Some additional thoughts: if you look at the BTS/BTC chart on bittrex, you could see that the previous down trend was from 1300 to 280 in the course of Sept 16 till March 17 - 7 months. So, it had lost about 4.6x of its value in 7 month. Right now the trend is from 16,000 to about 1300 or about 12x loss in value from June till October or 5 months. So, this downtrend is much more severe. Plus the relative marketcap of BTS and its holdings at bittrex are at least 10x higher now than before compared to the bitcoin, so the exposure to BTS at bittrex grew a lot relative to the bitcoin. Also, there were almost $7Million BitUSD in June 2017, right now it is down to $3 million with the Bitshares DEX exchange trying to cover the $2 million of BitUSD loans automatically by selling the BTS. In the previous bear run, there were just $100,000 of BitUSD in circulation or 30x smaller than the current position. On top of this the leverage required to hold the BitUSD is 1.75, this translates into the selling pressure 1.75 times higher than the BitUSD level in a downtrend.

Lets consider an extreme scenario, where somebody, say a pro trader X holds those $3 million BitUSD and is not going to sell them until the bear trend clearly reverses. The accounts that sold those BitUSD to trader X are going to be liquidated against the collateral BTS they hold until those accounts buy back the BitUSD by selling BTS or get automatically liquidated to zero BTS. So, the downtrend is more likely to continue until the big trader X considers the bear trend to be over at which point those BitUSD will be converted to back to BTS. I am not saying that it will happen, but if the bear trend in alt coins continue for a few more months, a lot of BitUSD will continue to put additional pressure against the BTS with too little liquidity on the market and the price can continue its collapse. It would be good if the big trader X was the blockchain itself as I proposed, so it could intelligently support the BTS at key points and punish the speculators.

Bitcoin is loved as a holding not because of its slow transaction times, but because of its relatively low volatility. In contrast, the BTS essentially absorbs all of the volatility from BitUSD which has zero volatility. If we wanted to make BTS a lower volatility asset, we need to give it a big liquidity pool against the USD, like the central banks do in smaller countries around the world. Those banks buy their own currency by selling the USD from the pool when the national currency falls unreasonably and buy the USD when the national currency rises too fast. This is what the BTS blockhain could have done in April/May/June. The same goal could be partially achieved by advertising the benefits of BTS more during the downfalls on Youtube, Google and Facebook with the targeted ads and advertising it less when the price rises too fast - the blockchain should sell the BTS and put it into BitUSD liquidity pool used for advertisement and liquidity support during the bear downfalls.