I have a couple questions
How does Bitshares manage it's Blockchain growth and storage over time? What happens to low volume markets?
1. Not sure, with the 101 delegate system, I think the theory is the average user will not have to download the entire blockchain, I see parts of it are discussed here
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9204.0, maybe someone else can give a better answer.
2. There is a requirement for all shorts to cover every 30 days, so even if you bought an asset in a low volume market you should be able to get fair value for it. I imagine a market can also be discontinued with notice if there was really low volume.
I find bloat and efficiency to be one of the most defining factors but when I have time I'll do some more research into the project. I really like where it's heading in terms of technology, profitability and it's DAC system.
What was the timeline of transitions between coins? was memorycoin ever a part of protoshares? and protoshares became bitshares? What happens to people who still own the old coin?
This might not be accurate, I'm just someone that owns some BTS, so I don't know everything about the project.
Protoshares (PTS) was the first thing they created, but once they realised POW was inferior and that they needed more funding to build the first DACs they created AngelShares too. So originally the idea was that AGS & PTS would get a decent stake in DACs the BitShares Devs and community funding helped start and if any independent third parties wanted to use that toolkit or a lot of the underlying technology they were asked to sharedrop 10% on PTS & 10% on AGS to get the community and developers support.
An independent developer FreeTrade was just a third party that share dropped on AGS & PTS for his MMC, MMC2 & LTS projects, I don't think any were particularly successful and there was some controversy surrounding some. I never looked into them much their CAPs were too small to interest me.
Other projects more linked to the BitShares team share dropped bigger amounts on AGS & PTS, they have the 'BitShares' in their name. like BitShares DNS (Namecoin killer, $6 million CAP pre-merger
http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=qeweF05tT50 ) BitShares Vote, BitShares Music
http://peertracks.com/ & BitShares Play.
Of course the big one so far was BTSX that was awarded 50/50 to AGS & PTS holders on 28/02/14.
The main developer realised though that a lot of the DACs would end up being competitors rather than complimentary because the killer app is BitAssets like BitUSD
http://whatisbitusd.com/, so you really want one main DAC that maximises network effect and bootstraps one DACs BitAssets to the entire world, so they decided to merge DNS, Vote, AGS & PTS into one main SuperDAC - 'BitShares' at no.4
Any shares you own in any of the merged DACs will be made easily accessible and released linearly over two years. Except BTSX those stay trading just the same as its blockchain forms the base of BitShares, it's just been diluted a bit to bring in the other DACs. The most recent newsletter covers a lot of it, a little bit 'cheerleader' for my taste but
http://bitshares.org/bitshares-reloaded/Another big change is the new BitShares has dilution, it's max is less than Bitcoin, probably much less than that in practice and unlike Bitcoin where it gets paid to miners, it's voted on by shareholders and released via delegates to fund development, marketing & charity but shareholders can also choose no dilution at all. (So anybody can get BTS but not for having the most expensive mining machine but rather for do something useful and valuable that the BitShares community wants to support or that they think will add value to BTS.)
Thanks for the very informative explanation, looks like the project is progressing well despite a few bumps in the road. I'll go through everything when I have more time but I can see why there is so much interest in Bitshares, even if some may have gotten a raw deal down the track you can't deny that they are making some good headway and doing well.