Now that Steem has turned into a article juggernaut and signing-up machine. The benefits will only trickle down to Bitshares the first DAC or DAO to ethereum folks. A DAC is a "Decentralized Autonomous Corporation." This term was stolen by Vitalik Buterin phrasing his term DAO or "Decentralized Automonous Organization."
Bitshares is like the NASDAQ, a Futures exchange or even a Visa Card payment system. It has 3 second confirmations that can be made into 1 second confirmations. Bitshares can also handle over 100,000 transactions a second and probably a lot more with the right equipment. Bitshares will have to when the system is built out and high frequency traders come in or we can buy cattle futures or trade leveraged currencies. How does Bitshares get these fast transaction times? The system has a set amount of what Bitcoin would call "Miners" but Bitshares calls them "Witnesses." Now to square the circle there are only a small amount of witnesses around 24. You can check out who they are here http://cryptofresh.com/witnesses . Now obviously they dont give out their addresses but some do.
The reason Bitshares has not taken off yet is due to poor marketing and lack of visibility. Bitshares is like Ethereum the only difference is Bitshares has a council to vote on things while Ethereum lets anyone build anything. This DOESNT mean that you cant crowdfund on Bitshares, you can. You can make a UIA or "User Issued Asset." This can help you kickstart your business on the cheap. You can raise money and instead of doing an IPO on a small stock exchange which could cost upwards of $100,000 USD a UIA on Bitshares costs about 10,000 bitshares. Now a UIA can also be a mutual fund or ETF (Exchange Traded Fund). As long as the people who make the UIA are transparent they can hold stocks in a brokerage account and set up buying and selling bots to keep their UIA Exchange Traded Fund within a close range to the NAV (Net Asset Value). As ive lost about 99% of people reading the last sentence, hopefully 1% will make a UIA to be a Mutual Fund or ETF (Exchange Traded Fund).
Bitshares is the exchange where Steem and other crypto-currencies, gold/silver and other currencies are traded. Go to bitshares.openledger.info
As I make my dolphin cry and boom boom away. To the Moon folks! To the moon