Fellow shareholders, friends, random people interested in Bitshares, privacy, freedom, and less government:

This post serves as a way to gather feedback and material for future posts, where the aim is to develop ideas and notions to make Bitshares more widely adopted.

It is my core belief that unless we consciously move things in that direction (as many in the community have been doing), we will never see that reality come to be.

Why Bitshares?

The last decade or so has proven beyond doubt that there is something seriously rotten about the present financial system.

The situation is in fact much worse today than it was in 2008, and the second round may be coming soon.

A Bank Account - not what it used to be

It has become increasingly difficult to open a bank account, too. And if you do manage to get it open, the interest rates for major currencies are laughable.

To add insult to the injury, by depositing your money at the bank, you are giving the bank control over the money, control they will exert immediately, by lending your money, making a profit ... and sharing none of it with you.

Once you deposit the money in the bank, it is NO LONGER YOUR MONEY.

Especially for US Persons, banking in many parts of the world has become impossible, as the local banks prefer not to become a personalized spy for the American IRS.

This is due to a law that essentially shows the US believes they can legislate over the entire world.

The crazy thing? It worked.
And unfortunately, it did not stop there.

Government hypocrisy and the decimation of privacy

Emboldened by the US, the bureaucreats at the OCDE came up with a scheme that all but kills banking privacy worldwide, forcing banks to send financial records of their customers back to the customers' country of residence.

Ironically, all of this is paid for with taxpayer money - average Joe and average Jane unknowingly paying for their own financial enslavement.

This represents a total loss of privacy of the individual in financial matters to the state. And when the state has totalitarian control over the economic life of the citizens, that is not good news for freedom.

Such legislation also assumes that everyone is a criminal by default - "why would you have money offshore? Don't you trust us? There is | no reason | not to! And since you do, because you are a filthy criminal, you would not report it! So we will make you do so automatically."

Instead of assuming good faith on behalf of the common people, all this information will soon begin being exchanged automatically.

Of course, wealthy people have already figured ways around this.
And cybercriminals are salivating over the troves of information that shall soon become available underground.

Interestingly - I kid you not - the people who came up with that legislation don't pay taxes themselves!.

This is hypocrisy of the highest level.

Break free

It is for those sort of reasons that interest in Bitcoin surged years ago - the idea of being in control of our own money, without a middle-man that not only invests your money and does not give you a single cent, but also has the audacity to tell you where you can and cannot spend your own money, and will report you to "the authorities" for any "suspicious" activity.

In true kafkaesque fashion, what exactly constitutes suspicious activity is never really defined.

From Bitcoin came the wider idea of cryptocurrency, and altough initially the new ones coming out were basically clones of Bitcoin (which is open-source software) with a few changed parameters, over time, the ecosystem evolved, and then exploded.

We are living through this time.

Adoption levels

Being a technical person, it was relatively easy to keep up with the developments in the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, for less technically minded people, a lot of this stuff is Chinese (if you are Chinese, let's say it's Arabic to you), and next to impossible to understand.

To give you an idea, over the years I must have talked to more than 100 non-technical people about bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and maybe 7 ended up installing the software.

About 2 still use the software today.

The seeds for change have been planted, with this technology. We no longer have to give control of our money to institutions that DO NOT have our best interests at heart.

Bankers and Banksters

Mind you, there are bankers who are good people. I know a few of them.

But in the grand scheme of things, they are powerless. Either they tow the line, or get replaced.

When "maintenance fees" (heh.. what maintenance? it's all computerized) were introduced here, my banker privately confessed that he was outraged and thought this change to be immoral; it was just the banks' way to pass on losses imposed on them by the ECB to the end customer.

He was a senior guy at the bank as well, but there was nothing he could do - the orders came "from above".

Steemit enters the picture

Dan Larimer understood that the key to mass adoption was to deemphasize the cryptocurrency aspect.

By marrying social media with the right monetary incentives, steemit very successfully overcame adoption issues - it made cryptocurrency simple enough for non-technical people to use.

What we have now is thousands and thousands of people, most of which knew nothing of cryptocurrency, getting exposed to these ideas.

And for many, that is all they need.
It does not have to stop with Steemit, though.

Bitcoin

This is something that every steemer should familiarize him/herself with, if only because at the moment there is no direct way to convert SteemUSD to USD (altough I hope you are convinced, after reading this, that putting ALL your hard-earned money in a bank is not necessarily the best idea).

Such services will undoubtedly come in the future. In the mean time, I suggest that you become familiar with the basic aspects of bitcoin - I can write some articles aimed at beginners, just leave a comment saying so to gauge interest.

If the idea of cryptocurrency will stick around, I would say holding Bitcoin is also a good investment. Diverting a small amount ($20-100/month) of your SteemUSD earnings to bitcoin may not be a bad idea at all.

There is also a plethora of services that will take Bitcoin and credit a virtual card or a plastic card with EUR, USD, etc; which you can then use online or offline, in shops that do not yet take cryptocurrency directly.

Keep in mind that by using such services, you have waived control of your money, and now depend on the service to honor their agreement with you.

Bitshares

Disclaimer

Before we develop the prose on Bitshares, there is one thing you should know.

The learning curve for Bitshares is steep, if you have few notions of cryptocurrency, and most importantly, finance.

But it is not impossible to master to a decent level - once again, do leave comments if you would like to see some writing about the topic of how to use Bitshares for beginners.

What is it?

At its core, it's a decentralized exchange.

If you do not have a background in cryptocurrency, what that even means and the motivations behind it may be hard to understand. Let's explore that.

Underlying technology

Powering both Bitshares and Steemit is Graphene.

Take a break and read the link above if the history of the software interests you.

Otherwise,

The need for a decentralized exchange

To get in and out of the Bitcoin ecosystem, people use something called an exchange - you send them euros, dollars, or what have you, get credited the amount on their site, and then you can buy on their platform the cryptocurrency of your choice.

As you can imagine, this creates a very attractive target for cybercriminals.

I won't bother you with a list of names, but if you search for "list bitcoin exchange hacks" or similar keywords, the search results will speak for themselves.

Let's just say it's somewhat common, even today.

Therefore, when users send funds to a centralized exchange, they are placing their funds at risk.

Indeed, it is good practice to have in a centralized exchange only as much and for as briefly as you can have - this will mitigate the inherent risk of using such platforms.

Enter the DEX (Decentralized EXchange)

From the above situation came the idea of a decentralized exchange.

Perhaps I will cover the story in more detail in a later post (leave a comment if interested!), so to make a long story short, you can exchange, without counterparty risk (keeping funds in a centralized exchange), a variety of national currencies, precious metals, and other cryptocurrencies, using the Bitshares software.

Contrasted to Steemit, for instance, only SteemUSD are available - so if you would rather have EUR or CHF or CNY .. or even Gold and Silver, Bitshares is the place to do so.

A note on the recent steemit.com attack

Cryptocurrency wallets hosted online are vulnerable to a class of attacks where, if the server is compromised, the javascript sent to your browser can be maliciously altered to give the keys to your kingdom to an attacker.

While I did not receive confirmation that this was the attack vector in this case, it would be my first guess.

It should serve as a reminder to not keep all of your eggs in one basket, no matter which basket it is.

In this context, if you had a portion of your steem earnings in the Bitshares blockchain, and you used the standalone bitshares client (OpenLedger is vulnerable to the same style of attack, if you load the wallet code from your browser), then your funds would have been 100% untouchable.

It may then not be a bad idea to keep a portion of your steemit.com earnings outside of steemit.

And you should follow steemit.com security best practices while accessing the site, always.

Since detecting compromised javascript is very difficult if not outright impossible for someone who is not a security expert, avoid using the owner/active keys as much as possible, and rotate them every once in awhile.

Download link for standalone bitshares software

A bank account in your pocket

wait 'til you hear about Bitshares ...

There are many uses for Bitshares, but the one I believe would be of most interest to "normal" people is using the platform as a bank account.

Imagine a cryptographically secure, always-on, nearly-zero-fees (none of that nonsense of paying $40 for an international transfer), nearly-instant (under 10 seconds, instead of several days) bank account, where you can hold anything from national currencies, to other cryptocurrencies, to stocks and market ETFs, to precious metals.

Your own private bank account.
Your own private investment account.

If all you want is to hold USD, then perhaps keeping all of your funds in SteemUSD is a better choice - less to learn about, and it pays you interest (the Bitshares equivalents will not pay interest, though they used to, but this was found to be unsound; if there is a way to reinstate interest, I sure would like to know about it!)

But if you see the potential of diversifying your portfolio .. then Bitshares may be just what you have been looking for.

The End Game

(heh, took a bit longer to get here than expected.. hope you stayed with us!)

I see Bitshares as the potential engine powering a next-generation financial system.

Where people store their value, in complete privacy()*, and have full control of their funds.

Where friends can send value to friends, instantly, anywhere in the world, without paying through the teeth to do so.

Where online payments can be made in gold, silver, or any national currency, without incurring exorbitant conversion fees, commonly levied by credit card companies and banks.

Where savers can save, traders can trade, and speculators can speculate. Without enriching some middle-man who charges unbelievable fees.

Where normal people can easily send funds in and out of the legacy banking system through a worldwide network of for-profit fiat gateways, being charged reasonable fees to do so.

()* Actually, at the moment, all balances are transparent, this is a missing feature that is finally being worked on. You can still maintain a modicum of privacy by choosing a username that is not tied to any other username you use elsewhere.

Back in meatland..

I am a big believer in physical cash as well, and I do not think cryptocurrency ever will (or should) fully replace it. The ability to use money without leaving a trace must remain for our economic lives to be free.

But in the battle for wealth, dignity, privacy and freedom, tools such as Bitshares will - hopefully - become more and more prominent.

You are witnessing a revolution in finance right in front of your eyes - and 99% of the world does not see it yet.

This might be at the same level of the computer revolution itself.

Ask yourself these questions

Add your comment below..

In Bitshares..

• What kind of potential/users are there?

  • Savers
  • Traders
  • Merchants
  • Speculators/investors
  • ...

• What is the use-case of the platform for them?

• Where do they hang out?

• How can we bring them value?

• Which markets could we attempt to capture?

  • Forex market
  • Stocks / Whole-market ETFs

• Which features are missing to make Bitshares more attractive?

  • STEALTH
  • Stop-loss and stop-profit
  • 3rd party GUIs that resemble a bank account

• Are we missing any key pieces of the puzzle?

  • Worldwide network of fiat onramps

Come say hello!

We Bitshares fans tend to hang around the Bitshares forum.

While we post here on Steemit as well, a lot of the discussion still takes place there, and likely will in the future (there were some polls about this not so long ago).

Final words

Bitshares is still evolving.

Don't treat it as a finished product just yet - altough it is good enough for day-to-day use, if you accommodate a little bit; some of us have been using it daily for years.

If you have any more questions, please drop a comment here or on the bitsharestalk thread, either me or another Bitshares fan will be happy to answer any doubts.