BitAssets (bitUSD, bitCNY, ... bitGold) are designed to track the price of those "real world" assets without counterparty risk on the blockchain.
So think of them as financial tools. You can switch your exposure to price movements in 3 seconds by trading between them.
Think of BitShares as a special purpose currency factory that offers a way to create a variety of useful hybrid "smart coins" that breed desirable features from multiple currency strains. Some are trustless. Some engineer blockchain-assisted trust. Some represent real assets mapped onto the blockchain by trust alone. Others are stable with respect to external assets that may or may not be stable themselves. Some are deterministically self-contained mathematical constructs. Others extract order from the unpredictable external consensus of generally clueless people. Our industry is generating a Cambrian Explosion of new coin species.
So, when you evaluate any particular coin, you shouldn't be comparing it to some preconceived idea of what your ideal one-size-fits-all universal coin should be. That's like saying everyone should standardize on a single retirement mutual fund. The blockchain world has moved waaaaaay beyond that.
When somebody says "So think of them as..." you can guess they are about to try to assfuck you. And then "deterministically self-contained mathematical constructs", oh no, and "a special purpose currency factory" oh yes yes yes.
The bitxxx market on Poloniex can be summarized as "Here is an oppportunity to convert your money into bitcoin, then buy an asset that will decline in value as bitcoin increases in value".
Why is it marketed on Poloniex? Because it provides capital to sneaky fucknuts using complicated terminology who want cheap money to invest that they can pay back at a discount.
I get the cynicism. At the end of the day someone must buy these tokens at stated face value.
"deterministically self-contained mathematical constructs"
The determination is self contain IF AND ONLY IF large lots of these pegged tokens can move large lots of value at stated value.
But crypto really, honestly needs these pegs.
"So think of them as..."
Yes tools. You can trust your $usd in a bank account, a MtGox account, BitAssets account, or a Nubits ledger. But your going to need to trust someone until you convert your $money into physical gold or silver. Everything else is credit, so was once said.
These virtual gold, silver, CNY, USD, EUROs are need in crypto to port value.
So yes again, they are important tools.
Hold them like a hot potato, pass them quickly for someone else to hold.
I personally would use them to move fiat value from exchange to exchange. And opening a fiat/crypto pairing can thus be accomplished with these virtual products.
Long term there will be a DAC or DAO, depending on their motives, that becomes widely trusted with these kinds of products. There will likely be depositor insurance, and small interest yields, and function just like a bank account less the overhead.
But for long term storage of commodity money. A greater revolution is needed. These virtual gold, silver, CNY, USD issuers are going to have to actually hold in a vault the real physical product. Which is a legal stick icky spot to stand. But some one will build it, and they will come.
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