But the volume, yes, well. Bitshares solves a problem that affects something like .0000001% of the world population, and that's maybe being generous.. I got lost in the decimals.
Essentially, it's hard to sell a solution to a problem that almost no one knows exists.
For crypto-geeks, Bitshares should be the Holy Grail, but the Bitcoin maximalist crowd has been too busy propping up their crypto-idol instead of championing new innovations in the space. Hey, they have their reasons and profit motives, who am I to judge.
Anyway, Bitshares isn't going anywhere, and there's still a ton of development going on around the platform as @dahaz159 mentioned.
From my point of view, Bitshares is SO FAR ahead of its time, that we won't see more widespread adoption until the crypto crowd has gone 1000-10,000x in size, along with the market cap of the relevant pioneers in the space.
Good news, that's what Steem is here to do!
When hordes upon hordes of people have their value stored on a blockchain, then they will need a decentralized exchange..
Steem: Creating problems we already have solutions for! ;)
Well said.
I think your predictions (1000-10,000x in size), though somewhat discouraging, make a lot of sense.
It's interesting to see a technology so ahead of its time that it's hard for people who do understand it to market it correctly for everyone else to get onboard.
I finally got to a point with trading on the bitshares exchange where I "got it". Part of the confusion revolves around its flexibility. You can literally trade so many pair combinations that I couldn't wrap my mind around the relative "values". Couple that with lack of liquidity, and I found myself going to outside exchanges to check the going rate on various cryptos.
Leaving your trading platform to check prices is totally counter-intuitive. The first thing I decided to do was to only trade in bitUSD:SOMECRYPTO. This allowed me to fully quantify my trade order.
So, the way I invest in bitshares, while simultaneously owning other crypto is as follows:
By borrowing bitUSD with bts as collateral, you are, by definition showing faith in the underlying bts asset. You have the opportunity to benefit from both your investment in the other crypto, and any price increase that my come to bitshares.
It is important to have reserve shares in case the bts price falls so you can add to your collateral position if it gets close to 2:1.
One last thought:
It would make a lot of sense to display the spot price for the common cryptos on the Exchange page. This would keep me from going elsewhere to check the price. Ultimately, with enough liquidity this problem will go away.
I completely agree and had similar confusions. That's why I created this cryptocurrency spreadsheet so I could track assets in USD, BTC, and BTS. I needed all three to compare prices across various exchanges and coinmarketcap. When a price is good in one place for arbitrage (or just to know the price hasn't yet "caught up" so it's a cheap buy), I needed a way to quickly compare relative values in various currencies. You may find that spreadsheet useful. I've really been enjoying playing with it and improving my own copy with buttons which activate scripts and such (see the comments for more on that).
I've done the bitUSD loan thing a few times now and only this last one will I have to a wait a bit to pay down because BTS went down in value and I bought BTS with my bitUSD loan. I actually went 5:1 on that one just to be safe and not have to check it all the time. I also have a good amount of BTS on an exchange so I can increase my holdings a bit when things move around.
I asked this question somewhere else but I hope to know more opinions so I asked again here... As I roughly understand, Ethereum and Bitshares are like two camps/ecosystems. What do you think about their biggest differences (advantages/weaknesses)?
That's a great question. I don't know enough about them to answer, but I would like to hear other answers.
My hunch is Ethereum has more marketing behind it and maybe some more well-known investors or industry people promoting it. It seems the BitShares/Steemit ecosystems are built by developers for developers without much thought beyond just the actual technology. It's all quite fascinating to me how the technology itself isn't what really matters when it comes down to which one gets more marketshare.
A classic example of how superior tech fails in the marketplace is how VHS won over BetaMax video taping.
Yep. I mentioned that in my reply to Dan.
I think more people should try it out. When I realised what I have on my computer I simply could not grasp the consequences. It is huge. It takes some time to get under the hood of it though. As for the price of bitshares, I hope they stay where they are. I'm mining and a fair chunk of it is bitshares.
I haven't even looked into mining it... Can you send me some links with more info?
Eobot has bitshares in their cloud mining service. I just started using them a week ago, so I'm relatively new to it. It seems straight forward, just remember that they hold the assets for 6 months if you decide to purchase by credit card. You avoid that by using bitcoin. Here is a referal link from me: https://www.eobot.com/new.aspx?referid=663733 if you like to sign up. I chose the 1000 gh for 220 USD . 5 years contract.
I thought BitShares couldn't be mined in the traditional sense?
Exactly. I don't know what @funkit is talking about. W A Y back in the early days there was PTS which was a PoW coin used to seed the BitsharesX project. That may be what he's referring to, but afaik nobody is mining that of significance if at all.
good post
Lifetime membership entitles you to earn through the referral.
http://favs.pw/bitshares-how-to-earn-money-with-the-referral-program
I am using the official light client, no basic mode.
https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-core/releases/latest
Keep spreading the word, use BitShares as often as possible.
Ah, thank you. I didn't connect the dots with realizing how you get a chunk of someone else's lifetime membership fees. I guess that creates an incentive to become a lifetime member and then convince others to become lifetime members. If they join up, then you essentially get your membership fee covered by them.
That sounds kind of like a multi-level marketing or Ponzi scheme though. I can imagine many not liking the feel of that.
Your referrer gets a cut of your membership fee, but your referrer's referrer does not. So it's not remotely like MLM. It's really more like any other referral program you would find out there.
Except that it stops at 2 levels deep IIRC. Originally Mx Wright suggested a MLM scheme and there was significant resistance. Cutting off the nesting level to a shallow depth of 2 helped to get acceptance of the idea.
Bitshares is less complicated than ETHEREUM
I don't see Imperial Credits on your chart. An oversight I am sure.
I'm a BitShares newbie too and it's definitely a mind blowing platform. I can only imagine what EOS is about to bring