Bitshares Review: Beginners guide
BitShares (BTS): A blockchain with built-in exchange
Industry type: Smart contracts and decentralised exchange.
What is Bitshares? Bitshares is a decentralised smart contracts platform with the world’s first decentralised exchange (DAX), a fully autonomous system that provides services to trading, banking, stocks, lotteries and auctions without human management and guided by rules that are coded in open source software that is distributed across a decentralised network. With the common features of a trading platform, no single point of failure, and high scalability Bitshares can handle the trading volume of the NASDAQ stock market.
What gives it value?
- Decentralised trading.
- Stable cryptocurrencies.
- Company account management.
- Supports decentralised apps.
Interesting Technology:
- The decentralised asset exchange DAX gives traders the ability to buy and sell tokens whilst holding their assets in their Bitshares wallet rather then a centralised pool that is prone to attack. With all of the features that are expected in a trading platform, the DAX doesn’t require account permissions and gives traders complete financial freedom.
- Graphene is an open source C++ blockchain implementation that was designed specifically for Bitshares. What makes Graphene special is that it’s modular and so can be adapted to many different uses. Graphene can process an impressive 100,000 transactions per second. Graphene is also used in Steemit, a decentralised blog site, and followmyvote.com, a platform for private digital municipal votes.
- The Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) is what Bitshares uses to process transactions and build the blockchain. With DPOS, BTS token holders vote for ‘witnesses’ to validate transactions. Witness numbers are capped at a certain number and the top tier of witnesses with the most votes are awarded associated fees. Witnesses are the equivalent to miners on the Bitcoin network.
- User issued assets allow individuals and companies to create custom tokens on the Bitshares exchange that are attached to something of value which holders can hold or trade. When an asset is created, the name, distribution, description, and any customization requirements are specified, such as if only those on a specific whitelist can hold tokens. Common use cases for user issued assets include national currencies, oil, gas, deposit receipts, company shares, events tickets, reward points, individual or corporate debt, crowdfunding, digital property, and privatised-stable cryptocurrencies (SmartCoins).
- Dynamic account permission is a feature of Bitshares that gives company accounts a hierarchical weight to process expenses. This creates a system solution where some accounts rely on other accounts to gain permission for funds, whilst other accounts hold more weight than others depending on where the accounts sit in the hierarchy. For example, if someone in the hierarchy proposes a transaction, then other account holders say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to that transaction, and when the transaction has enough of an approval rating from all accounts, it is approved.
- Bitshares is the first smart contracts platform to offer scheduled and recurring subscription payments where users can authorise a third party to make regular withdrawals from their accounts on within certain limits. In other words, it is a function for ‘set and forget’ payments for things such as monthly bills.
Notable team:
- Dan Larimer is a software programmer and creator of Bitshares. Larimer also co-founded blockchain social platform Steemit and is the CTO of the EOS network. He is a serial entrepreneur and an extremely respected member of the cryptosphere.
- In BitShares there is no ‘one’ development team, instead, there are many freelancers making network upgrades only after shareholder approval.
Notable partnerships:
- Quintric, a real-time institutional grade cryptocurrency and legal tender backed by Gold, Silver, and Briefne’s coin of the realm, as well as five other legal tender gold coins: Canadian Maple Leaf, Austrian Philharmonic, Chinese Panda, British Britannia, and Australian Kangaroo. Quintric will be building upon Bitshares blockchain.
- PalmPay, a merchants POS system that accepts any digital currency at zero cost has been using the Bitshares platform for over 3 years.
- BitsFarm is a farming game built on the Bitshares network that uses SEED tokens to plant virtual crops and earn rewards.
Bitshares Review: The Good
- Its decentralised exchange is built into its wallet with no single point of failure.
- Users can create their own SmartCoins that are tied to real-world assets.
- It enables subscription and recurring payments.
- It can process 100,000 transaction per second.
- The project has more features than can be covered in this review.
Bitshares Review: The Not So Good
- It lacks good marketing, and as a result, fails to inform the public of its activity or existence.
Future Roadmap:
- Bitshares future developments are proposed by developers and voted upon by stakeholders. As such, developments are constantly initiated and completed as need be.
CONCLUSION:
Bitshares is a well-established platform with a considerable list of utilities, fast transaction speeds, and room to scale. In my opinion, decentralised exchanges like this will become very popular in the future, but due to its lack of a marketing campaign, Bitshares may not compete with its newer competition on the basis of public attraction. With that aside, there is no doubt that Bitshares is a powerful platform.
Bitshares Price:
The current Bitshares price, market cap and charts.
Local exchanges:
Coinspot: www.coinspot.com.au
Cointree: www.cointree.com
Overseas exchanges:
Binance: www.binance.com
Poloniex: www.poloniex.com
YoBit: www.yobit.net
Livecoin www.livecoin.net
Where to store this crypto:
Online wallet: https://bitshares.org/download/
Similar coins:
0x (0X) – A DAX protocol for the Ethereum network.
Waves (WAVES) – A create-your-own crypto platform.
Ethereum (ETH) – The most popular smart contracts platform.
Ethereum Classic (ETC) – The original smart contracts platform.
Further information:
Whitepaper: http://docs.bitshares.org/bitshares/papers/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitShares/
Website: https://bitshares.org/