Bitshares. Comeback kid.

Bitshares turned up un my radar because of Steemit. Based on the same technology, this cryptocurrency is fast. You all know how fast it is to send steem here and there. And Bitshares is the same. I started buying in to it at about 1 USD cent and it is currently at 10 cents. Market cap hovers around USD 280 million

Reasons for investing

1. I had som excess steem I had laying around. And I thought this looked like a cheap alternative. And boy I was right.
2. Bitshares is traded on the DEX together with steem, btc, eth, ltc, USDT and a bunch of other instruments. The DEX is a downloadable exchange you can run on your own desktop. It is mighty cool. No worrying about Poloniex DDOS attacks. It also serves as a wallet with easy backup. Plus it has a ton of features I really can't explain. It has some learning curve to it, but it is an exchange, so the functionality from other exchanges is comparable.
3. To me bitshares look like maybe the best option for small payments. I know they are working on something called bitpay. How it works out, I'm not sure.
4. There are several projects spun off bitshares. You look at one of them. Yes, I mean Steem.
5. The new project Dan Larimer has started, EOS, might even strengthen the bitshares ecosystem.

The chart is one of the sexyest things I have ever seen. If it will last is anyones guess. But my general feeling is that it will as the altcoin market slowly but surely eats up Bitcoins dominance. The world doesn't need a new bitcoin, it needs solutions. And with some smartness and user adoption. Is bitshares it? I sure hope so.

The Decentralised Exchange (DEX)

What's not to love about it? I get goosebumps every time I fire up this app. It is my favorite place to trade, no doubt about it. Here showing the steem/bts pair. Which is a real interesting one since bts is a real small denominator. The price fluctuations can be astronomical. For the past weeks and months selling steem has been real good value, but I have started to buy back some. I have also bought some Lisk, which is a real interesting project.

The DEX can be a bit isolated and lack volume, which opens up real world opportunities for some bargains you don't get any place else. It can also be a catastrophy if you start panicing. Generally I have found the fluctuations to be largely in line with Poloniex, but I have seen real bargains in the Dash/bts pair. I think it was about 40% compared to Poloniex. Not bad when you have patience to hunt.

To move funds to the DEX is easy. You can participate in givaways here on steem and you get some to start trading. Moving steem there is also easy via openledger.