Bitcoin Forum

Our marketing guys got on my case today.

"Why do you keep posting to that thread with the negative headline?", they asked.

"Because that's where my favorite troll hangs out", I said.  
"He brings in all kinds of eyeballs with his whacky graphics!"

"Yeah, well, it doesn't look good.  Can't you move to a thread with a more positive headline?", they grumbled.

"But nobody will stop by without some gratuitous controversy", I pleaded.
"His negative thread is where all the eyeballs will be!  There's been nearly over 7000 views on that one thread alone!"

"Don't worry", they assured me, "Your troll will move to the new thread if that's the only place you post."
"Then you can have the best of both worlds!  A warm, fuzzy headline and lots of great troll droppings!"

I'm still a bit skeptical, but I promised them I would give it a try.  So here goes.




Stay tuned to this thread for periodic updates about what we're doing at BitShares.
(Historically we've been criticized for sticking mostly to BitSharestalk.org Forum.)
But as you can see, we've recently started working hard to bring more useful content here.  Hope you like it!

Stan Larimer
BitShares Delegate

You can learn more by downloading Max Wright's in-depth BitShares 101 ebook or watching Max's great interviews on BitShares.TV.
There's are links to both on Bytemaster's Blog (http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/?r=stan)




There's a nice set of wallet tutorials here:  BitShares Wallet Tutorial Videos (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=12853.msg169130#msg169130)

Check out Music (http://peertracks.com/) and PLAY (http://playshare.io/) for their specific software releases.

You can find out about the other independent DACs at their own websites
as featured in this newsletter (http://us3.campaign-archive2.com/?u=ac6976e87d9e9f0eac4bbf19c&id=da7e2e91a3#) in our Newsletter Archive (http://bitshares.org/newsletter/archive/2014/)  



Here's a series of articles I wrote for this forum to provide some background on The Origin of BitShares:

Part 1   - It Began with ProtoShares (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182300#msg182300)
Part 2   - The Death of Mining (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182301#msg182301)
Part 3   - The Ideal Mining Pool (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182302#msg182302)
Part 4   - AngelShares and Virtual Mining (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182303#msg182303)
Part 5   - POW to POS to TaPOS to DPOS! (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182304#msg182304)
Part 6   - Sharedrops and Snapshots (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182305#msg182305)
Part 7   - BitShares Sharedrop Theory (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182306#msg182306)
Part 8   - Experimenting and Pivoting (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182307#msg182307)
Part 9   - What is a SuperDAC? (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182308#msg182308)
Part 10 - BitShares Unleashed (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182310#msg182310)







And here is another site chock full of BitShares news:  http://bitsharesblog.com/beyond-bitcoin-show-talks-with-bytemaster-about-bitshares-development/ (http://bitsharesblog.com/beyond-bitcoin-show-talks-with-bytemaster-about-bitshares-development/)


Finally, here is a nice product brochure that you can download and print...

English flyer in A4 print size (front):
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1T3mDxaa7U0IOaD251yNwNiqI_9Fier7QgtnBm3hCzyI/edit
 
English flyer in A4 print size (back):
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/10mf7scN4ldCoXy8alz7UCkzt7N3tTQwJWS81zXfNMxs/edit
 

Troll Chest

Finally, lest they be lost forever, we add links to our favorite troll graveyard.
In addition to some outrageous (even funny) troll FUD, these contain some serious discussions among the foul droppings.

Communist BitShares Wealth Redistribution is Theft (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=916696.msg10064700#msg10064700)
BitShares? interesting ! bullish (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=679185.msg7701034#msg7701034)
Even though BTS devs are greedy, it's still better tech than NXT and NuBits (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=913075.msg10025109#msg10025109)
Is BitShares a Blog or a Bitcoin 2.0 project? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=914001.0)
Nubits vs Bitshares vs Bitbay (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=945640.msg10354649#msg10354649)
BitShares is Dead (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1001681.msg10874650#msg10874650)
Where are those Bitshares' Shills? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=989629.msg10767924#msg10767924)
JOIN OR DIE! United We Stand... Divided We Fall! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1010947.msg10967889#msg10967889)
BitShares Greed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1090964.msg11628749#msg11628749)
More BitShares Greed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=913075.msg11668322#msg11668322)

One of the biggest strengths of BitShares, DAC is that it is able to autonomously hire its own developers and marketeers by automatically recycling a few percent of its growth to pay their salaries - without involving any corruptible manned company.  This is an often overlooked form of decentralization you don't find in many leading blockchains.

Of course, this leads to worries about whether delegates are earning their pay, so we encourage them to give periodic reports to the stakeholder community who elect and fire them.

I like to highlight delegates who are doing a particularly good job of implementing this "Hired by the Blockchain" vision.  Here is this week's admirable example of what having up to 101 paid delegate slots can do for a chain:

Hmmmm......think your marketing boyz should recognise that your 'favourite troll' is actually responsible for raising BTS' profile on BitCoinTalk in the last few weeks.
And, as the old saying goes, theres no such thing as bad publicity.  Not to mention that he may have a valid point or two......

Anyhow, all this is completely moot, because now that Stan has come out in favour of puppies for BTS, I have an announcement to make:

NXT! We love kittens more !

http://i62.tinypic.com/148fyh3.jpg

OK. NXT wins. Obviously.

Hmm, that seemed almost too easy.

This is the best thread ever.

Who doesn't love puppies???

http://cdn.sheknows.com/articles/2013/04/Puppy_2.jpg

I'm officially all in BTS. How can you resist that face??

Sorry NXT, kittens just ain't doing it for me...

Hss the flaw improved security in Bitshares Come from Beyond suggested been fixed implemented? It only took 22 colluding nodes to bork the chain, according to his modelling.

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTeJJ-mGnJxqksK_P1E8b8yHBVRc4GHcqmjnKwvrYiKJWmZ3tdL

That was not a flaw. Just some suggestions how to improve security, if I recall correctly.

http://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hairless-bald-animals-thumb.jpg

Cunicula returns?

Post edited.

There is no such thing as bad publicity and people are more likely to read through a thread calling Bitshares a scam than something bland and informative.

Hell, I learned a lot about Bitshares through that thread and thought the meme's were pretty funny

Just for kicks, here is another meme for you which represents Bitshares as a Cryptocurrency

http://www.geektress.com/images/trek/Spock%20pup.jpg

Now THAT is a more civilized competition!


And now a word from our sponsor:

Bytemaster just published some insights about how the BitShares Decentralized Exchange deals with front running.


Read the rest here...  How BitShares Prevents Front Running (http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/29/How-BitShares-Prevents-Front-Running/?r=stan)

We now resume our regularly scheduled pet tournament...

That's an amazing creature. 
Definitely innovative. 
What exactly is it?

That is BCNext's true experiment! Half Cat half dog. To bring the dog and the cat loving community together!

Looks like an innovative, stabilized Derivative to me!  :)

(But you should say "Half Dog and Half Cat",  never say "Half Cat and Half Dog",  Always say "Half Dog and Half Cat")

No idea. Maybe an old master of kung fu...

OH MY GOD!! BITSHARES AND NXT ARE MERGING!!!!!

This just out - integration with ShapeShift!  (I think that's a fox, not a cat, in their logo.)

http://i.gyazo.com/7e1d8e301d7bb9d65a67b013f1dd4fe8.png

What's cool about this is you can move your BTC to BitUSD in about 60 seconds and bring them back to BTC when you want to spend them.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, while it's in your BitUSD "Savings Account", you earn variable interest (generally at least 1% right now) and you are insulated from drops in BTC price.  Bring it back to your Bitcoin "Checking Account" when you want to make a payment.  (Or send it directly as BitUSD to someone with a BitShares wallet in just 10 seconds.)  

Conversion among other currencies and BitAssets is coming soon.

You can see this at https://shapeshift.io/ (https://shapeshift.io/)

At the tail end of Max's video mentioned above, he gives a nice little tour of the bitAsset page at bitsharesblocks.com (http://bitsharesblocks.com)

So hot

Your missing a link to the website and people are pretty lazy to go and google it.

You guys should work on some games to add, big investors and a forum full of rocket scientists are great but surely you are missing out on the massive amount of noobs. DogeCoin doesn't have the tech but they do have a fun community which keeps people around and arguably some of the best marketing around.

I did post this further above but it never hurts to do it again.  You can see this at https://shapeshift.io/ (https://shapeshift.io/)

I'd be interested in everybody's experience with it.  Right now it's in testing with limited transaction sizes but they'll open it up as soon as everything checks out.  I've heard nothing but good things so far.  Let's see what you guys think.

We were just discussing the role of games to help bootstrap awareness in Bytemaster's Live Q&A Session today (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13860.msg180272#msg180272).  I noticed the ideas were being kicked around on various threads at bitsharestalk.org.  Some like the idea, some hate it.  I suspect we'll see something along this line in a month or two.

The games and gambling are inevitable but I guess the challenge there is making sure that even if a government disagrees with the aspect of gambling that it is decentralized enough that there is no way to regulate it or intervene. People like games and gambling and social aspects so adding all of that increases exposure which would be better for Bitshares holders.

I think if you could do it where the gambling profits benefits the entire userbase equally then there would be no problem.

Cruise ships are an interesting example.
When a ship pulls into port they close their onboard casino.
When they get to international waters, the casino lights up!


Sovereign DACs live in international waters by their very nature.
How are they different?

All righty...since NFD finally moved from 2 satoshis to 3, and has stayed up there, I'll join in:


"All Into The Bowl."

Here is BitShares' modest contribution to Bitcoin's success... "Just in time Bitcoins"

"With light wallets on the way and ShapeShift already integrated, It won't be long before someone releases a wallet that is both BTC and BTS integrated that uses ShapeShift to easily go back and forth between the two.  Now every user on the planet can download a single app and hedge BTC in a bear market with one click.  That will crush it."  - Max Wright

Now people can stay in crypto while hopping between ubiquitous checking and yield-bearing stable savings for pennies.

My Jake as a puppy.  Jake loves Bitshares.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/518477168527962112/NRSb25L5.jpeg

Indeed, that is one smart dog!

(I'll bet if you took a poll of all smart dogs they would each reach that same conclusion.)

Most smart dogs are also very freedom-oriented in their beliefs.  I can't tell for sure from the forum name, but I'll bet it was one smart dog that decided to create and post this transcript:

The thing I find most interesting about governments is that there are so many that complain about the inefficiencies, surveillance and corruption but when faced with legal issues out of their control such as theft of their personal property or large scale fraud (Mt. Gox) that they would turn to their governments and demand that they solve the issues. The US Government in general is horribly inefficient with Democrats and Republicans spending all their time arguing over issues that nothing really gets done and  hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year in order to make the other side seem less credible along with over bloated pension funds and exuberant wages for basically doing nothing when that money would be better spent on basic needs. The Blockchain solves a lot of these issues by taking away the centralized control of the monetary system but the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the adaption of the Blockchain into a full nationwide monetary system is how Governments would pay for maintenance of infrastructure since it isn't like the average person would just go out and donate money to the Government in order to pay for these services. It seems inevitable that Governments would have to transition to Blockchain technology and the sooner they start to adapt the better but they have yet to even begin and the question would be, how they would make the transition?

These puppies are so cute and huggable. Puppies are always a great marketing point of attraction. I think im going to buy over 9000 Bitshares as we speak.

The only reason we have governments is because no one can stand the alternative. (That would be organized crime, but I repeat myself.)

I believe that the way forward is to provide better alternatives to government, things that make government irrelevant, things that restrict its abuses, but not the elimination of all that is barely keeping a finger in the dike of untamed human nature.


Anything that will work on the blockchain shouldn't need government - let the free market handle it.  Bitcoin funds itself via inflation at the tune of several hundred million dollars per year.  At government replacement scale, that would be many billions available to fund operations.  Um, if you didn't have to burn it paying miners to buy electricity.

At government scale using BitShare's DPOS "miners", all those funds would be redirected to pay for useful work like operations, infrastructure, and developing new services.

Of course, with BitShares we are only recycling a few percent of annual growth to fund growth.  Long before we reach government scale, we won't need to do that because we can fund it all out of fees for services rendered.  So far to date we have been net deflationary.

So, yes, move as much as possible of what the governments do onto the block chain.  That's ultimately what we are trying to do to wean ourselves away from dependency on government to enforce a level playing field and an incorruptible set of rules.  Providing a decentralized exchange and stabilized currency products is just our warm-up act.

For the record, BitShares loves groundhogs too.

You've resorted to copying my opening line???

bitcredits.website (http://bitcredits.website)

This most certainly isn't a puppy.

Here's a quick summary of four efficient ways to step off the crypto elevator on down-swings and back onto it each swing up without having to exit to fiat.

1.  Use a Centralized Exchange to trade between real BTC and your favorite BitAsset (BitUSD, BitGOLD, BitEUR, BitSilver, BitCNY).

This stays in crypto (and does incur larger fees and counterparty risk while the exchange is holding your assets for you) but you are hedged against volatility while you are sitting in a BitAsset on that exchange.

2.  Use a BitShares Gateway (http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/update/2014/12/18/Benefits-of-Being-a-BitShares-Gateway/?r=stan) to to trade between real BTC and your favorite BitAsset on the BitShares Decentralized Exchange (http://bitshares.org?r=stan).

This stays in crypto (and does incur exchange-like fees) but eliminates counterparty risk except the moments your are actually passing through the gateway to get to the safety of a decentralized exchange and the stability and yield of a BitAsset.

3.  Stay on the BitShares Decentralized Exchange (http://bitshares.org?r=stan) and trade BitBTC against your favorite BitAsset.

This stays in the low fee / counterparty-free trade zone while letting your purchasing power track BTC when it is climbing and sitting out any down drafts by tracking some other BitAsset and earning yield.  This is the cheapest way to toggle risk-on/risk-off.  Pennies per toggle.

4.  Use a smart wallet with integrated ShapeShift (http://shapeshift.io) technology to switch between real BTC and a BitAsset on the fly.  

You move between BitAssets and real Bitcoin at the touch of a button - just in time to spend it.  The rest of the time you are in BitAssets, safe from volatility and earning a yield.  You are only exposed to ShapeShift counterparty risk and fees during the moments it takes to transition through their gateway.

Actually I linked to media.boreme.com/post_media/2013/thomas-jefferson-banking.jpg

But, Cool!  Anybody that quotes Thomas Jefferson and recognizes who the real Bad Guys are is a friend of mine!

Here's an excerpt:

Site is now the fastest way to buy or sell BTS and BitUSD assets online

Canton, Geneva (PRWEB) February 02, 2015

ShapeShift.io (http://ShapeShift.io) has integrated the BitUSD and BTS digital assets into its instant exchange platform. Consumers can now buy and sell BTS and BitUSD anywhere in the world instantly with Bitcoin, Ripple, Dogecoin, NXT, or over 15 other leading cryptocurrencies with ShapeShift.io.

The speed and convenience comes from the platform's minimalist design, with no signup process or account required.

As the digital currency ecosystem continues to rapidly grow, integration between platforms is accelerating. ShapeShift.io, which launched in August 2014, has risen quickly as the most convenient way to buy or sell the leading digital assets. The site has integrated over a dozen of these currencies to date, enabling instant conversion between all of them directly.

Among the so called 2.0 projects, only BTS has gone that far, so yeah props for that. The rest of the arguments are pretty much political and based on opinions not fact..

I knew NXT champions would eventually come to their senses.  This is a great start!  :)

wallet_approve_delegate dev-pc.bitcube true

wallet_approve_delegate dev-pc.bitcube true

wallet_approve_delegate dev-pc.bitcube true

Here's a series of articles I wrote for this forum to provide some background on The Origin of BitShares:

Part 1   - It Began with ProtoShares (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182300#msg182300)
Part 2   - The Death of Mining (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182301#msg182301)
Part 3   - The Ideal Mining Pool (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182302#msg182302)
Part 4   - AngelShares and Virtual Mining (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182303#msg182303)
Part 5   - POW to POS to TaPOS to DPOS! (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182304#msg182304)
Part 6   - Sharedrops and Snapshots (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182305#msg182305)
Part 7   - BitShares Sharedrop Theory (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182306#msg182306)
Part 8   - Experimenting and Pivoting (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182307#msg182307)
Part 9   - What is a SuperDAC? (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182308#msg182308)
Part 10 - BitShares Unleashed (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182310#msg182310)

I've reposted the links here for your convenience.

   
https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/IELogo_75.jpg
 
I&E 550: Innovation and Cryptoventures (https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/550crypto.htm)

Today Bytemaster had the opportunity to present a two-hour lecture at the Duke University School of Business in Durham, North Carolina under invitation from Professor Campbell R. Harvey (the guy with the necktie).  The forty students taking this course are a mixture of computer science, business, and law majors who are interested in learning about starting entrepreneurial businesses in the crypto industry. The class is divided into eleven teams, each of which is required to develop a crypto business as part of their course objectives.


As you can probably imagine, Dan talked about Decentralized Autonomous Companies (DACs) and how to make them profitable.  Among the opportunities he discussed were:

1.  Cloning the BitShares block chain using the BitShares Toolkit to produce independent businesses like MUSIC and PLAY.
2.  Adding your own business logic like VOTE and DNS to BitShares itself to leverage it's delegates, community, currencies and network effect.
3.  Using BitShares User Issued Assets (UIA) to issue regulation compliant shares in a brick and mortar and flesh and blood company.
4.  What it takes to add your own Market Pegged Asset (MPA) to BitShares.
5.  The opportunity to create a business based on issuing one or more Prediction Market Assets (PMA).
6.  Becoming a BitShares Delegate and using that to bootstrap a startup business.
7.  Creating supporting business for third party add-ons, services, and products inside the emerging ecosystem.
8.  Crowd Funding vs. Crowd Hiring to bootstrap and sustain block chain based businesses.

Unfortunately there are no notes or slides to give you since Dan's lecture was given "off the cuff," but we did record it and hope to publish some or all of his best riffs before long.

For some reason I found Professor Harvey's course reading list particularly interesting, but you should check out all the other resource links on the course web site (https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/550crypto.htm) as well.


Perhaps the most amazing thing to me was that a university group of that size and diversity could reach unanimous consensus on anything.  But not a single person in that entire lecture hall expressed one shred of disagreement with Dan's unspoken assertion that dogs are much better than cats.

Here's a tiny 30 second video sample:

Bytemaster on How Much Decentralization is Enough (https://www.flickr.com/photos/129428802@N04/16431051336/)

Over on The Thread That Must Not Be Named, DE has raised some legitimate questions and presented them rationally, so I am happy to address them.


1.  Non-voting owner's who are happy to accept the decisions of active voters are effectively delegating decisions to those who do vote.  It is their choice.  In the 17% voter turnout example given, it is clear that most owners are happy to go with delegate selection by those who do vote.  I will speculate that they do this for the following reasons:

a.  Rational Ignorance.  It's not worth their time to figure out who to vote for.  It doesn't matter to them which subset of generally acceptable candidates get elected because delegate ability to do something undesirable is negligible.  A delegate either signs blocks and includes transactions faithfully or not, and everyone can tell if they don't.  Those in full-time positions need to avoid having a lynch mob form to vote them out and so they need to continuously answer the question, "What have you done for us lately?"

b.  They have no objection to any of the delegates that are being elected by those who vote.  If an issue comes up, then they presumably are reserving the right to weigh in.  Low participation means owners are generally satisfied.  I don't vote my stake in cold storage for this reason, but if I'm not happy at some point, I will go to that extra trouble.  So that could also be the case for many of the other non-voting stake out there.  Similarly, smaller stakeholders can go to the extra trouble of rallying others to their cause (i.e. "colluding").

c.  In general, a large voter cannot vote in a delegate that doesn't already have broad support from everyone else.  It is true that a large voter can swing which of the otherwise lesser approved delegates get picked.  It is even true that a very small voter can switch who is in positions 101 and 102 by changing one vote.  Similarly, if many small voters agree on certain delegates, there is nothing a big owner can do about it.  This is how it should be.  The bigger your stake, the more you have at risk, and the more say you should have in who runs the business.  This is far more fair than many traditional business that are intentionally structured to disproportionately favor the big guys.

Yes, and another coalition of 11% of the remaining stakeholders is able to override them.  :)

2.  Owners have a right to form political alliances to achieve their objectives.  You can call it "collusion" if you want.  The rest of the owners have a similar right to team up (collude) to overrule them.  If an owner doesn't like what the "ruling collation" decides, she can sell her stake.  The company is, by definition, only owned by people who approve of how it is being run.  It is the right of those owners to run it that way.  Blockchain technology is there to ensure transparency in whether the agreed upon rules are being followed.

Bottom Line:  BitShares has been implemented with a well-defined transparent form of decentralized government.  We have tried to make it be fair enough to attract a large number of happy owners.  (We would be fools to do otherwise.)  Those who find that acceptable and profitable will own it.  Those who don't, won't.  If there are enough who want it run differently, they will actively vote for changes or clone a competitor.  So far, the current community seems happy with what they have.

:)

Here's another quick thought experiment on the above topic.

Suppose you have 10 accounts each with 10 shares and you decide that each account gets 1 vote.
One of the account holders divides her shares among 10 puppet accounts.  Now she has 10 votes.
So the rest of the account holders are forced to divide up their shares as much as possible too.

What do you wind up with?  1 vote per share!   :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

TL;DR: BitShares ought to do extra voting rounds if total number of votes for outsiders is higher than number of votes for at least one of top 101 delegates. Otherwise you can't claim that the delegates are chosen in a fair/democratic manner.

Voting rounds are continuous and voters can change their votes at any time.  The top 101 delegates are always those with the most number of shares approving them and everyone can look at that set and decide to change their approvals at any time.

So by your criterion, if "extra voting rounds" are needed to make things more "fair/democratic", then BitShares is infinitely fair and democratic because new voting rounds happen every 10 seconds forever.  

 :)

In the current version voting results are applied on the fly. To follow the criterion you need something like modern president elections (when the 2nd round is used if none of the candidates gets at least 51%):

1. All shareholders cast votes
2. If new top 101 don't get the overwhelming majority then part of delegates with lowest vote count is removed from the list of candidates and goto #1
3. Old 101 delegates are replaced with the new ones

PS: Also, you use "vote-outs". This mixes two different voting systems and may lead to a worse situation.

We use approval voting. 
Everybody indicates all the candidates they approve of.
The 101 most approved of candidates are hired.
No need to make it any more complicated than that.

:)

I lol'd  :D :D :D

Interesting opportunity if you still have a lot of mining equipment looking for something to do.

Stan

I respectfully disagree. You need a more complicated method because otherwise you have a weak spot. An adversary doesn't need to earn credibility to enter top 101. Lowering credibility of the competitors works too. What is especially bad is that the current voting is asymmetrical - you need N units of effort to earn credibility and N/10* units to lower credibility of other candidates because everyone will likely do the same. I didn't analyse this tactics closely but suspect that cooperation of outsiders trying to asperse the winners and take their place is a powerful trick.

-------
* - assumed for a case of 1000 candidates

That's not how BitShares voting works.

The only thing that an individual voter can do is indicate which potential candidates are most acceptable to them.
If a candidate ceases to be acceptable, the voter can remove that approval.
That's all.

She has no ability to "down vote" anybody or concentrate negative votes on certain candidates.
There is no such thing as negative votes.

Each candidate runs in his or her own independent election.
Each seeks a high percentage of approval from the voters of all shares.

The 101 candidates with the highest approvals get the jobs.

Theoretically 101 candidates could each receive 100% approval.
In practice, our top delegate currently has about 18% and Delegate 101 has about 8%.

---

Good to hear. Update https://bitshares.org/blog/delegated-proof-of-stake/ please, statements like are very confusing.

Agreed.  I had to go do a WTF on that myself.

You can set your defaults to follow the voting slate of some other delegate or group of delegates that you trust rather than picking the full set yourself.

If you do that, then the "thumbs down" icon means, "ignore any recommendations for this candidate".


So, you can toggle the thumb on each candidate between "Thumbs up - add to my custom slate", "Thumbs down - remove this one from my default slate(s)" or un-selected - "do what the default slate(s) I am following recommend".

But all this does is effect how your slate is defined.  When you vote, all you can do is add or not add votes to a candidate.

You can't do anything to subtract the approval they have from other voters.

We just had a newbie drop by and talk about his first experiences with BitShares.
I figure, what the heck, there may be puppy-loving BitShares newbies around here too...

I think you guys need to get rid of the puppies and go for some more exciting marketing. The puppies look dumb, I actually preferred the old thread with all the meme's of Stan and Bytemaster.

Maybe you could do themed marketing where you base a bunch of your new ideas in terms of the theme.

Remember, you want Crypto to be EXCITING!

Grab some smoke machines and some laser lights and your halfway there.

No worries.  This thread is for sophisticated and erudite puppy lovers.

(But I am pleased to note that there are now more than six BitShares related threads that regularly make the front page here.)

Something for everybody!

<A free bump>

I feel the need for some kitten action, tbh.

This kind of sums up my day:
http://i62.tinypic.com/34gnb4k.jpg

But, if anyone (like Crestington  ;) ) feels the need for some excitement, there will shortly be a chance to watch NXT zoom into the upper statosphere (or crash spectacularly into the New Mexico desert....)

NXT in Spaaace!  (https://nxtforum.org/nxt-promotion/nxt-in-space!/)

Thought Stan might like this, with the being a rocket scientist and all.
We're currently waiting on FAA permission for the launch, but it should be cleared pretty soon.

I never said the ideas weren't good, I think highly of Bitshares. I was just saying that you should look for some more entertaining ways of presenting your ideas, like PBS meets FOX news.

Lol, NXT is literally going to the moon. NXT thing you know they are going to let you send transactions to their moonbase so you can buy lunar latte's.

http://a.abcnews.com/images/Technology/HT_donut_moon_nt_130626_16x9_992.jpg

Well, there will either be a whoooshhh, followed by some zoom, and a gentle glide back to Earth......or whoooshhh, followed by a large KABOOM !

Here´s an overview of the project so far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Zz0cQjU_E&feature=youtu.be
http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/lohan/

http://i61.tinypic.com/2l6fpy.jpg

Wow, that is a really cool project!

Brings back many fond memories of times spent at remote test ranges.

(Testing remotes, of course.)

Well, if you guys want some range time and a visit to Spaceport America, I might be able to find some space(s) on the guest list for the launch, when we finally get a date.

I would be most interested!

I heard a rumor that the reason Bitshares dropped a lot recently is that the developers had to sell a lot to pay taxes, is that true?  If so, does that mean its a good time to buy now or are they going to sell more?

At this point, Invictus does not anticipate the need to sell any BitShares to meet its 2014 tax obligations.
I have no insight into the personal business of individual developers.

Or you can be like Roger "the tax dodger" Ver.  In terms of taxation, a lot of countries ruled that PoW is self-income (and theoretically so are any rewards for maintaining any networks) and BitShares' delegate setup is likely subject to it too (it creates a pressing problem as the tax authorities will probably shake down Bitshares to reveal the identities of those 101 delegates).

Can't the delegates send them this (https://judgybitch.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/fuck-off.jpg) as the id?

BitShares is a blockchain.
Blockchains ain't talkin' any more than Duke the Bush Beans Dog.

http://i.gyazo.com/176e2b6d04f2d37b9d2d0db880aea4b5.png

Looks like the Bush beans guy has no idea that his Dog just let out a chemical warfare attack on him.

Yup, yet another good reason (of millions  :D ) that cats>dogs, especially in confined spaces like RV cabs.

If you are a puppy lover and live in one of these countries you will soon be able to have physical silver shipped to your door using BitSilver to pay.


The nice thing about that is you can lock in your price in 10 seconds rather that waiting days for your wired funds to get there.

Instant off ramp.

Cryptosmith just announced the details here:  BitSilver to Silver Website Contstruction Has Begun (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14266.msg185581#msg185581)

Sad to see another centralized exchange get into trouble.  This hurts us all.

But this is also exactly what the BitShares Decentralized Exchange was designed to solve.  Even if you're not ready to invest in BitShares, you can still use its services to control your own destiny.


You always keep your assets in your own wallet and you can then trade between them without anything leaving your wallet, accomplishing the same thing you do on centralized exchanges.  Instead of continuous 24x7 exposure of your assets to hackers on a centralized exchange, this now only happens for the few minutes you spend moving through a gateway or bridge (https://bitshares.org/resources/gateways) when you want to get your hands on the actual asset.

Most of the time, you don't really want the asset, you want the exposure to that asset's price characteristics.  So you hold market pegged bitAssets that track the value of other commodities and currencies. This lets you hop around between bitUSD, bitGold, bitCNY, bitSilver, bitEUR, bitBTC and BTS without leaving your BitShares wallet.  This set will grow, but that's a pretty good mix for trading against big movements in crypto vs. fiat.




The chances of a hacker timing their hack to the moment you are using a centralized gateway to move in and out of the BitShares Decentralized Exchange is vanishingly small.  And you can pick your gateway at the last minute from a growing list of options.

This way, you can quickly move from the BitShares Decentralized Exchange into your favorite leading coin just in time to spend it.

And earn a bit of interest in the mean time.

Details here (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2vz1zq/its_now_officialbtercom_was_hackedlost_7170_btc/comjbit) on reddit.

Regardless of the rivalry  8)  between NXT and BTS, I think we both agree that people in crypto should get away from the use of centralised exchanges.
Pretty much every major crypto heist can be traced back to an exchange security lapse (or theft by the operators).
De-centralised/distributed exchanges allow all the fun of crypto trading, without the risks of keeping your funds on the exchange.

Stans probably going to get drowned in NXT'ers pointing this out.......but NXT has had the MultiGateWay decentralised exchange up and running for the last 6 months, and the MGW tech has been integrated into SuperNET, offering even more trading opportunities.
For example: purchasing alt-coins with fiat via the integrated  Coinomat  (https://coinomat.com/) plug-in.


NXT MultiGateWay currently supports:

http://i61.tinypic.com/105pstw.jpg

And here are a few links:

http://multigateway.org/
https://nxtforum.org/nxtservices-releases/
https://coinomat.com/
http://www.supernet.org/

Cats are conclusively better than dogs, it turns out.  ;)

http://i61.tinypic.com/kexnog.jpg

It's time that dogs and cats unite to wean the world to the wonders of decentralized exchanges.

As a peace offering, I will not publish the following graphic as originally intended.  :)

OMG! That is the most vicious and underhanded anti-cat FUD I've ever seen on this forum !
It's becoming obvious that Stan (if that is indeed his name) is simply a paid shill for the shadowy 'Scooby group'.

In rebuttal, according to my exhaustive research:
If we assume that there are 30 million cats in the continental USA, and (according to Stans own figures) 300 cases of rabies, then the chance of the average cat owner being savagely disembowelled by a rabid Fluffy is one in 100,000. Which is perfectly acceptable, IMHO

If we also assume that there are, lets say, 81 dogs in the USA, then we come to the unavoidable conclusion that 100% of all dogs have rabies.
As well as fleas.
And a habit of sniffing each others arses, not that thats completely wrong.

I rest my case.

I'm still in favor of working together to convert the world into users of decentralized exchanges, but dang, we're going to have to do something about all those cats sooner or later...

This article, Is Bitcoin Truly Decentralized? Yes – and Here Is Why It’s Important (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/19133/bitcoin-truly-decentralized-yes-important/), by Erik Voorhees in Bitcoin Magazine is several weeks old, but still worth commenting on.

The key tl;dr quote is:


1.  I agree with its premise that there is a great difference between coercive and market-based centralization.

This is an argument useful for answering my favorite troll who tends to mix his objections to coercion with solutions that people are free to adopt or not, as it serves their needs.  

2.  I don't agree that market-based centralization is harmless.

It doesn't seem hard to imagine that big governments and institutions could at any time be controlling Bitcoin's half-dozen biggest mining operations without our knowledge. Decentralization is needed to prevent corruption that comes with the ability of people in power to seduce or coerce a small number of players.  Whether that number is small due to market forces or coercive forces, the vulnerability still exists.

Now, since decentralization has its costs, every free person must decide how much decentralization is enough.  This will vary from activity to activity.  I don't need much decentralization to buy an ebook.  I need a lot more to protect my retirement nest egg.

How to balance decentralization cost vs. immunity from corruption is the question that interests me.

I think we should be exploring many solutions.  Who knows what we will learn by comparing them in action?

Oi, you need to understand the demographic of the relationship between the dog vs. cat rationale first there bud. If we can assume X number of Cats dwell in a home compared to dogs you can then determine what your target audience should be. Say you just want to slowly weed out all the dogs and make cats the dominant species, I guess you could mess with cats DNA and breed them with tigers. Ever hear of a Liger? It's a lion and tiger mix and as big as a saber-toothed tiger, I don't know any dog that could compete with that.

http://www.salem-news.com/stimg/february242013/ligers.jpg

BitShares has, of course, been anticipating such a nefarious development...

Looks like we'll need to speed up our Catzilla^® breeding program.....anyone know where we can get some open source T. rex DNA?

Top coinmarketcap.com assets by volume.

The DACx proposal sounds really interesting.

Where could I read about that DACx?

PS: I was googling for a cute puppy and found one with uncanny valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley) effect. Open the link only if you have very good mental health and don't mind if it visits you in a nightmare tonight - http://images.forwallpaper.com/files/images/c/c35a/c35a9122/334564/dogs-animals-computer-bald.jpg

Now that is an enthusiastic dog!  
The keyboard has nothing to do with it.
I've seen that look before.
I can tell he just learned about BitShares!

See Baozougongqinwang (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=940298.msg10530722#msg10530722) a few posts above for DACx announcement.

http://dacx.com/ (http://dacx.com/)

LOL, I saw it 2 days ago but didn't memorize the name. Maybe it's too generic. I expected that DACx was an "extended" DAC (like DPoS vs PoS), not a company.

Sorted alphabetically, BitShares holds all of the top 5 asset slots on coinmarketcap.com...


Just sayin'...

The alphabetical sorter seems to be broken:

BitUSD
BitCNY
BitGold
BitBTC
BitSilver

We can't trust the data...

Actually  "UCGBS" are the first five characters in a very long acronym designed to help people remember that BitShares has awesome market pegged assets for USD, CNY, GOLD, BTC, and SILVER that held their pegs impressively during the recent crypto recession.

We appreciate that coinmarketcap sorts them for everyone in this easy to remember and highly pronounceable format. 

Tonight I got a revelation from Saint Bernard Puppy that it stands for United Church of God of BitShares...

It's not an easily memorable acronym and the limited vowels don't help make real words out of it. The only word I can think of is BUGS and I doubt you would be happy with an acronym containing that. Still, CBUGS is more memorable than UCGBS.

BitShares is getting a whole new set of wallets - web wallet, lite wallet, full wallet, and a couple more "special" wallets.

One of the nice little upgrades is that we got rid of those ugly, cat-like robohashes!


Robohashes and identicons are visual "checksums" that help you spot when you've made a typo in an account name

Robohashes are a bit more distinctive, but they tended to uglify the first impression in the wallet IMHO.

So now we use kaleidoscope-like identicons, which are much more visually appealing.

To me, it's like the difference between day and night, good and evil, dogs and cats...

What do you think?

Firstly first few pages them dogs were adorable if i am honest, but how does a bit share love dogs and not cats!?

Cats are mythical and mysterious and have been worshiped for hundreds of years, dogs are greedy and stinky and i love them also because i have 3 of them but where is the love for our cats. They need loving too,  I feel you should love all of god creatures.. :)

(Don't tell the NXT guys but I have two cats too...  they like BitShares just as much as my dogs.)

These are sort of interesting, how many types are available and how are they generated?

There was talk of pointing an nxt alias with bitmapdata to an account, so the account could have a custom image associated with it, but I haven't implemented it yet. Linking an accountid to a picture can bring that human element into a normally computer-like string of random characters.

Happy thread!
http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/22100000/Puppies-vs-kittens-puppies-vs-kittens-22175696-400-258.jpg

How many Bitshares are needed to buy a puppy?

You shouldn't buy a puppy with BitShares because puppies are priceless.

If you have a puppy, you inherently have good karma, and BitShares come to you!

There is open source software out there (e.g http://robohash.org/ or Identicons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon)) where we got it or you can track it down through the BitShares GitHub library. 

Ok so its just a generalized library, cool still. I'll need to look into my custom icon idea more, I like this.

As you could've guessed, I develop for nxt, but I still find other systems interesting.

While I'm here I've always wondered how things like bitUSD are able to give interest. Can't seem to find where that money is coming from.

Just as in most of the world's traditional exchanges, you short an asset by borrowing it to sell now with the hope of buying it back cheaper later to pay off your loan (thereby taking the savings as a profit).

So a bitUSD is just a tradable collateralized loan that represents lending of a dollar's worth of BitShares now in exchange for a blockchain enforced promise to pay back a dollar's worth of BitShares later (with interest).  The borrower puts up three times as many BitShares as she borrowed as collateral under blockchain control to make sure that there will be a full dollar's worth of BitShares available to pay off the loan  if the price of BitShares should fall.

So, the interest comes from the person who did the borrowing (shorting) and is paid to the person who did the lending. 

One fine point:  all interest is paid into a blockchain managed pool from which all interest is paid.  So the lender gets a moving average of the interest all borrowers have paid.

What makes this better than doing the same thing on a centralized exchange is that there is no counterparty risk.  The blockchain holds the collateral and will automatically pay the agreed amount to the two parties - like a robotically trustworthy third party escrow agent.

How does the blockchain know the price?

Elected delegates publish price feeds and the block chain picks the median value.

Median value as sum of values divided by number of values?

No, that would be called the "mean".

"Median" cannot be affected by willful outliers since it is guarded by all the other feeds on both sides.

So that means BitShares-people kill puppies when they're about to become adult!
I knew it all along!!!


Please don't do the face thing. You can see from the robots example why that is a bad idea.
The pattern is much better.
....though somehow I see near-swastikas in each of them above. Guess it confirms my earlier suspicion :D

I see shurikens.

just a user-defined 16x16 pixel image, I could dynamically generate them for accounts and assets too, that might be cool.

** DISCLAIMER **

While BitShares does indeed love puppies, this is not to say that all puppies share BitShares' non-violent philosophy about how to deal with distasteful things like, say, cats.


We neither condone nor tolerate this kind of puppy behavior!

In fact, long ago (well weeks and weeks ago, actually) Bytemaster did an interview with Max Wright talking about Where Can Blockchain Technology Take Us? (http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2014/12/28/Where-can-blockchain-technology-take-us/?r=stan)

It's far more than just crypto-currencies or even decentralized exchanges producing stabilized smart coins.  It talks about engineering non-violent solutions to everything.

I guess my marketing guys were finally right - it was just a matter of holding out long enough!
(Rats, I lose my OP bet.)


Nobody wants to read a thread where everybody agrees.
(Although I guess they all might agree that I would make a good used car salesman.)


Hmmmm.   I like the sound of that.

 :)

From time to time I like to pick out a great delegate proposal and highlight it here so readers can get a flavor for how much is going on with the BitShares platform.

Here's a candidate who has offered to advance the community 1 year's salary up front if he is elected as a delegate.  Essentially lending the network 1.5 million BTS to be repaid out of a delegate revenue stream.   The loaned funds allow other mini-projects to be funded up-front without having to wait for funding for them to be accumulated.  This is a great opportunity for little guys to get funded and prove themselves before they might otherwise be able to win election as a delegate themselves.  

Great business model!



https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13500.msg176337#msg176337 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13500.msg176337#msg176337)

I typically try to respond only to polite questions, but let's face it, the funny and creative pictures above are about as polite as DE ever gets.

So in the interest of cutting him some slack, I'll restate the implied questions above as if they came from DE's (possibly fictitious) polite and honorable non-identical twin sister.

Polite and Honorable DE:  Hey Stan, I agree with you about the relative merits of Dogs and cats, but there is something else that is really bugging me.  You guys are supposed to be passionate Austrian Libertarians yet seem to be backing away from certain forms of communication with the public all of a sudden.  I hear you've even hired a PR spokesman, how Libertarian is that?  Won't that conflict with your past reputation of trying to be the most open and transparent development team?  I really loved how you used to share every thought and idea as soon as it entered your head.  I hear some on your own forum are even upset about not having as much direct access to Bytemaster as they used to get all the time.   What's up?

Stan Larimer:  Why, thank you Polite and Honorable DE!  If you have such a question, I'll bet there are lots of other people wondering the same thing.  Below is the explanation I recently posted over on bitsharestalk.org.  I might as well post it here too, for your convenience and edification!

I find this application of DPOS amazing.

If you have a good idea, might as well contact him about it...

 :)

http://www.reddit.com/r/counterparty_xcp/comments/2y0apx/contract_news/

Any reaction to that (I don't believe that any puppies were hurt btw) ?

As long as no puppies were hurt, we wish them well.

Hey guys!  There is no better way to find out what's going on in BitShares than to check out the March Newsletter (https://bitshares.org/newsletter/2015/nullstreet/the_nullstreet_journal_0-2.pdf?utm_source=BitShares+Supporters&utm_campaign=a9b7554fa0-Community_Newsletter_Volume_0_2__3-13-2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a18e5c0fa1-a9b7554fa0-146707801&mc_cid=a9b7554fa0&mc_eid=489624927d).

This newsletter is unique because it is written by the delegates themselves (developers, marketeers, and service providers). 
Each of these small businesses reports on what it is doing with their funding - which gives you an overview of the whole ecosystem.
I was amazed at the scope of projects that are now going on, with more appearing almost weekly.

(Bytemaster and I have to read the newsletter ourselves these days to find out everything that is happening.)

So our goal of a completely decentralized ecosystem is becoming more of a reality every day!

 :)

29 pages and 0 pics of puppies. This is bad. Very very bad.

I just read the newsletter.  Wow, apparently there are 10x as many things going on in Bitshares as I thought there were.  I had no idea most of these projects even existed.

This activity should be the counterevidence to DecentralizedEconomics claims that Bitshares is a scam.  Might be time to buy more now that the price is low again and there seems to be a lot going on.

We need some kittens.....

http://i57.tinypic.com/2d6oua.jpg

There, all sorted.

They are very cute, but that's just a disguise.

(And you must admit, they are incredibly centralized in that picture.)

Far too many cats per square mile, if you ask me.

:)

To restore balance to the force I include a picture of 101 BitShares puppies.
You can only make out one of them from this extreme range because the rest are decentralized.

Oh, and by the way, BitShares stakeholders have finally sorted out how they are going to handle release of public statements in a way that seemed to satisfy most folks.

Bottom line, our self-imposed muzzle is off!  Read all about it in our March Newsletter (https://bitshares.org/newsletter/2015/nullstreet/the_nullstreet_journal_0-2.pdf?utm_source=BitShares+Supporters&utm_campaign=a9b7554fa0-Community_Newsletter_Volume_0_2__3-13-2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a18e5c0fa1-a9b7554fa0-146707801&mc_cid=a9b7554fa0&mc_eid=489624927d).

I just added this to the info section - second post at the top of this thread...

One question: essentially, the issuers of a Bitshares asset short it on 200% margin; I got that part. But, are the lifetimes of the assets limited? Are they automatically redeemed in BTS after X days, or is their lifetime forever?

This question popped up in my head as I was having a not-so-pleasant dream about issuing a hypothetical asset tied to the S&P 500 - call it BTS500 - and essentially "selling America short." This would not lead to a Black Swan event, but it would lead to someone sitting on a growing responsibility for more margin over time. How would that work for an issuer? Can he or she add more margin as time goes on, as you can for a regular stock-market account?  

Oh, right:

For posting a puppy picture you automatically qualify for one free deluxe question!

BitShares does auto margin calls under 2 conditions:
1.  If the value of the BTS collateral falls from 3x down to 2x.
2.  At the end of thirty days.

You can avoid this by adding more margin or reset back to 3x and 30 days by closing out one position and reentering a new one.

This does not affect the holders of the BitAsset, who can hold them forever if they choose.

If you buy a bitAsset you can hold onto it forever if you want.

If you create a bitAsset (by 'shorting' it into existence, and providing some of your BTS as collateral), then you are forced to buy back that bitAsset within 30 days, OR if your collateral gets too low.

What is the point of this? 
It gives every bitAsset holder a guarantee that within a 30 day period, someone is going to need to buy the asset back, which means that you are able to sell your asset if you want.


One option for the 'short' to cover their position is to 'buy it from yourself', by shorting a new version of the bitAsset and selling it to yourself to cover your old asset.  This is kindof like rolling over a futures contract for a commodity, into the next period.  When you do this, you have to put in an order at the feed price (the 'fair price' of the asset).  This means that anyone else out there could offer a better price than this, and then you would have to sell to them instead. 

Usually, there is a small spread of bitassets.  For example, people are willing to sell a bitUSD for $1.005, or buy it for $.995 (worth of BTS) or something like that.  If someone puts in an order saying "I am willing to sell for $.999", which is below the feed price of $1, then within that 30 day period, when the shot needs to cover, they have to buy from that person first, before they can short a new asset to themself. 

If no one is willing to sell for a better price than the feed, then the short is free to roll over their position for a new 30 days.

This system ensures:
* Some buying power will exist every 30 days, for all of the bitAssets in existence.  This guarantees you can get out at a fair price by waiting a max of 30 days.
* The creator of the bitAsset (who shorted it) doesnt get screwed over when they have to cover their short.  If no one is willing to sell to them at a fair price, they can sell to themself.

If the S&P was going up relative to BTS, then the issuer of the asset would be losing money over time (which you would expect, they have shorted it!).  This means they would lose BTS.  When they were forced to cover their position after 30 days, they would not be able to reshort as much BTS500 next time.  If they have some extra BTS laying around, they are free to remain in the short position as long as they can afford to, by adding more collateral.

If the S&P went down relative to BTS, they would make money.  When they covered they would end up with more BTS than they started.

Someone asked why they should own bitAssets instead of the real assets they are pegged to.

Fair question.

One of the things about BitShares that most excites me is how many other businesses, world-wide, are starting to develop products and services for it.

Here's a one minute proposal to the decentralized BitShares community for Bitsapphier's new Moonstone (https://moonstone.io/) wallet - just to show you what I mean!

Derivatives is for girls. Derivatives of derivatives - this is what real men play with.

(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

Our main web site is bitshares.org (http://bitshares.org), but...

here is another site chock full of BitShares news:  
http://bitsharesblog.com/beyond-bitcoin-show-talks-with-bytemaster-about-bitshares-development/ (http://bitsharesblog.com/beyond-bitcoin-show-talks-with-bytemaster-about-bitshares-development/)

We are having a community challenge to come up with the best "elevator speech" to explain "Why BitShares?" to someone in the time it takes to go on an elevator ride with them.

I kinda liked this one:

Yeah...it's a little more down-to-earth than "Bitshares helps created a decentralized peer-to-peer financial network for the future!"

Given that they can do Vladimir Putin, I'm sure they can do cats. 
Puppies, being much higher order beings, may take them a little longer...

NullStreet's new BitShares TriFold Brochure...

http://i1280.photobucket.com/albums/a485/emailtooaj/page01_zpsfqdrt8o4.jpg (http://s1280.photobucket.com/user/emailtooaj/media/page01_zpsfqdrt8o4.jpg.html)

http://i1280.photobucket.com/albums/a485/emailtooaj/page02_zpsjikpiqtz.jpg (http://s1280.photobucket.com/user/emailtooaj/media/page02_zpsjikpiqtz.jpg.html)

Download here...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1hxqfske51hxu8c/Bitshare%20TriFold%20Print%20Handout.zip?dl=0

Oh, btw, is there a working DAC somewhere in Bitshares?

PS: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=996522.0

Wonderful Question!

From Bitcoin and the Three Laws of Robotics (https://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-robotics/) where DACs were first introduced:


Of course, this is the ultimate vision behind the name but there are many viable systems worth owning that will only aim to achieve some partial mix of these characteristics.

Having spent 36+ years working on autonomous vehicles for land, sea, air, and space I can say with confidence that "autonomous" is a spectrum of automation that takes over where "teleoperation" leaves off and (hopefully) never quite reaches "unresponsive to the intent of its human designers."

Mars Rovers must navigate autonomously for considerable distances without commands from Earth - but they do pause for instructions every once in a while to give humans a chance to ask "are we there yet?".

BitShares is well on its way to its designed levels of autonomy, which is "responsive only to its shareholders".  Even now, BitShares no longer strictly needs or heeds its creators and we expect that to become increasingly true over time.

Speaking of autonomous navigation, the BitScape.io Team is off on a Road Trip touring as many BitShares activity sites as they can cram into a 3000 mile tour of the American Northeast.


If you are interested in sizing up the for-realness of BitShares, you might want to follow their reports over the next three weeks.

Now that you've brought up the subject: what would be a DAC in law? The law already sez that a corporation is an artificial person - but that designation takes into account the fact that a single corporation is a centralized entity. What would be the "artificial person" in the case of a DAC? It's an interesting question, and one that the legal theoreticians will have to get around to...

They probably will, but my position is simply that a DAC is not a legal entity created by the state.

BitShares, INC
BitShares, LLC
BitShares, LTD

...would be legislated artificial persons created by a government to grant certain status, protections and exemptions to its owners.

BitShares, DAC

...is an engineered artificial person that seeks no such status, protection or exemptions and intended to be a sovereign entity operating in international waters.

Your actual mileage may vary.

Drops link:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/113769/cyber-fund-report-daos-will-reach-mass-adoption-disrupt-politics-and-religion-by-2025
and runs away.....

This is pretty cool.  Cryptosmith (another third party BitShares business) just went live with a soft launch.
They tell me they will do a full launch next week if all goes well.

Stan

Looks like the MineBitShares pool is having some success!


The benefits of BitShares self-funding delegate system keep rolling on...

Just wait till they finish hooking up with cryptosmith.info so you can mine directly to real physical gold and silver!
(Cryptosmith is up with a soft launch this week and a full launch next week if all checks out.  Use your bitAssets to lock in purchase of gold and silver metal instantly!)

You took Bitcoin weakness (necessity to pay money to electrical companies) and transformed it into your strength (self-funding). That was a smart engineering solution.

(\(\
(-.-)
(")(")

Thanks!

(But I saw you sneak that subliminal image of a cat into your signature...)

 ;)

The PeerTracks (http://peertracks.com/) Team (aka BitShares Music) made their big debut at the Texas conference this weekend...  https://plus.google.com/communities/104193073958834457881

Max Wright interviews Taulant Ramabaja, one of the founders of Bitsapphire as he explains the #Moonstone Wallet!


What is Moonstone? Where is Moonstone now? What's Moonstone's direction?
If you like what Moonstone will do for BitShares, Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, don't forget to subscribe at: https://moonstone.io/

Oh yes, and the BitShares Peer-to-Peer Road Trip presses on in style...

Other BitShares community members relentlessly working on better decentralized exchange interfaces...



Good suggestions and I really like this layout.  I was going to suggest the depth chart in that location but was worried about it looking too cramped but it looks good!  

Your BTS cronies look like a bunch of deranged hippies.  Why don't they get a shave and attempt to look like respectable individuals instead of spreading Communism door-to-door across America?  Someone needs to report this to Homeland Security.

Wow, so much fantastic stuff going on around Bitshares.

When are you guys going to do some Canada tours?

Well, this trip is going so well I'm pretty sure they will do another one.

I hear the BunkerShares (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13881.msg180433#msg180433)^TM BitShares Data Center Bunker is on their bucket list near Debert, Nova Scotia, Canada.


http://www.falloutcomplex.com/

Everybody seems to be designing a cool contender to be the best BitShares Wallet / Decentralized Exchange Interface.

A bit more from Dan Notestein, the blocktrades.us (http://blocktrades.us) CEO:

If you've been interested in purchasing PeerTrack's Notes (http://peertracks.com (http://peertracks.com)) directly using BitCoin, but haven't wanted to go through the trouble and expenses associated with making multiple coin conversions across exchanges, BlockTrades.us (http://BlockTrades.us) (https://blocktrades.us) is offering an easy way to get started.

Blocktrades.us has just added support for buying and selling  Notes with BitCoin, BitShares, BitUSD, BitCNY, and BitBTC.  No sign up is required to purchase coins on the site, and coin purchases complete within two bitcoin confirmations (or around 30s for conversions between BitShares coin types).

Hi Stan,

As we discussed it in other threads, Bitshares is a great technology and great idea, really innovative and Dan seems a nice and honest guy, but I was just wondering isn't it Bitshares fall under the illegal securities offering in the United States? I am based in the UK so I am not sure about the US regulations, but as far as I know it is illegal to offer not listd company shares in the US to not qualified investors. In the meantime you are promoting the project as a decentralized company and while I understand the Bitshares assets has a digital currency role as well, but apart from the digital currency function it is a de-facto company share too with voting rights, so don't you think you will be in trouble with the US law enforcement regarding to this project?

They've apparently spent a very, very large amount of money on lawyers to help protect them from this.

Have the lawyers changed the US regulations without the involvement of the Congress and Senate and without making the change of regulations public? Because my understanding was that the law regarding to illegal security offering is still in effect, but gain I am not familiar with the US legislative situation regarding to this.

The company metaphor is used for pedagogical purposes to help people locked into the original Bitcoin paradigm think bigger.  We interchangebly use ten different metaphors to expand people's understanding of the potential of transparent public ledgers.  

For example, see What is BitShares? (http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/update/2014/12/18/What-is-BitShares/)


Dr. Charles Evans wrote a great (and funny) article on letstalkbitcoin about the virtues and limits of using metaphors to describe revolutionary new products.  Remember the "Horseless Carriage"?   Here's a link:  A bitRose by any other Name (https://letstalkbitcoin.com/a-bitrose-by-any-other-name/).

We often describe Bitcoin itself as an unprofitable unmanned company to point out the appalling waste of POW mining as its security and distribution mechanism.  Does that suddenly make Satoshi an issuer of a security?

Anyway, we have been thoroughly instructed by five different law firms about the kind of businesses in which we can engage.  Thus far shall we go and no further.   :)

All right then, and thanks for the reply. I was asking from purely investor viewpoint about this legal risk. Perhaps it would be useful if you could post more about that legality issue or why it is not an issue at all.

From your Mighty Master of Mixed Metaphors...



BitShares was "sharedropped (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182306#msg182306)" into existence by dacsunlimited.com who merely recommended a publicly defined distribution list specifying a targeted demographic of other coin users (BTC and PTS). Anyone could download DAC Sun's custom version of BitShares's public domain software and claim any free tokens to which they already held the keys.  The first person to run that free software launched a new blockchain and others then joined in to form a new peer to peer network among themselves based on their shared consensus that DAC Sun's software would regulate their interactions with each other.

The resulting asset, BitShares, trades as an ordinary crypto-currency on several ordinary crypto exchanges just like Bitcoin.  As a second-generation "smart coin" it supports an enhanced set of transaction types that affect how and when the internal bookkeeping tokens are transferred among users of the distributed software according to a fixed and transparent set of rules.  External third party applications analogous to specialized bitcoin wallets use those underlying transaction types to implement whatever metaphor the application designer thinks will be useful for helping ordinary folks take advantage of these new transaction types.

• Some of these third party applications use the Bitcoin wallet metaphor (aka "skin") because that is familiar to the Bitcoin community.
  
• Others use the skin metaphor of a decentralized exchange - because that is the easiest way to visualize and specify certain transaction types.
  
• Others are planned to look like checkbooks or on-line bank accounts because many consumers are familiar with thinking that way.
  
• To some, it will have an uncanny resemblance to a public voting booth.
  
• Some interfaces won't use a computer at all - you'll have an ordinary debit card that you load and spend like any other.
  

But under it all, BitShares is just an (extra)ordinary second-generation crypto-currency with many 3rd party "skins" to help different types of people use it more effectively.

Owners of BitShares tokens get to elect service providers who represent that they are legally able to perform certain unregulated functions in their jurisdictions.  These are very simple everyday functions, like notarizing (signing) digital documents, providing public data feeds, and writing open source software.  But there is no human corporate structure in any jurisdiction that owns or controls it.  

Thus, BitShares is merely a transparent public ledger that exhibits a different customized emergent behavior made manifest to each individual depending upon the set of software that individual uses to interact with it.

And here's what's going on with BitShares Vote team...

https://i.imgur.com/bSF9apv.png


Puppies won't save your Bubble.

Thanks for posting pics of the people that are your BTS "counterparty that doesn't exist"...
You guys have no idea how many US securities regulations have been breached.

Yes.  That's the point of the thread.  
Compiling all the evidence showing that the BitShares ecosystem is really real!

I almost chose that same picture myself (minus my smiling face).

:)

APRIL 3, 2015    BY ADAM ERNEST
BitShares Worldwide Meetups: Blacksburg Edition

On April 2nd, BitShares community members hosted a meetup at NuSpark, a local entrepreneurship space in Blacksburg Virginia near the Virginia Tech campus. BitShares worldwide meetups have been growing in popularity recently. More and more people are being exposed to the BitShares blockchain and the possibilities that come with new forms of value and new businesses via BitShares. We typically get pizza and drinks and have great fellowship and discussion surrounding Bitshares.



During this specific meetup we gave updates on several Bitshares related projects. Some of the projects that were discussed were the new BitShares web wallet, Peertracks, and Moonstone. When we showed off the web wallet we demonstrated just how easy getting into BitShares can be. Along with this pitch we revealed several gateways to the Bitshares trading network. Some of the ones discussed were BlockTrades and ShapeShift. Peertracks was discussed as well, which is essentially Bitshares music. Peertracks allows for music artist and fans to connect on a whole new level. With this platform artist can be truly profitable and the fans become the biggest promoters. We then covered a new open-source light wallet called Moonstone. Moonstone aims to bring Bitshares to the masses by providing a better user experience. In just a few days, Moonstone will actually be launching a crowd-funding campaign.
 
Another highlight from the meetup was getting to hear from a Virginia Tech student who has been helping work with Bitshares. He explained what he has learned from the developers so far and what he likes about the BitShares ecosystem.
 
Additionally we welcomed the team from the Bitshares P2P Tour. Currently they are traveling around the United States meeting up and interviewing Bitshares community members. Their journey will be the subject of a film.  The story will be made into a documentary and will serve as a way to bring community members together. The stories and experiences of Bitshares early adopters and founders needs to be heard!
 
Be sure to join a BitShares meetup group so you can attend the next one! And if there isn’t one near you, ask us about starting your own.

I'm glad you all like puppies because you're about to get crushed by the Doge.

Here is Fuzzy's list of cool BitShares Projects.



Admittedly, the BitShares Island and its landmark BitShares Office Tower complex pictured above are a bit further off, but you've gotta love the Marina del BitShares in the middle of the island where the BitShares catamaran fleet will drop anchor when not decentralized.

Now that is interesting...I've been whacked around by the stock market for some time, and was toying with the idea of getting into Bitshares so I could offer Assets tied to the Dow, S&P 500, and a few popular stocks.

Yes!  Check out the earlier post in this thread from Baozougongqinwang (Rampaging Prince Gong)!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=940298.msg10530722#msg10530722

They are offering a mix of VC crowdfunding and reselling affordable micro shares out of major stocks.

So what you're saying is, there's no interest in a suite of Bitshares Assets that mimic already-listed major stocks. Thanks.

No, just the opposite.  I'm saying your idea has been validated by other professionals who got some VC funds to try it. 
The arena is still wide open for innovation by early movers...

 :)

You mean, by issuing them and adding them to the Bitshares ecosystem? Wouldn't that require all delegates to add the stock prices to their feeds?

It depends on how you want to do it.

If you go with Market Pegged Assets (MPA), then the answer is yes and you have a trustless decentralized asset.

If you go with User Issued Assets (UIA), then no, you back the asset with an IOU to trade it at a spread around the price of the real stock and you become a centralized point of trust.  This means success depends on your reputation or you should team with someone who has a public reputation.

The two approaches can coexist on one blockchain, giving lots of options for various business models.

With MPAs like, say, BitBTC, you need to convince the delegates that there is enough demand to be worth the effort of publishing a feed.  Over time, this will get easier.

A good approach would be to start out with a UIA, prove there is demand, then petition the delegates with that evidence to offer a MPA version.

The same about bunnies

https://40.media.tumblr.com/3a7445c0ba404a8dbef7995562d6df53/tumblr_nijliqSRnV1tm0lv8o1_500.jpg

Oh, man!  That pegged my cute-o-meter.
You gotta warn me before you go posting something like that!

WTF is this? "BitShares loves puppies" got another meaning after


https://i.imgur.com/WUDL3tu.png


I suggest to start a new thread. FUDers have won this battle against your marketing team.

#shotsfired

This is basically one hour with Bytemaster answering questions from the public and (IMHO) letting way too much slip about what's coming next.

The Bitshares ecosystem provides a magical user experience (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15517.0.html)

Some of you may find this article interesting...

Gateways and Bridges (https://bitshares.org/resources/gateways)


Read the rest here...

Gateways and Bridges (https://bitshares.org/resources/gateways)

For completeness sake, since this is a thread about everything happening in BitShares, here is a link to what's happening with BitShares Music, aka PeerTracks!  You can trade their token right now on the BitShares Decentralized Exchange!

http://whatarenotes.info/

Here is a fascinating new fundraising model that makes clever use of a variety of BitShares mechanisms.
Just goes to show how BitShares is changing the way things can be developed now that wouldn't have been before.
In this case, it's a way to lend a third party developer money to build the Moonstone wallet and earn a pretty nice rate of return.

Great overview of BunkerShares - another company launching on BitShares

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2fcUSYiz_w (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2fcUSYiz_w)

No puppies there ... spiked and eaten?

Somebody had to stay back at the office to keep up with all the press releases...

Two questions:
1- can bitshares client connect through TOR, if so how?
2- is there a bootstrap download

thanks

I'll get you an answer when our developers wake up...




EDIT:

BitShares developers have not done any integration with TOR.
No reason why someone couldn't though...

From BitShares Developer Nathan:

Thanks :)

http://i59.tinypic.com/2vc73w8.jpg

I assume that's to make sure I don't forget?

:)

By the way, BunkerShares just launched its presale campaign...  another business using the BitShares platform.

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15816.msg203117.html#msg203117

For the sake of completeness to this "historically significant" archival thread, I'll post this here too.

BitShares on Bitcoins and Gravy...

I love puppies too :)

This is a friendly reminder to all Bitshares holders that you are paying Stan to post dog pictures to this ridiculous thread.  Good investment.  Stan maybe when you're done milking this Bitshares scam for all it's worth you can get a job with the Doges.

thanks for bumping de

Not sure why the authors said we were only the fourth most popular chain.
Great Grandma Larimer assures me we are the most popular.

Who are you gonna believe anyway?  Cointelegraph or her?

Anyway, here's an article with actual content!

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114033/bitshares-101-basics-of-the-worlds-4th-most-popular-cryptocurrency

I enjoy BitShares, but why in the world did it have to be Amanda Johnson that decided to write this article :(

I'm pretty sure this is not a puppy, but it's got that energetic puppy inquisitiveness about it, that cats find so endearing.

It's like it smells that something GREAT is in the air!

Latest from Max Wright...  one of his best IMHO.

Did someone mention puppies?

How are the updates on the client?  The software you guys released last year was really disappointing.

Check updates history here: https://github.com/BitShares/bitshares/releases

No, I mean how is it?  Any user reviews?

User feedback for latest version here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15900.0.html

You can also try the web version of the wallet:
https://wallet.bitshares.org

Thanks.

thanks

But do puppies love Bitshares?  ;D

Just look at the picture in the OP.
They were all attending a briefing on the original plans for BitShares.
Can't you tell how much they loved it?
True, snacks were served, but these are sophisticated and erudite Great Pyrenees Puppies.
I'm sure they weren't unduly influenced by that.

Oh not until they see this...

https://i.imgur.com/RSWLrjf.jpg

Yes, they are pretty happy about that, (knowing what they know is coming this summer).

Shares are moving from weak paws into strong paws.

We already had the fairest initial distribution we could think of.
Now with these Great Depression prices there will be no way to say everyone didn't have a chance to get on board.

Strong paws will prevail.

Is this a good time to get in then?

You can ask Duke, the Bush Beans dog, but he ain't talkin'

 :)

Ok...

Ok, ok, here's just a tiny piece.  China started early with dacx.com (http://DACX.com).
This is a report on Shanghai international TV.



This new startup is powered by BitShares:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMbgER0BOqA&feature=youtu.be (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMbgER0BOqA&feature=youtu.be)

Skip the first 30 seconds before the show starts.  This was on prime time TV in China.

Most of this is in English and already public information.


Get to meet Rampaging Prince Gong Ming.  
Just the tip of the iceberg.

Beyondbitcoin.org (https://beyondbitcoin.org/)

Just wondering...  How much funding did Bitshares get (from VC's, IPO, etc..)?  I am trying to compile a list of the highest funded Altcoin and 2.0 projects here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1045967.0

Off the top of my head in round numbers I would estimate:

  500K in VC investment
6000K in donations from supporters

(Valued at the time they were donated)

Cool. Thanks.

6 million USD total worth of donations from supporters?

To be precise from 1 Jan 2014 to 19 Jul 2014 was donated by supporters: 5625.02597337 BTC and 415218.03087392 PTS
Source: http://www1.agsexplorer.com

But in November 2014 almost all PTS was returned to donators.
Source: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,11289.html

Ok.  Let's make it less confusing.  How much funding did Bitshares get in total from VC and donations.

I want this to be accurate as much as possible https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1045967.0

If you want to know how much USD funding BitShares gets you should know exact day and amount when BitShares team sell donated BTC (same for Etherium, etc) maybe better if you count funding in BTC?

In BTC BitShares gets donation: 5625.02597337
VC investment: 500K USD (as Stan remember)

Ok good. Thanks.

At least unlike Supernet Bitashares released something for that 5 million $ and what Bitshares released it does work and make sense.

What are you talking about? SuperNET has lots of things operational.

And you say "for that 5 million" as if someone just took all the money raised. That might have happened with Bitshares, but SuperNET doesn't work like that. The money raised stays in the asset and contributes to the net asset value. When money is spent on things related to the project it's done so transparently through approvals from the funding committee.

SuperNET is the closest thing to an actual DAC that I've encountered.

Here's a solid writeup on BitAssets...taken from a whole thread on the subject.

Not really.

"1 BitUSD ALWAYS = 1$ (+-1%)"

?

Theoretically at high liquidity... good catch actually that definitely shouldn't say "ALWAYS" in the current implementation of BitAssets, as we can see bitUSD is overvalued at the moment.

Looking forward to seeing how BTA 2.0 addresses the liquidity problems:

BitAssets 2.0: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16127.0.html

Response to design critiques thread: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16143.0.html

In this week’s hangout Bytemaster talks about the 17000 lines of recent c++ code, including the witness / delegate / worker split, bitAssets 2.0 and the referral system.  He also gives some insight into the motivation and philosophy behind these changes and why the scope and details of the upcoming release is not yet public. Also featured in this hangout is a discussion on a user friendly interface and how back-end improvements as well as the referral system will improve the situation.

1:08 Introduction by Fuzzy

2:00 Bytemaster updates

No real updates that we are ready to disclose yet. The team has been working harder than ever producing more than ever.

2:30 Liondani: Contributions on github seem to fade after February, what’s going on?

Bytemaster: First, let me start by saying we have no intentions to increase the maximum supply from about 3.7 billion or increasing the rate of issuance from 5 BTS per second. Those parameters of the system are untouchable and we remain committed to that.

Second, the entire team has been doing nothing but work on BitShares. We are just not doing this work in public. We are preparing a whole lot of documentation to describe everything that we have been working on, to answer everyone’s questions, and we plan on releasing and announcing all this new information in the first part of June.

We have added over 17000 lines of c++ in our private repository. These are lines of code that do not exist in the public repository. To put that in perspective, there are 17000 lines of code in the core blockchain library that define BitShares. We have done more in the past 3 months than we have done in the 9 months before that.

So, the dev team has been working harder than ever on BitShares. BitShares is about to get a major, game-changing update in its feature set, and performance. We’re very excited about what it is going to be, but we can’t reveal the details at this time.

5:20 Liondani: Looking at Github can be very misleading for newcomers then!

Bytemaster: Yes, it would be good to put a note on GitHub or something like this to know what we are up to. But we are so close to releasing and announcing this now..

6:40 Fuzzy: What is the reason you have done this off GitHub? Competition?

Bytemaster: There are a lot of factors. There is competition, but also we wanted to focus, not having to deal with the FUD that we have been dealing in the past. For instance, there were some intermediate results could have upset some of the people out there, since we did not have all the solutions at the time, but what we ultimately came up with allows us to maintain our goal of no dilution, no changes to supply, no mergers – any of the things people were worried about. We wanted to avoid those types of things, and we’ve managed to do that and we’re were happy about that. We have been discussing some of what we have been working on – bitAssets 2.0, the referral system, paid workers / delegates / witnesses divide. And that’s part of what we have been working on, but that’s just scratching the surface.

9:10 Ben Mason: After the launch of this changes, will you be able to write a roadmap?

Bytemaster: I just wrote a roadmap yesterday.

9:23 Ben Mason: How do you feel about the present state of the ecosystem?

I feel that the ecosystem is stronger than ever. Every day I talk to people that are doing stuff, that are interested in things. Our community is unique, as far as I can tell. We have really smart people that have really strong commitment to our philosophy. And I think it unites a lot of the people who want to build on BitShares. It’s the philosophy, and the role of freedom and all the things I have expressed. It has really built a community of people that have a lot in common, and really binds us far more than whatever the share price happens to be in any given day. And that’s going to bring us through the fire. You don’t know what’s going to happen before it takes of.

I will say that if you are actively working on stuff for BitShares. There are significant API changes coming. And you should contact us and we will help you with that.

11:30 Ben Mason:  Is there a possibility Peertracks will use the BitShares blockchain?

Bytemaster: No updates at this point in time.

11:50 Do you believe FollowMyVote will deliver the value it originally believed it would?

Adam is in the office every single day, giving us business contacts. He’s reaching out to the Pirate Party, and is getting a lot of inroads there. He’s going to be building on the BitShares platform. These things always take longer than we would like, but I believe he is a valuable member of the team, and that we will see value from it.

12:35 Adam received 30 million BTS from the merger, do you have any information on that?

They have not been moved, and they are vesting, so the vast majority can’t be moved.

13:10 Will FollowMyVote sharedrop?

Bytemaster: There will be no unique FollowMyVote token, it will be on the BitShares blockchain and it will use BitShares directly.

14:00 What do you think of ItBit?

Bytemaster: I think it would be great to be involved with them. I have not had any conversations with them at this point in time.

14:40 Regulation and the Philosophy of BitShares

Bytemaster: Well, the philosophy of BitShares is flexibility. One of the things we are working toward is allowing User-Issued Assets (UIAs) to be regulatory compliant. If we can have the regulatory, completely legitimate uses, whilst still maintaining our freedoms on one platform, I think that’s the best of both worlds. But I haven’t looked at their exact details, I look at their website, it looks like they raised 25 million dollars, and are working on refining regulation, and we have a lot to offer.

But I do not want to be in the mode of handing over the keys to the kingdom to complete control. You know, we need to maintain our blockchain that’s free, with funds that can’t be seized and with no requirement to identify yourself. As long as you can maintain those things and the system is not censoring transactions, and we’re decentralized, we can stick to our principles. But I think that a free market needs a web of trust – if you will – to allow people to know who they are doing business with, to restrict access to – there is a whole market out there that we can’t tap without some form of self-regulation, and that’s where we need to go.

16:35 More discussion on compromise and regulation versus freedom.

22:00 Bytemaster on getting network effect

24:00 Witness / Delegate / Worker split

Witnesses: Elected by the shareholders. Block producers, they get paid per block.

Delegates: Elected by the shareholders. Can propose changes to blockchain fees and parameters, that are voted on by the shareholders.

Workers: Elected by the shareholders. Workers get paid each day. They specify how much they need each day.

This is really decentralization of power, and gives us more flexibility.

38:00 Referral and lifetime value of users

47:10 Where is the Light-Wallet in terms of development?

Bytemaster: We postponed lightwallet development due to some performance issues that we are working to fix on the BitShares core. So we’ve been working to specifically design for the lightwallet, and we’ll focus on this after the upcoming release.

49:45 User Interface

Bytemaster: User interfaces are hard. We got 2 people working on a userface; svk and valentine, and svk is only working part time. Building a solid user interface takes a lot of time. Building a user friendly interface is even harder. We recognize that this is required. With the new system that is coming out, with the referral system in place, there will be a huge incentive to build new user interfaces to attract users and sign them up. For instance, moonstone will have that much more incentives to build a brilliant user interface that attracts users.

55:20 How will the new features be available without a better user-interface?

Bytemaster: We will shift development to user interfaces after we got the back-end polished. A lot of the challenges we face in designing the user interface are a consequence of decisions made in the way transactions are structured, and the way data is organized in the client. It will be a lot easier building user interfaces if the data is structured and the API right, and you have the information you need to interpret it.

I can tell you the protocol is going to be easier to understand than ever.

58:10 Is any of this related to the implementation of the object graph?

Bytemaster: The concept of object graph is foundational to performance gains.

58:30 Discussion of BitAssets 2.0

Bytemaster: Concerns over premiums on BitAssets. An alternative is fee on forced redemption. We can try both. There is huge incentive to try different things.

1:04:00 Discussion of BitAssets yield

1:06:00 Will all witnesses be paid the same?
Bytemaster: Witnesses should all be the same.

Oh, and here's the May 8 edition...

Hey Stan.  Can you post a link of the Bitshares' team? 

Perhaps the most authoritative source is the one maintained by the blockchain itself:

http://www.bitsharesblocks.com/delegates

Of course there are many other huge contributors who are not formal delegates, such as hero members at bitsharestalk.org (http://bitsharestalk.org) and members of the http://nullstreet.com/ (http://nullstreet.com/) community marketing association.

There are also a lot of associated companies that I have mentioned from time to time throughout this puppies thread.

There is no central list because there is no central organization. Everyone associates themselves with the project as an independent agent and those come in many varieties.

I saw a page from before where you, Dan, your Chinese co-founders and your dev team were shown.  I'm trying to find it.  Can you point me to a link?  I would really appreciate it.

Many photos you can find here: https://www.facebook.com/officialbitshares/photos_stream

There is always this classic...

If there is somebody whose picture you would like in particular, I probably have it on my hard drive...

I saw a page online that showed all the founders and the team that created BitsharesX last year.  That's what I'm looking for.  I think the page even had Li Xiao Lai as co-founder or director...? 

I remember the page you are talking about.  
Lots of little circle shaped pictures.
I think that was lost when Invictus released BitShares to its owners.
Now there is no such central team and no Invictus web site.
Think of Invictus as just a development "contractor" that delivered its product to the world as open source and then ceased crypto operations.
So that web site has been taken down.
I'm not sure if a backup exists, but perhaps Google archives or some volunteer has it.

Can't leave any evidence.

Oh ok. Thanks.

It might be a good idea to have a page for your team, advisers, founders, etc.. at bitshares.org.

That's entrapment.

Someone was nice enough to track down this link.
It's WAY out of date and has broken links, but it is probably the one you were seeking.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141015084123/http://bitshares.org/community/team/

YES!  That's it..

Isn't that team the same team active at Bitshares today? 

A lot of them are still involved in BitShares in many independent capacities.

The latest at BeyondBitShares.org (http://BeyondBitShares.org)

Forwarded to Homeland Security for the "Most Wanted" posters.

Excellent BitShares PR!  :)

Bitshares Technical Analysis for 5/21/2015: http://themerkle.com/speculation/bitshares-technical-analysis-for-5212015/4774/

Developer Hangout with Bytemaster (https://beyondbitcoin.org/developer-hangout-with-bytemaster-may-22-2015/)

This one includes a complete transcript, for quick skimming.  Here's a sample:

40:10 Clip from LetsTalkBitcoin: Adam Levine on Ripple’s IOUs and black/whitelisting.

Andreas Antonopoulos concludes that with Ripple the cryptoeconomy has gone from free and decentralized to PayPal in three years. What are your thoughts on this clip?

Daniel Larimer: Adam described the situation perfectly and that the only problem people have is.. you know we need assets that can trade on a blockchain so that we don’t have centralized exchanges. Everything single time someone transfers their money to a centralized exchange they are creating Adam-bucks or Gox-bucks or Bitfinex-bucks, it’s no different. All we’re doing is having the exchange put assets on the blockchain ledger and once they’re on a blockchain that means their assets can be used in smart contracts, whereas when they’re on the ledger, there’s a lot more restrictions. If you’re on an exchange’s database you can only do what that database will allow, if you put it on the blockchain you can do anything the blockchain will allow .

It’s giving people the freedom to do both, The Bitcoin purists out there say, we’re not going to allow anything that has these features to even exist on the same protocol. It’s cutting off your network-effect, it’s cutting off your ability to integrate and is denying people a lot of value that they can have.  I think that the mistake they make is to conflate User-Issued Assets with core assets – that’s the difference between BitShares and Ripple. Ripple actually froze XRP, for some users, but in BitShares you can never have your BTS frozen, and in that sense BitShares is like Bitcoin, and the User-Issued Assets are like assets issued on CounterParty; you wouldn’t blame Bitcoin for Counterparty allowing issuers to Freeze the asset. Same thing: You don’t blame BitShares, because it is perfectly usable even if you have user-issued assets, and what he didn’t mention was that BitShares offers another option which is the market-issued asset which gives you all the price stability of these IOUs without the restriction, without having an issuer having to comply with these laws or hold the funds. So BitShares gives an option, and he didn’t describe that option, so at most he was on a mission, but what he described was perfectly accurate.

45:00 Fuzzy: It does not seem fair that they put us in there with Ripple

Daniel Larimer: I thought that was perfectly fair, they are comparing a feature of BitShares to the entirety of Ripple.. which makes us much bigger than Ripple. The fact of the matter is that when I talk to major banks, and they tell me about their efforts to integrate with .. is they are not interested in Bitcoin at all – Bitcoin does not work for them, for settlement between banks, it doesn’t work for them to integrate with them, but they do want to integrate with crypto – they want to take advantages of cryptotechnology, so we can hold your Bitcoin, and not integrate, but if you want to integrate and play you need to have a more robust feature-set than Bitcoin supports.

We discussed this last week; I am about finding free market solutions to secure our life, liberty and property, and that means that we need to have free market solutions that give us price stability, privacy, identity. And those three things we need to have solutions for, we can’t just say “whups it’s impossible” we’re not going to do it, or “sorry, we don’t have any privacy, everything has to be public”  or “sorry, no identity, everything has to be anonymous” because fact of the matter is, if anonymous currencies were the only option in the market then there are other problems that come about with kidnapping and ransoms and you know those scenarios – the free market needs to have a solution.

And I want solutions that do not require force, that don’t allow you to be coerced, and where there is no single person that can leverage you on your financial.. you need financial freedom and part of that freedom incorporates all of those things, so when someone rails against our platform having the option of having these features, you’re denying the need of having those features in a free market. It’s not the KYC process or the whitelisting process or the ability to freeze accounts that is the issue – and it’s not even companies or international companies that are the issue – it’s governments that can use coercion to compel these companies to do thing that they would not do in a free market. So I think a lot of companies in a free market, the market would probably settle on some reasonable Know Your Customer requirements – because that’s where all the money would be that’s where people feel most safe, but companies must also balance that with privacy; it will be like swiss banks where you don’t get to see who owns what and all that stuff. You can trust companies because they are competing with each other, but when you have governments coming in and coercing these companies, it’s a completely different ball-game, it’s no longer a free market.

In the free market you can trust people, because trust is a valuable commodity, and big companies are almost entirely in their trust. You buy from Apple, because of the brand, and the brand is all about the trust they have earned. And nobody is going to burn their trust to cheat one or two customers.

Right now governments and regulations create high barriers to entry which, the higher the barriers to entry, the higher these companies can abuse their power because they have already got it, but the lower the barrier to entry the more balanced the free market becomes. So I think it’s very bad to adopt a mindset that says, all these different things are just absolutely wrong and that we need complete privacy. People want complete privacy and anonymity because they are afraid of the government and companies doing that is not an issue, a blockchain that supports private entities doing that is not an issue, and fact of the matter is a blockchain that allows private individuals to self-organize and self-police without coercion is a tougher target for governments to attack than something like Bitcoin, where all you have to do is say “think of the children!” and now suddenly Bitcoin is outlawed or has negative PR, and you need to maintain a balance of these things to get wide acceptance and wide acceptance is necessary for us to actually have any freedom with cryptocurrency.

55:00 Daniel Larimer on Decentralization and Freedom

There’s always going to be blockchains that give you freedom. Obviously BitShares the core token is going to be that way. But I don’t think there is reason to fear or exclude others those who do the other things. I think bringing the others onto our platform gives users of our platform who want the privacy or don’t want to reveal their identity, the option to trade the free asset for the restricted asset, and this gives the free asset more value, versus one that does not have this option.

The fear that people have against Ripple is if they come dominant we are right back where we are today, with governments controlling access to funds just by having an account, they can cut you off financially by blacklisting you with the banks and if that becomes dominant a new system has to be bootstrapped and you have to acquire the network effect all over again, but I think that’s just going to be the nature of society. As one country evolves a tyranny a new country has to start up and there’s a revolution, and if eventually people lose sight of it and you have to do it over, and over and over again until we figure out a way to maintain freedom.

no only does bitshgares love puppies WE ALL DO :D

oh my god, they're super cute :)

Latest BitShares Newsletter... (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16542.msg211528.html#msg211528)

Listen Here (https://beyondbitcoin.org/bonus-hangout-with-jim-willie-from-goldenjackass-com/)

“Jim Willie is essentially an Icon in the new economy movement and I am not entirely certain he realizes it yet.  He brings high quality Economics forecasting content to his customers at the Golden Jackass Report’s Homepage: www.goldenjackass.com (http://www.goldenjackass.com)

This content is generally based on Geopolitical and Geoeconomic events, coupled with some insider leaks and a skill in data analytics that helps him paint a vivid picture of current world events.  He does so liberally with a wide and wet brush.  I’d have it no other way.

I hope everyone enjoys learning from him and also our conversations about the blockchain (with special consideration for BitShares) and the potential solutions it enables our current paradigm’s as-yet-irreconcilable problems.  This will be fun for everyone despite the dark tone of some of the forecasting because although Jim’s focus isn’t forecasting sun-shiney days, at least his delivery has a level of humor.  I hope you brought your thinking cap…and maybe a fresh pint to set the tone!” 

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16594.0.html

What's this about NEM? I'm confused.

I do indeed love BitShares. 

Also in regards to TOR, I played with it a bit in the early days.  I couldn't get torrify to work correctly.  If I remember right, it was in regards to getting the incoming connections to route correctly.  Someone with more knowledge (not that hard) might be able to get it to work.  I was also concerned, that the wallet would be leaking my real IP and wasn't sure how to entirely safeguard against that.  The solution I finally hit upon was using Whonix, I was able to not only run the wallet, but even generated a few blocks through TOR. 

Thanks.

You're probably gonna really love what we announce on Monday.

you mean the 1000% price increase? Oh wait, I wasn't allowed to let that slip :D

I wish. I would be so rich if that happened. Do you know something about monday that I'm not aware of?

Monday starts the first wave of summer announcements regarding the future of the BitShares project. It's going to be a doozy...

not really. I know 2 things,
coinomat is going to add bitusd this month. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16649.0.html
and there will be another Gateway soon https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16594

I'll post links to all the links to all the links right here - starting Monday.

"Doozy."  Now there's a word I haven't used in a while.

http://i.gyazo.com/157176d317aeeff1ecf13c8f4013e6ba.png

Ranks right up there with "swell"!

http://i.gyazo.com/b9667d969ed5a2fb1b78ca10d161e76d.png

Nevertheless, they both do apply to Monday copacetically.

Bitcoins and Gravy #70 Bitsapphire & the Moonstone Wallet! (https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/ep-70-bitsapphire-the-moonstone-wallet)

BitShares Music at MIDEM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggK95uVZnKs
 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggK95uVZnKs)

Oh yes, I promised to mention it here too...

BitShares 2.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1084460.msg11567556#msg11567556)

Just when you thought it was going to be a long summer!