Thank for those who have more knowledge about derivatives taking the time to make some explanations. Admittedly my patience was too short to elaborate sufficiently.
It doesn't really matter that some people are ignorant of the utility of derivatives, because they will always gravitate to what is succeeding.
And derivatives boost the ecosystem by orders-of-magnitude, because a large portion of the business world can't participate without them. No hedging, sorry they can't do Bitcoin.
how do side chains fit in to this scenario of derivatives
Merged-mining was
my recent idea of how to do the programmable block chain correctly, not Ethereum nor Bitshares.
Bitshares actually started out as groups competing application-specific blockchains but all minor chains were abandoned in favor of pushing BTSX (branded just "BTS") adoption to get bitUSD network effect.
BTS delegate nodes provide a way to create ephemeral bridges between distinct chains while letting each retain their sovereignty.
Realistically the application-specific chains that should emerge soonest are voting and DNS which both have BTS sidechain projects already underway.