Chapter 6: The State of Bitshares
In this chapter, I thought I would give you a quick run-down as to the state of Bitshares as of December 2014.
I also post quarterly updates with a new State of Bitshares address at this location:
http://www.bitshares.tv/chapter6
I suggest you go there now and enter your email address so that I can notify you when a new video is released.
If you are reading this book after Ql 2015, this chapter may just be for nostalgia's sake.
Firstly, funding. The development team, which consists of five really, really, really, high-level programmers, has enough funding to last until January 2016. In the world of crypto-currencies that is an eternity. In the world of business that is about 10 minutes.
You should also know that by holding delegate positions, this development team and/or others could continue to develop and bootstrap the network indefinitely.
From a technology perspective, things are advancing rapidly. The core platform is up and running and working well as a desktop application.
You can download the free client today. You can store your Bitshares, or bitUSD or any other Bitassets currently available with your own private keys. You can trade in and out of any of those assets. You receive interest on all of them.
The market cap of Bitshares is over $30 million. Over $1 million of bitUSD and other Bitassets are in circulation.
Avery useful resource to see these things for yourself is:
http://www.bitsharesblocks.com
All of the above is basically proof of concept. It is working and working well. The next step is to make it pretty and add features ready for mass adoption.
The development team is working hard and has a number of exciting planned releases for Ql 2015. Some of these are being kept quiet, but some have been made public.
To make the client even more pretty and useful, the development team will be releasing a new and improved interface very shortly. This will make the desktop client much more intuitive and user-friendly so that users can get the most out of Bitshares and trade Bitassets more easily.
Very exciting also are the iPhone and Android wallets. This will make it super simple to send and receive Bitassets. It would not surprise me at all to see a young tech-savvy crowd using bitUSD to send small payments to one another with this super simple wallet. It could be the campus currency at your local college soon.
Increased functionality will be built right into the wallet with MultiSig, Escrow support and paper wallet backups. All of these features are available with Bitcoin, but they are not built into the client. This means that users are forced to go hunting for third party websites and platforms to find these functionalities.
This trend will continue, by the way. Because the Bitshares protocol has more flexibility than that of Bitcoin, features are more easily built into the client itself.
Perhaps most exciting though, are the partnerships with exchanges, merchants, and on and off ramps.
In the background, Bitshares is working hard to make it simple for people to get Bitshares and Bitassets. Right now, and this is true for most altcoins, you need to first buy Bitcoin with your fiat at an exchange and then buy Bitshares, using your Bitcoin, at a crypto-currency-only exchange.
For those of you who want to purchase Bitshares, I will show you in the next chapter how to do that. But very soon it will be much simpler. A number of companies have stepped up and asked to be involved in the Bitshares project. The first ones will allow North Americans to transfer fiat straight into Bitshares or Bitassets and back again directly without having to go through Bitcoin.
This will be a major step for Bitshares and will really allow it to go mainstream.
When the price of a crypto is stable, you don't have to explain the complication of the Blockchain or decentralization like you do with Bitcoin.
At that point, the message to users simply becomes: download a wallet, fund it, start earning interest on it, and spend it at participating stores.
All users need to know is that they can fund a simple wallet and merchants will give them discounts for this superior fee-free payment method. Most users will not even care that it is a crypto-currency. They won't have to worry what the price of bitUSD will be tomorrow because it will be worth the same as it is today.
Bitshares is also working with debit card providers to allow bitUSD to be spent anywhere Visa and MasterCard is accepted. This will re¬introduce all of the annoying fees and lack of privacy of the legacy system, but it will make bitUSD far more liquid in the short term. The goal, hopefully, is to grow so much that most merchants accept bitUSD directly and one day we can throw away the debit cards. But for the interim, it is a very important step that will allow people to use bitUSD anywhere.
All of these things are in the pipeline, and 2015 could be the start of something very, very big for Bitshares.
I hope you have enjoyed this educational book on Bitshares.
In the next chapter I will teach you how to get Bitshares, should you choose to do so.
To get a more current update recap on the state of Bitshares you can go here:
http://www.bitshares.tv/chapter6
Please leave your email address so I can notify you of future updates.