So after a month of messing with HERO I've come to the following conclusions:
The HERO contest lives or dies by convincing a lot of people to use HERO as a 5% savings account
This requires a lot of non-crypto people to transfer fiat to HERO, which is going to require a simple and easy on-ramp. I don't see anything in the HERO contest materials about the on-ramp for non-crypto people to move fiat into HERO easily and quickly. This literally has to be like an Interac e-transfer that automatically buys HERO - users don't even see the DEX.
Non-crypto people are going to need an iOS and Android app to use as a wallet and to check the status of their savings. This wallet is also going to need to enable them to convert to/from fiat seamlessly. This is probably the most critical part of the contest and will determine whether the HERO sees widespread adoption or not. A clean, simple app is key. All people are going to want to see is their balance in their native currency increasing by 5% every month. They should not even see HERO. Just $XXXX and the number gets bigger every day. Basically: transfer money to our app and it will grow at 5% until you transfer it back out.
There needs to be millions of HERO tokens available in a very liquid market for this to work. This requires hundreds of millions of BTS to be locked up as collateral. I personally created more than 500 HERO and have now settled every one of them due to volatility and absolutely awful margin calls. I lost over $20,000 USD of value in a month trying to bring HERO to market - BTS went from .30 to .20 and anyone trying to get HERO off the ground got killed. There is a lot of risk in creating HERO that has been glossed over in the marketing materials, and if whales are going to create millions of HERO - and put hundreds of millions of BTS at risk as collateral - there is going to have to be a very convincing plan for steadily increasing the price of BTS. I personally feel a few whales have dumped the BTS market to squeeze HERO collateral and create an entry point for themselves. Whales could easily roll the market up and down and make a fortune for themselves shorting and buying back HERO at the expense of the average Joe. This is a huge problem. There needs to be steady upward pressure on BTS in order to convince a large part of the market to short HERO.
More as it develops!
I'm thinking this all sounds great but didn't bitcoin get its value from:
When bitcoin was regarded as stable enough it was picked up by the Chinese and now it is regarded as a digital gold. I mean gold is a hedge against inflation right?
First I thought BTS are shares so stock! Now @stan you talked about it being a currency, ok sounds nice. But (look another one!) if you look at Steemit, @aggroed posted a distribution of the (whales) wealth on Steemit regarding HF19 a while ago.
Outcome: not the 1% no the 0,1% of whales owned the most wealth.
Since Steemit is based on Bitshares but made so to kindle long term growth, how can you expect the same thing doesn't happen?
can't agree more!
Logical reasoning. BTS is showing a downward trend since 12/6. Short term correction?
This is an absolutely stunning idea! I really think the hero coin will be a huge success. I also agree that the method for mass adoption needs to be incredibly simple. This is revolutionary if bitshares can pull it off!