I signed up to be a Lifetime Member of Bitshares. With the recent price of BTS being as low as it is, the subscription cost me around $70USD which I thought was a no-brainer. I messed up the referral process so lost out on a $21 rebate, but no biggie.
Here's my referral link if you want to sign up as well.
https://bitshares.org/wallet?r=stvnmllr
I'd like to be able to rebate my referree's back 30% of what I would earn in BTS, but I'm not that advanced of a user yet of the platform to be able to do so. Check out user 'Fav' as he has been a contributor from the time before the project was even called Bitshares, and can get you signed up as well with a rebate as he seems to know what he is doing. I've been told it's not a pyramid scheme as it only refers up one layer, but whatever. It's $70 for a lifetime of benefits in the decentralized platform of the future.
The more I read about this project, the more I get excited about what the future holds.
There is a lot of buzz around Bitcoin $5k, and beyond, and the overall market cap etc but I think it's important to remember that the BTC Dominance % is only because the newness of the space and BTC coming first. Bitshares, Steem (more specifically the SMT token), and EOS are all ahead of their time. Bitcoin is clunky, has terrible transaction speed & confirmation, and is being fork'd to oblivion. Bitcoin Cash, or Bitcoin Gold don't have any value other than by association, so it's hard to justify billion dollar market caps. All of the benefits of Bitcoin are equally provided by a significant number of alt-coins. Maybe it won't be the ones I think it will be, but the point is there there are so many alternatives to which one becomes the standard, that eventually the market cap and dominance of Bitcoin will fade (after a run-up to $xxxk in 2018), the overall cap might stay the same but others will fill in the gaps. One of these I have to think is going to be Bitshares because it can do so many more things than Bitcoin can. Same for EOS v. Ethereum. What can I do, what is the utility, what is the use case, v. market hype in a name, or first to market advantage.
BTC is an intermediary because the trading pairs I'm interested in aren't available yet. I don't fully understand the concept of atomic swaps, but I'm pretty sure they don't require BTC or centralized exchanges.
If I had more to invest, I would put it into Waves, Bitshares, Tenx on a dip, Steem, and EOS at any price....haha I mean below the $6 ICO price. If EOS replaces Eth, then $27.50 according to the math of market caps and circulation, and I think that is on the low end.
There was a pretty big spread between the buy price of BTS on the Dex vs Bittrex that I found interesting. It was 1052 sats on the DEX, and 1005 on Bittrex. Bitshares has to get the liquidity up on the DEX to create a tipping point to get folks to convert over. The user interface is very confusing even for trained users. Same goes for Steem, and trying to transfer Steem from Bittrex to the Steem wallet is way to complex for basic users. That's just a little rant while it was on my mind.
Lastly, I was listening to Carter Thomas from Coin Mastery, and he highlighted being a part, or contributing to the community, as through meetups, and old fashioned in person networking can help get new ideas into the marketplace. I checked out the Minneapolis, MN area and there is a meetup on the first Thursday of every month at the Mall of America. If we can get regular folks out to these sort of thing and each buys $100 of bitcoin or what not, they would get pulled into the market and become educated on how crypto is going to be the new world order.
Here's the link
https://www.meetup.com/Everything-Bitcoin/
These groups still seem to small in terms of members and attendees, but I've got to think are going to grow over the coming weeks and months.
