Every opportunity is a window that is in the process of closing.
Bitshares is a decentralized exchange for cryptocurrencies.
It’s fast!
Faster than anything out there... With 1-2 second block times, it is capable of 100,000 + transactions per second.
Bitshares has a problem, though. Adoption.
Adoption has stagnated. With low usage comes poor liquidity, lack of price parity with outside exchanges, and virtually unusable trading pairs.
Bitshares has the speed to dominate the decentralized exchange category, but the community’s decision to curb inflation and cut development and marketing expenditures has crippled its ability to capitalize on its strengths.
Right now, Bitshares is the fastest blockchain in the space. With the development of EOS, however, the chief advantage.. speed.. will be in the grasp of others. The window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
A major competitor has already announced their intention to decentralize their exchange and develop the new platform on EOS. Others will follow.
Bitshares only hope is to increase adoption. Hype is not way to raise its price. People have to use the exchange. People have to utilize the smart assets. Only wide-spread investment into the Bitshares exchange will improve its liquidity, market parity, and result in an increase its value to the market.
Will the bitshares community respond to the threat, or will Bitshares continue to have permanent potential.. Potential that may never be realized?
Will the Bitshares community re-institute inflation to fund new development, interface enhancements/simplification, and marketing the platform?
Will the Bitshares exchange move to the EOS platform to solve the fee issue?
Can the stake holders, who have the ability to make a difference, move the platform into a position capitalize on the delineating strengths that set Bitshares apart from its competitors, while it still has the ability to dominate the market?
Bitshares is Amazing. Bitshares Should Succeed.
But the window is closing.
EOS is still in development and is more of a competitor to Ethereum, the apps built on top of it will require further development also. Bitshares has been established for years and unlike other "Decentralized Exchanges" coughWAVEScough it has the smart contract derivatives (BitUSD, BitCNY, BitBTC) that manage collateral, meaning you don't have to trust a third party to remain accountable.
If (or should I say when) USDT or another major exchange collapses then more people will educate themselves about decentralized exchanges and smart contract driven options. There is nothing stopping these measures being implemented within Eth and the localethereum exchange has partially done this by allowing clients to manage the private keys of wallets used by the exchange (the exchange can't run away with your coins and you can still extract coins used on the exchange even if the site goes down). I think WAVES also announced that they want to implement smart contract options.. Bitshares is doing all this already, it's up to us to add liquidity.
The launch of EOS will change the playing field. I think it will make one of Bitshare's advantages go away, or at least neutralize it.
EOS will succeed, short of it being a scam (just joking). The only thing bitshares needs to fear is not doing the things it needs to do to retain its competitive advantage.
no it won't, i don't think the EOS dex will offer one cent trades, or zero interest loans. Trade on bitfinex and you will spend a fortune on fees. On the dex fees only cost one single penny.
I can almost gurantee eos finex will have high fees just like any centralized exchange. Bitfinex is a for profit corporation. No one will ever beat BTS dex on fees. You can trade millions of dollars on the BTS dex for the fee of one cent. All centralized exchanges charge massive fees if you trade millions of dollars.
Thanks for this. Interesting insight into the future of Bitshares. I have personally found it difficult to get fair bargains on the DEX when trading and some gateways like Lisk and Steem have been closed for months. I no longer trade on the DEX and have gone back to the centralised exchanges.
lykke.com will start direct BTS/FIAT pairs, hopefully very soon (development is done and testing phase ongoing). Depending on their liquidty that could really give an impact.
I can see arbitrage bots bringing much liquidity here.
Thanks for your reply.
Very informative.
Great.
"Bitshares has a problem, though. Adoption.
Adoption has stagnated. With low usage comes poor liquidity, lack of price parity with outside exchanges, and virtually unusable trading pairs." In my opinion both steemit and bitshares are going to see mass adoption when something in the market changes. See how many people from vine came to youtube and got really famous, even though they didn't make that much money if any on vine. For example if medium.com were to close down and its audience moved to steemit, then steemit adoption would increase. There just needs to be a catalyst event like I mentioned that would offload a bunch of existing users of a centralized exchange to bitshares. For example when binance was down recently some people thought they got hacked. Imagine they did get hacked and people started distrusting centralized exchanges then it would increase adoption of bitshares. Two things that you as an individual can do to increase adoption is to help make the wallet UI easier to use and also to come up with ways to help people get fiat into some form of crypto or even into bitshares without having to make use of a centralized exchange.
The point is, bitshares WOULD be a UNIQUE place to move if something catastrophic happened. That may not always be the case. With EOS coming on the scene, building a DEX that performs similar to Bitshares will not be a difficult task.
If Bitshares does not have the infrastructure formed to coordinate, fund, and execute enhancements, it could easily be displaced.
I just posted an article about a enhancement that could give Bitshares another edge right NOW:
https://steemit.com/bitshares/@songminer/bitshares-arbitrage-let-s-switch-the-tables
BitShares needs the hype not to inflate the price, but to bring more users in who will take action on the exchange.
In this regard, you are surely helping. While my small amount of BTS will probably never make a vote difference, my personal voice can help advance the exchange. So can yours.
Will the window close? Perhaps, but I invested in BTS and I believe in it. Will the voters make the right decisions? I don't know, but I can speak up as you have done and present my opinion on the matter.
I do agree with your assessment here.
I hear what you are saying. We do need to act and grasp the opportunity while it is there. I would point out that -in my independent observation on the number of accounts holding BTS -a proxie for people using bitshares- it has grown from 35,000 last fall (oct 17) to 90,000 (feb18). So in the last five months it has tripled. That is not exactly stagnating.
I understand your reasoning, but I would argue that it is the volume of transactions on the DEX, not the number of accounts that constitute adoption. I would love to see data that supports anywhere near a tripling of transactions since October.
Is there anyone who can gather and display that data?
OK. First off -generally yes- volume of transactions is a very good indicatior. Here are two websites that show numbers. https://www.cryptofresh.com/assets and http://open-explorer.io/#/assets Now. I would like to warn you that I have seen crazy data at these websites(result of bad coding). The websites do not go back in time. I did look at them in the fall.
So let me throw some more warnings out there, you have to also be aware of "wash trading". It is easy to fake volume -take two accounts and transfer a bunch of coins back and forth a bunch of times. This happens regularly on scam coins listed there. That said, I have seen seen these numbers rise. Normally, in Oct there was around 40 million a day in US dollar equivalent volume. Recently there has been 100 to 140 million a day. I just saw today one said $12 million so I don't know what is up. All of this to say I think generally, both market volume and numbers of accounts have doubles/tripled in the last few months.
So the problem with USD volume is when the price of BTS goes from 0.88 to 0.22; USD volume falls by 75% as well. And just to be clear I have seen scam coins have a volume of 10% of the daily volume (IE it looks like there is $45 million of volume but $5 million is a scam coin so that number is off 10%.) Transactions are just as easy to fake as volume numbers. (it is all done by computers...). When it works there are some real nice charts on the cryptofresh site.
https://steemit.com/bitshares/@steempower/bitshares-state-of-the-network-13th-february-2018
I really don't think BTS is ever going to migrate to EOS, interchain operations on the other hand are entirely plausible.
I bet for a fusion between EOS and Bitshares in the near future... I think this is the way bitshares and eos will succeed
I fear it is the only way Bitshares survives beyond a mediocre existence.
I've been thinking about the same for a while: Can bitshares survive the EOS and other dex developments?
I think it can, especially because Dan seems to find it important. Unlike his withdrawal from steemit, he still mentions bitshares in his blogposts on Medium and has mentioned countless times that there will be some sort of beneficial co-existence between the two if not outright bts participation EOS (even though that's probably not up to him anymore).
So I think steemit will end up as myspace (the cool place people don't use anymore), bitshares will end up as youtube (the place you go to for everything) and EOS/block.one will end up as google/alphabet (the innovative, superrich and playful owner) if you get my analogy.
Thanks for the read and reply. I am hopeful, but think the community will need to take some action to see Bitshares improve.
Can you please explain what you mean with fee issue? I'm unsure what you mean.
Development and marketing is gaining momentum right now, so I think BitShares is on the right track from that point of view
An english targeting marketing / promotion worker would be awesome!
Bitshares fees are low, but they are charged for every transaction.. even canceling a transaction assesses a fee.
The fees are required to keep the network running. On top of EOS, an app will only require stake to keep the network running.
As a result, straight up, a competing app on EOS could eliminate fees in an effort to compete with Bitshares as a DEX.
I don't disparage any efforts by developers on Bitshares, because I realize they are contributing to the ecosystem.
I only question whether it will be enough to rely on those who volunteer to help.
Inflation in the blockchain, that is ear-marked for coordinated development and marketing will better ensure the future of Bitshares.
The fees are very low, especially with LTM. I don't think that any user would be angered by them. The comittee would have the power to basically disable them, but why?
The fees are actually the economic model of the DEX. Do you have an idea of how the DEX would finance itself on EOS?
One option: it is run by a central authority (like BitFinex) that is pumping money in it until market share is established, then introducing some kind of economic model. The central autority either then stays or leaves the exchange to itself. Probably works, but is it then a decentralized exchange? Not. Future of it? Questionable.
The people doing the workers are more than volunteers, some of them are fulltime engaged with BitShares. I dont think that Inflation is not possible without a real hardfork.
Additionally, there are other problems that might occur in EOS, see
I do also like EOS and look forward to its live product. I am also curios what the model of EOSfinex will be! If you ask me it all comes down to marketing and an intuitive exchange, sadly not the underlying technology (see VHS vs. Video 2000, Blu ray vs HD DVD and so on).
Especially because the fees are so low, bitshares shouldn't tell you about it every transaction you make / cancel.
I still rather trade in bittrex because it just feels easier to use (not caring about liquidity).
I'm happy the UI got improved last time I used it, but there should be tools to make trading easier.
Like tooltips with values you're used to. It's such a hassle having to calculate every price you see and check if its different from other market values
To me there's a problem with whoever (community/foundation/whoever) is 'running' bitshares having extremely little voice+presence ...
So when Stan Larimar is going around claiming to be the 'godfather' of Bitshares and to be doing 'partnerships' with Bitshares and the various scams has been pushing, there's literally no voice standing-up and saying "he absolutely doesn't represent Bitshares whatsoever, and Bitshares in no way endorses this latest scam that he's essentially claiming that we endorse". And this is hurting Bitshares a lot imo - most people just associate Bitshares with Stan Larimar and his various scams, and thus write it off as a scam-coin.
Secondly, when Bitshares was dropped from Bittrex, with the claim that it was using too much memory - it's been very hard to find any talk about working on sorting out the issue, or clarifying if this really is the issue etc .... i.e. is there an issue with memory usage in Bitshares? Is this something you need a developer with relevant experience to work on and you're prepared to pay for this? (I would probably be well-qualified for example).
And this of course relates to the point in the article - the community really shot itself in the foot by not sufficiently funding development (as I understand, this helped push Dan Larimar to rather develop EOS, as he wasn't getting paid for his efforts to continue developing Bitshares, which is total insanity if true). I get the impression there are issues with nodes and memory and nodes being down and thus the DEX not working or being slow at times, and this has also no doubt not helped things ... but again, very hard to find evidence of anyone really tracking+dealing-with these things ..... and yeah ..... it's definitely death for a cryptocoin if no one is dealing with such things ...