What is BitShares?
BitShares (symbol BTS), formerly known as ProtoShares (PTS), is an industrial grade “crypto-equity”, peer to peer distributed ledger and network based on a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) algorithm. It was created in 2014 by visionary Dan Larimer (“Bytemaster”), co-founder of Steemit, EOS and Cryptonomex.
BitShares is based on Graphene, an open source C++ blockchain implementation, which acts as a consensus mechanism. Graphene is used by several other projects like Steemit.com (decentralized Reddit, blog platform), and PeerPlays.com (gaming site and token PPY) indicating real-world usage.
BitShares operates more as an equity rather than a purist “currency” since BTS tokens are used as collateral for a variety of decentralized financial services like smart contracts, decentralized exchanges, banking, derivative creation (of market pegged “bitAssets”) and currency rails.
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
Coins not in reserve fund: 2,599,900,000 BTS (2017 Sept 30)
Coins in reserve fund: 1,000,668,097 BTS (2017 Sept 30)
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.
Your wallet address is your username
This is way better than long cumbersome strings of letters and numbers which is just asking for bad user experience and errors. Your username acts as your wallet address (like your social media or google login). It’s much easier to remember and type “john-smith” then 21x9d8sv37sd6m282u4j2hg9h4orbjht2u98f3.
BitShares Financial Service Offerings
BitShares competes with banks by issuing collateralizing market-pegged and stable bitAssets (also called smart coins)
This means crypto-based assets track real-world market assets like the US dollar denominated “bitAsset” known as bitUSD. This tracks the movements of the dollar by aggregating a variety of data sources that are maintained by the BitShares community.
This Smart Coin token always has at least 200% (or more) of its value backed by the BitShares core currency (BTS), to which it can be converted at any time, as collateral in a smart-contract based loan managed by the blockchain.
What makes this platform unique is that it’s free from counterparty risk yet still has a loan backed by collateral. This is achieved by allowing the network (and software protocol) to secure collateral and perform settlements.
The goal of price stable smart coins (bitAssets):
A predictable stable price with reduced volatility
A relatively reliable solution to predict the future value of a token
A unit of account distinct from assets with capital gains or losses (which has increased tax liability)
Hedging against volatile Cryptocurrency markets and price action
A BitShares market-pegged asset (MPA) can be viewed as a contract between an asset buyer seeking price stability and a short seller seeking greater exposure to BTS price movement.
Figure 2: Shows price discovery and a short seller who makes a bet to profit from BTS price movements which ensures liquidity as with a 24-hour forced call (selling of position) from call time.