The story starts a little further back, so let’s catch up on my last several months of absence.
Getting involved in early projects
A few months ago, I discovered an article here on Steemit by @gravity-protocol. I was curious about a project that would invest so much money in Steemit votes and resteems. I figured it must have either an extensive financial support system or an idea they’re really excited about getting out there.
My curiosity led me to their Telegram chat room, which was a community chat room for developers. I applied myself there, learning about Gravity Protocol and what their goal was. This is where I learned that Gravity was a direct fork of Graphene. More on that later.
After being involved in the chat room and the prodding of @blervin, I set up a cloud server and made a testnet witness for Gravity. This was the start of an adventurous and educational couple of months.
This is where I first interacted with @murda-ra, and @fav. These people are heavily involved in the Graphene community and are committed to creating a better world through BitShares. There were a couple of other familiar faces in that chat room like @roelandp, who is also deeply immersed in the BitShares community. Again, more on that in a bit.
Everyone that I interacted with in the chat room was surprisingly helpful, which truly drew me in. I wrote a straightforward tutorial on how to set up a node for the testnet, and began reporting bugs to the dev team. After a few of weeks of this, I was approached by the team and asked to start running their Twitter account! Additionally, they appointed me as their admin and moderator in their Telegram and Discord rooms. To say the least, I was ecstatic! I never, in my life, thought that I could work with a technology company, having no relevant degree or background besides my own self-teaching. Hard work really does pay off sometimes.
With a newfound excitement, I wanted to learn how to interact with the blockchain more than with just a pre-programmed interface. I wanted to learn the inner workings of Gravity so I could help out the community even more. This is where I started reading and learning more about BitShares and Graphene.
Why did you learn about a different blockchain than Gravity if you were working with them?
Remember earlier how I talked about Gravity being a direct fork from BitShares? That’s why.
Being a brand new, direct fork from BitShares meant that Gravity had no documentation. None. I mean, besides the company’s guide for setting up a node and a witness (here’s a secret- it’s almost identical to setting up a BitShares node!) That’s also why I wrote my own tutorial for a node.
link goes to the Graphene documentation
When things with Gravity did not work for me, I had to resort to the Graphene documentation (documentation). “That’s the source of the fork”, I thought. “The answers have to be in here somewhere.” (By the way, this documentation is currently being updated. Some of the info on the site might not be 100% accurate.)
Digging this deep into the code showed me the advantages of this particular chain over others.
Okay... You learned about BitShares, answer the question in the title of this post!
A few things made me pull the trigger on purchasing a LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP:
It's fast, really fast
Have you used BitShares to send funds before? Try it. If you are someone who thinks that blockchain transactions take a long time, it will change your mind. This is the same with any blockchain that is Graphene-based (BitShares, EOS, Steem).
When I am sending funds between exchanges, I use either BitShares or Dogecoin because of their speed and low fee.
The community BitsharesTalk.org
Those who are actively voting on changes being made to BitShares are involved and brainstorming reasons behind votes and answering questions.
User Issues Assets (read more)
This allows anyone to make an asset that can be used for a variety of things (store of value, rewards points, etc.)
Stakeholder-Approved Project Funding (read more)
This is by far my favorite reason. Until I started digging deeper with BitShares, I had no idea what this was. This allows for a project to apply with the community to receive funding from the Community Fund (which is around $77,000 a month). This makes the BitShares chain self-sustaining and rewards those who are furthering the community.
Readable user names for accounts
This is a very small reason, but one that I really like. Copy and pasting isn't very hard for non-readable blockchain accounts/wallets; however, I like the personal touch.
All in all, the answer is that I believe that BitShares is a contender for major adoption of cryptocurrency.
This is why I became a LIFETIME MEMBER. If you haven't made an account with BitShares yet, it is free and you get a readable account name!
Start here:
If you are already involved in BitShares and haven't thought about becoming a LIFETIME MEMBER, I say you should give it a thought. BitShares already has an established history and is only becoming better. At time of writing, a LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP is 694.70219 BTS.
If you have any questions or thoughts, let me know and I will answer everything to the best of my ability.