I've been playing with BitShares for the last few weeks, and it's really interesting stuff. You can read more about shorting the USD here: Playing in the Margins: bitUSD and BitShares on Open Ledger.
Advanced technologies come with advanced challenges. How are "normal" people supposed to catch up with years of development to know what's going on and how it got that way? I could spend months reading through the 150,000+ posts on https://bitsharestalk.org/. I could spend hours in https://telegram.me/BitSharesDEX asking stupid questions. It's hard to know where to start. I guess I'll just keep working through the wallet help for the basics: https://bitshares.org/wallet/#/help
I know just enough to know the BitShares decentralized exchange and wallet in one is an amazing idea. The number one rule of cryptocurrency is to control your own private keys. If you don't control the keys, you don't own that asset. If you have cryptocurrency on a normal exchange, they control it. They own it. You have to trust them to give it back to you when you request it. BitShares solves that by keeping the keys in your browser (or the app) while also connecting you to a decentralized exchange. No trust is needed and the fees are tiny compared to normal exchanges which not only take a percentage of each transaction, but they often charge fees for withdrawals as well.
Right now one of the biggest problems I see is lack of liquidity. If the BitShares system had more volume, I'd do all my trading there. Without enough people using it, the spread on the buy/sell walls is too great.
So this morning I was looking into some trading bots. There's stakemachine by Xerox and BTSBots by Alt. I'm a bit overwhelmed. I went to create a new Bitshares account and it said I needed to pay for it, but first needed a lifetime membership account at the cost of 17,611.61748 BTS (currently over $140). I realized I could just open an incognito browser tab and create a new account there for free using the facet. So why would I pay for a membership? The trading fees are so low that even 80% back on them would take a very long time to make a 17k+ bitshare payment worth it.
I recently read this great post by 
Right now, there is no marketing behind the project even thou the product is awesome.
That's how I feel about this also. It's amazing technology, but it's confusing because it's so advanced.
It's tempting to just move on to simpler things. But for some reason, I can't. I think this, like Steemit, is important. I think decentralization provides hope for the future with more freedom and voluntary interactions.
So let me end with some newbie questions / observations which might be helpful for those who've been around BitShares for a long time.
Why should anyone purchase a lifetime membership? What are the benefits of doing so? Will the price of a membership always be the same or has it (could it) change over time?
The Advanced vs. Basic mode is helpful on OpenLedger, but things are still a bit complicated, even for people who are familiar with using a cryptocurrency exchange. For those who have never used one (many just buy from Coinbase), it can be overwhelming. How to fix this? I don't really know. Maybe links out to professional training videos explaining all the features?
How can we get people excited about an asset which has mainly just gone down in value over the last 3 years?
Again, I think BitShares is an amazing system, but I feel like I'm hoping against hope that the rest of the world will realize this also and invest in it seriously to bring up the price. A test of the technology last month showed it can average 333 transactions a second! How are more people not really excited about this?
Part of me wants to promote this system more, but I also don't want others to buy in and end up as bag holders if the price just keeps going down.
What do you think? What advice do you have for BitShares newbies like me?