A New Star Rises

Officially jumping into the coveted 3rd slot and  declaring itself “King of 2.0”.

BitSharesX (BTSX) with 106,424 BTC  (53,755,292 USD) has used the most recent alt-coin push to propel itself past some serious competition. Signalling to the market that there is plenty of room for fresh innovation at the top.

A series of Distributed Autonomous Companies, BitsharesX is the logical economic culmination of open source. If open source development allowed a small upstart from Helsinki to take on IBM, what will an open source business model do for our economy?

While it remains to be seen just how a delegated proof of stake system will work in the long run. It seem they’ve applied an old fix in politics, the idea of a group delegating one member to represent the groups will, to the newly forming potential problem of centralization in maintaining the blockchain. While I personally have not found the idea of delegation to be all that effective in politics, using a trustless system (where we can be confident no one is manipulating the vote count) may in fact be the missing piece of the puzzle.

Now what exactly does this distributed Autonomous Company do? A product of the Bitshares platform BitsharesX (BTSX) allows it’s user base to, “buy, sell and trade all kinds of virtual assets that track the value of real world items like dollars, gold, silver and even shares of companies. They can all be bought, sold or traded right in your BitSharesX account, with anyone on earth, at any time, instantly.”

So what these clever boys and girls have accomplished is a system that suddenly makes the whole market available to anyone who’d like to participate by tying token value to real world value on a large, publicly maintained ledger. Best of all, it seems they did so without anyone’s permission. Which is again it seems, the mark of the new economy. After all, who do you regulate if the organization is autonomous and distributed? Whom do you send your legal notice to if the network is owned by all?

If BitsharesX can deliver even a portion of it’s promise it may very well represent the opening salvo of a new wave of services that will be unlike anything we’ve had access to before. Sometimes also called a “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” companies like Bitshares can in effect maximize shareholder’s potential gains by minimizing it’s need for overhead (such as expensive CEO’s that sabotage organizations before riding down on golden parachutes).

We live in exciting times. Whether or not such excitement will turn to disappointment in the future is yet to be discerned but if you’re hopeful about the potential of this exciting new technology (as I am) one can begin to see  how amazing things could be.