I'm not looking for a technical discussion between PoS, PoW, etc... but rather fundamentally why traders and speculators are not using the DEX provided by BitShares?
My thoughts and questions without getting into politics:
-Liquidity is a major problem however this is a chicken and egg problem.
Because DEX trades tokens on the bitshares blockchain. People like to buy the blockchains actual token. There is a huge difference.
While true, simply day trading are the users ever going to withdraw the actual token? Just like real world options, no one actually takes delivery of that option. The exchange is just giving you an IOU in which you must trust they have your balance available.
Perhaps we need to divide this into two categories. Trading tokens such as BitBTC vs BitGold.
Additionally, take a look at the deposit/withdraw page in the wallet. With OpenLedger you can go direct from the Open.Asset to the real token or vice versa. IE deposit BTC and receive Open.BTC which can be traded against other pairs. When you think of the big picture these exchanges such as OpenLedger have motivation to compete for your business.
My wild guess for reasons are:
1. Traders want to be where the most liquidity is.2. Traders probably see no benefit to DEX that relies on federation and trust, thus isn't really immune to the risk of an exchange. They may in fact trust such exotic new tech less and besides they really don't need DEX.
3. BitAssets pegs are most certainly lossy.
4. Why learn some complex new thing which might have bugs lurking. Better to trust what most other speculators are already using. No real incentive to switch.
5. Probably concerns about how the DEX can perform in real-time during volatile market movements and overload of volume.
Etc, etc.
I agree. Liquidity is a big factor for active traders. Why would a trader make the switch when they're already making profit in Polo or Kraken. You see, traders go where they can make money, they don't trade somewhere because it's "awesome" or decentralized. It's all about the game.
The marketing error that most developers make is, "build it and they will come".
The successful marketers of altcoins have built a good hype bubble.
I have seen 0 altcoins that gained a great following and adoption due to building something truly functionally awesome.
Again, I agree. Marketing the platform really well is a must if you want people to flock and use it. But before you get the traders, you have to attract the whales and the newbies first in order for the traders to have an incentive to use DEX. So marketing DEX to people outside of crypto should be the goal. But I don't see the mainstream getting into crypto within 5 - 10 years.
So we're back again to the chicken and egg problem.