BitShares is going to do to the world of business what Bitcoin has done to the world of money – we are at the cusp of something incredible!
What Is BitShares?
The traditional way of buying and selling cryptocurrencies on an exchange is to convert your coins to and from fiat currency. This means that every time you want to buy or sell cryptocoins, you lose the anonymity inherent in the cryptocurrency and blockchain platform.
While centralisation is understandable (exchanges have a need to tie cryptocurrency prices to real-life assets like USD or gold), there is also the need for a more decentralised, anonymous system, and that’s where BitShares comes in.
The BitShares blockchain platform allows users to convert their cryptocurrencies to stable assets by converting those coins into another cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a real-life asset (for example, BitUSD is tied with the value of USD). This has quite a few advantages over regular exchanges (and some disadvantages as well), as we’ll see in the next sections.
Why was BitShares Created?
The first question to address is why a project such as BitShares was created in the first place. There is a glaring lack of access to financial services in several parts of the world. Overcoming this problem may warrant a decentralized approach. BitShares aims to fill this void by offering users access to a stack of financial services without the need for a bank account or similar services. Whether or not this concept will make a big impact in the future remains to be seen. The project certainly offers a fair few technical solutions to make its vision come true.
The Future
BTS is built on top of the Graphene high performance blockchain, which means that it is capable of maintaining the current transaction speed of up to 3 seconds (limited by the speed of light in fibre optics cable) and scale comfortably to 100,000 transaction per second in the future. This incredible performance capability allows BTS the throughput to successfully take market share from the traditional fiat financial platform and banking sector. To put this huge throughput in perspective, this enables the network to carry out more transactions that the VISA and Mastercard networks combined are able to process.
The potential combined with minimal transaction fees and the decentralised exchange offers phenomenal advantages over traditional brokers, and will see unprecedented adoption by the financial sector over the next year. Even with this system in place, BitShares still has sufficient reserve funds to allow several years of continuous development.
BitShares is not in competition with anyone or anything in the cryptosphere – it is merely filling a void that allows the world of crypto to decentralise the modern economy.
BitShares Technical Details
Consensus algorithm: Delegated Proof of Stake DPOS
Block time: 1.5-second average, 3 sec max, ~1.5 sec latency for 99.9% irreversibility certainty
Block reward: 1 BTS (from Reserve Pool)
Irreversible blocks: (2 * BLOCK_INTERVAL * WITNESSES / 3) ~ 34s
Maximum Coins: 3,600,570,502 (constant)
Maximum Transactions Per Second: 100,000+ potential (proven 3,400+ tx/s)
Noteworthy is the lightning fast blockchain with 1.5 second average block times and throughput potential of 100,000 transactions per second (which is more than all the credit card transactions worldwide combined).
BitShares management is controlled by a Decentralized Autonomous Company (DAC), a framework which allows BitShares holders to contribute and ultimately decide on the future direction of BTS. This DAC operates independently but in tandem with the original open source code base that is developed and tweaked continuously.
Price Prediction
Current Price: $0.24
End of 2018: $2.78
5 Year: $9.76
Conclusion
BitShares enables an open, scalable decentralized exchange and fintech platform with smartcoins, a novel type of financial instrument. It also organizes itself and funds its own work and development, effectively making it the first DAC (or “DAO”) to reach the free market.
