no they can't replace it because the Bitshare stuff is trust based so not good to sink large amounts of money into it.
-traders and speculators will not use it if it's not volatile and that's currently 80% to 90% of the money in bitcoin
- the high volatility comes from the high inflation.
Decentralised low inflation coins (with reduced volatility) which are trustless stand a chance to get a shot imo - not the bitshares-crap though.
What aspect of bitshares do you feel requires too much trust? The market pegged assets like bitUSD don't require trust to trade (no counterparty risk) like an IOU asset, just trust in the feed producers (delegates) that they aren't colluding to manipulate the feeds. Because of the difficulty in getting an active delegate position and the fact that shareholders can vote out malicious or colluding delegates if their actions are made public, I don't see this as an issue. It is also a best practice to have each delegate run by individuals / companies instead of one user in control of multiple delegates.
A steady coin could be of benefit as the fluctuations could or can be a problem, but what's to stop people paying more or less for these fiat-pegged coins?
Both BitUSD and Nubits use highly complex systems to keep the price roughly in line with their fiat equivalent(s). The peg usually isn't exact, but it's close enough. I don't know how it works and trying to understand it gives me a headache but I suspect there is some degree of centralization going on behind the scenes.
From what I understand about NuBits, they have custodian users maintaining buy and sell walls at $1 to keep a NuBit at that price. They use a variable interest rate to incentivize holders to "park" their NuBits and earn interest.
bitUSD and other market pegged assets on the other hand only require 2 voluntary traders willing to take opposite positions (long and short) on the bitshares internal market, the collateral of which is held by the blockchain itself. More reading for those that are interested how it actually works:
http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2014/12/18/What-are-BitShares-Market-Pegged-Assets/Edit: to answer the OPs question, I think that stable assets will find a home alongside volatile assets like BTC and BTS for their utility, but we must not forget that assets tracking the value of a currency that is strong today will also fall with that currency in the future when it collapses. So stable assets have good use in the short to medium term but in the long term a fixed supply cryptocurrency will probably be ideal (after the volatility settles down) for a global and manipulation resistant currency. BM just wrote up a good post talking about that issue:
http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/01/How-to-create-a-stable-decentralized-crypto-currency/With BitShares you were/are required to trust Bytemaster. With the current structure you now have to trust Bytemaster and the other Devs who have enormous amounts of shares and are now getting bigger chunks of near 130,100 shares per month each.
Between Bytemaster and I3, I suspect they hold near 10% of all the shares. I3 still has 67 million shares and I suspect Bytemaster and Stan have more than 100 million share already if not way more.
Since the network security is based on stake voting for block producers and vote participation is about 16%, it is hugely centralized around Bytemaster. This is why if you are nice to Bytemaster and PM him to vote you in as a delegate, you will all of a sudden be a delegate.
Bitshares is highly centralized right now. The crappy thing about it is that in order for it to become less centralized, Bytemaster and I3 have to divest. And with their amount of holdings, it will depress the price for long time.