Hi Steemerians, please indulge me sharing my love for Bitshares
1. The Bitshares Asset Exchange is BAE!
All centralized exchanges will eventually die through scammery or hacks. I had money in Cryptsy and luckily I sensed their scammy scummery before the withholding and closure, bitfinex got hacked, bitstamp, and of course Mt. Gox. This cannot happen with BAE. Funds are as safe as in a personal crypto wallet, because that's exactly what it is. It's a fully decentralized on-chain exchange, there's nothing better. With 30k-200k (USD) in trades per day among 20 different popular assets this exchange is getting more and more popular for traders and companies wanting to ICO. Anyone can issue a custom asset representing anything! Assets can be divisible, abundant, and flexible like "James Points" or indivisible and singular like "Ownership of this green BMW".
2. BAE Community
The Bitshares community is great. The Bitsharestalk.org page sees new posts and ideas every day. There are new projects popping up like BlockPay which allows merchants to accept any cryptocurrency and BAE automatically gets them gold or USD or EUR, thus solving the multi-currency and volatility issues all in one. Great developers 
3. BAE is cool AF with DPoS
Without acronyms that reads "cool as fuck with delegated proof of stake" this is the most secure consensus algorithm and allows BitShares a 3 second block time. With Bitcoin you wait 10-60 minutes for confirmation. Bitshares gets it done in 3 seconds.
BAE isn't wasteful. We only have one earth and one chance to love and preserve it. There is no race to burn more and more fuel; this project doesn't endanger our energy resources like Bitcoin does.
4. BAE is Smart
Where else can you short fiat currency, for free? USD will inevitably devalue long term. It always has and always will. Same with CNY. Yet some people will want to hold these assets... millions of people. They're standing outside your door with signs: please take money! Will trade short term stability for real value!
It's a beautiful thing.
Unfortunately, you can't trade with much leverage. Every USD (or gold, CNY, silver, EUR) is collateralized 150% to start and always at least 100%. So you don't get the collapse the banking industry regularly sees, but you also can't make crazy money, just plenty money. I can write another article on this if I see interest (pun).
5. BAE is Open!
OpenLedger (OL) is a privately owned company (a crypto-exchange). BAE allows OL to be totally transparent with their assets, transactions, and fees. An OL account is really a BitShares wallet, which you could make without OpenLedger. TradeBlock, FreedomLedger, and others are a similar arrangement.
Anyone can start their own exchange using BAE. I am polyamorous but I still have my BAE.
In conclusion, Bitshares supply is about to massively slow on Nov. 5 (remember remember) and it has the best technology, features, and community. Many people have proposed referring to the bitshares exchange as the DEX which is cool and it's true that it was the original decentralized exchange, but nothing else can ever be BAE.
xoxo,
Kenmonkey
learn more:
http://docs.bitshares.org//bitshares/whatis.html#
