Yes, I'll concede it is indeed debt, but so are the pieces of paper with dead people on them in everyone's wallet. Fiat is a certificate of debt with no collateral other than taxes and economic productivity of a nation state (which, you know, I love to consider theft or, at the least, a version of extortion).

In this case, the collateral system really matters. Whereas derivatives traders are often trading with only a fraction of real value backing their positions, BitShares takes the opposite approach with over collateralization. It does so knowing that BitShares itself is a risky, volatile asset. The key being even if the margin is called, no one is hurt accept the person who took out the debt position. Everyone else gets exactly the value they are owed.

I like the idea of betting against yourself to some degree, but isn't that also just like doing the same thing at a smaller scale?

So if create 10k bitUSD out of nothing, buy BitShares with it and hope for the best, betting against myself would be to also buy up some bitUSD. How much? 2k? 5k? If I was to do that, I might as well just create 8k or 5k bitUSD to begin with. The key, I think, comes down to how much collateral you have and how much you are willing to lose.

But yes, selling the bitUSD for just BitShares may not be as good of a move as selling it for multiple cryptocurrencies (which I've also done in the past). With what we saw this past week or so, it wouldn't have mattered much though as everything went down.

I'm glad you're here, Brady. I hope you enjoy playing around with this economic sandbox which runs on smart contracts with no violence. :)