Bitshares is so undervalued its almost hilarious. Best tech of any altcoin with the most horribly failed marketing and PR.
The tech WAS attractive when Bytemaster eagerly explained how cryptocurrency can evolve to attain stable price at the early times (What a fond memory!!).
But later, their team began to squeeze future participants by first introducing AngelShares (direct funding for development, the former plan was to be fully mined by CPU-PoW which runs for years), then arbitrary changed the funding period (the funding started on 2014-01-01, the deadline changed to 2014-02-28, former plan was to last for about half a year), and ended an initial distribution phase.
Furthermore, because their team can no longer squeeze future participants by limiting purchasing opportunity, they changed the very cap of long-stated hard-limit money supply (about little less than 2x dilution) and they started to squeeze the current holders'/supporters' shares in the system!!
This act affected severely the long-term trust in the system because it showed whenever Bytemaster wanted to get money (for developing purposes), he can easily change the cap of the system and screw the current holders!
And I feel that Bytemaster's idea is good but his team's competency of execution (of that idea) is insufficient.
This is unfortunate but the reality is harsh. I hope Bytemaster learns from the past and never to invite turmoil in the futhre.
And if you go to bitsharestalk.org you can see everyone is desperate and looking for EXIT (this is surprising compared to the past optimism).
TLDR; Bitshares' idea was bright but the competency of execution is no good, the future is especially uncertain, if you're interested be CAUTIOUS!
Most major crypto's have their fair share of screw ups, but they move on and keep innovating Nxt had aweful distribution, but it kept developing and has now gained more respect. Maidsafe screwed up their IPO but are high respected, Ripple is centralised and can dump billions of xrp on the market at any time but still is thriving, bitcoin has satoshi with his million coins had and its price pumped by mtgox as revealed by the Willy report so no one knows how much it is worth, but is still spreading like a tidal wave. They all have problems, none are perfect. Don't miss the forest for the trees. BitShares is making new progress all the time, bridges, new releases, new partnerships. It's time to stop looking at the past and see what is actually available now.