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As if the millions of dollars in "donations" and 100's of millions in BTS they own weren't enough, the BitShares Dev's are proposing a hard code in the client that will automatically vote/approve all the Devs for Delegate positions who receive 50 BTS per produced block 85 times a day.

It seems these guys are all about sucking money out of the system instead of trying to grow what they already have.

How many full time Devs does this thing need?

No words for this.Greedy as hell.
Do you have a link?

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=12869.msg169248#msg169248

TL:DR version: the BTS core devs have proposed to hardcode themselves into the BTS client for delegate voting purposes.
Most of the replies on the BTS thread itself are 'do not want', so the BTS community seems to be against it.
If the devs do push this through, it'll be another red flag for BTS status as 'probably not a scam', IMHO.

Newmine should know by now that saying shit doesn't make it true!
The devs are NOT proposing a hard code. It's not the best idea but it's put out there to stimulate discussion.

Feedback helps people resolve what is true and in their interests.

Newmine would like you to just believe his bullshit.. just ignore and appreciate that BitShares is trying to find the best ways forward, rather than having a dictatorship.

This thread is ridiculous.  Under the proposed default dev pay positions voters can vote them out with a click.  Hardly greedy to put your salary in the hands of the users of your product.  

The proposed change just allows the devs to stay focused on dev work instead of having to campaign to be elected.

It was just a discussion proposal! And one that was just intended as temporary anyway until the client is out of alpha stage and voting is more convenient.
Newmine is posting nonconstructive stuff all day on the bitshares forum.

Pretty sure I stated in the OP that it's a proposal. Trying reading it through. 

And yes, my .78 posts per day for over year constitutes as "nonconstructive stuff all day".

I merely point out the things you can't see as you are drowning in the Bitshares grape Koolaid.

How stupid are you?

What you suggested is obvious enough:

Blatantly misleading.. what Koolaid are you drinking!?.. you might want to look more closely.

Here's the text:

Many of the core developers are critical to the success of BTS and they are implicitly trusted by everyone who downloads the wallet.

For this reason I would like to suggest that the next release of the BTS wallet set the "default" approval for the following core developers:

Me, Toast, Nathan, Vikram, Valentine, James, Ben, Dan N., Eric F.   

Each of these guys is implicitly trusted and contributing directly to the github source.    This would really help the core team to get and keep the votes necessary without having to worry much about their salary.   Users could always "unvote" them.  

Thoughts? 

********************************************************************

This is very obviously just a proposal for the community to discuss the pros and cons. OP is spreading FUD for whatever his reasons are.

Talking about Bitshares is always good  :)

The proposal is just a proposal to discuss, but it seems to some people it is not possible to discuss ideas in public?

And i am against it!

I know it's not really supposed to be fully decentralised and all but this is pretty ridiculous. I was warming up a lot to BTS recently but seeing this is kind of weird. This is the type of thing that people will always post a link to whenever someone brings up or recommends BTS.

Its yet another shining example how bad they are at PR. Dan is an honest and visionary bloke, but he and his team are less than useless in figuring out how things may go down badly in public. They seem to lurch from one fully avoidable PR disaster to another.

Regarding this proposal itself, it was sounded out to the community to get feedback, its nothing to do with greed. The last thing any shareholder now would want is that voter apathy, and inability to vote easily may end up accidentally firing one of the core team. There some better suggestions already proposed in the thread, and I like the recommended slate one.

Pretty transparent to me what his reasons might be. I don't have to spell it out, anybody who has spent a decent amount of time here can see through it.


Oh look, its that NXT developer again trying to undermine again in the guise of 'IMHO'.

I have been there since the beginning and these little tweaks are constantly happening.

As I have always stated, the core idea and original BitShares X is awesome.

But,

They diluted the shares adding 500 million more BTS so Bytemaster wouldn't leave to create a competing BitShares. Well uh, he's the guy that started BitShares. Why would he even think about leaving his project after collecting millions of dollars in BTC, PTS and subsequently BTS by way of PTS? Because he wanted more money. The shares he received from the Donations weren't enough.

Now that dilution happened because no one wanted Bytemaster to jump ship, they decided to further dilute by way of inflation and giving special delegates, the Devs, 50 BTS per block which is around 4277 per day, equal to 130K per month, equal to 1.56 million BTS per year per delegate all because the Devs wanted more money.

@Newmine

Given that you spend so much time faffing around on BitShares forum, it's a wonder that you can talk so confused. More likely you are just being deliberately disingenuous.. a lite NXT troll perhaps but you are in your own way doing BitShares a favour because for all your trying, anyone worthwhile will see straight through it and recognise that BitShares is stronger than NXT; PPC and other weaker offerings.

You should retitle the thread as Newmine's greed.

The statement about Bytemaster being greedy is complete bullshit. He didn't reserve himself any rights he did not reserve others. He get the same compensation as the other Devs. Developers have to be compensated somehow and paying them by newly issued shares (only max 6% per year; at the moment it is less then 1% dilution per year to pay for development!!). Please present facts in perspective.

The problem I have with how you present things is that it is entirely one sided, sometimes misleading (like in this thread) and I not once heard you say how to resolve trade off issues. The development funding challenge for example: You complain about dilution to fund development all day (keep in mind it is ~ 1% dilution atm only) but never make a proposal how you would approach the problem. Would you suggest that all 10 highly qualified developers should work for free?

On the merger you mentioned (500m new BTS): You should look more closely and present things as they are: There where two types of AGS donations: (1) AGS donations before Feb 28th (2) AGS donations after Feb. 28th (BTS Snapshot). Group (1) donators got BTS. Group (2) should have gotten all other DACs (a Domain name DAC for example) Bytemaster was planning. Bytemaster realized that those different DACs might end up competing with each other and divide his loyalty. Therefore there was a merger of group (1) and group (2) AGSers so that AGS, PTS, the VOTE DAC and the DNS DAC got the new BTS (20% dilution). In return DNS and VOTE were integrated into BTS and Bytemaster is only working on one project now as opposed to many as planned initially. That all made BTS more valuable but was not communicated well.   

You are a funny guy but you seem hate driven.

funny strange.

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/update/2014/12/18/What-is-BitShares/ (http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/update/2014/12/18/What-is-BitShares/)

I think the best antidote for people spreading false information is to post a little useful information and at least give fair minded newcomers a fighting chance at hearing the truth.

I recommend Max Wright's deeply educational video interviews with Bytemaster for this purpose:  you get to look into Dan's eyes and see the integrity and passion there.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgfpSQFJTLqbgHm8mkgPdD-ma7t0bRhK

... or, if you like stimulating your thinking, visit Bytemaster's blog at bytemaster.bitshares.org.

Scammers seldom take the time (or have the ability) to publish that much thoughtful content.

Then decide who you think is more credible - the OP or Bytemaster himself?

If I am not mistaken, the OP is complaining about greed, not scam.

I too would recommend Bytemaster's blog for anyone interested in the idea of Bitshares. It has some very good posts (it's a good read even if you don't agree with the more 'philosophical' posts).
Link: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/

True, the two are some of the commonly used bombs tossed about indiscriminately in the hands of people seeking to harm the efforts of a competing community.

In this case, the entire OP is criticizing a project leader's attempt to discuss a potential way to ensure his developers get a token salary of a little over $2K a month.  Awful greedy.

For those not following the thread at bitsharestalk, Bytemaster just said that given the level of controversy, this isn't going to be attempted.

It was just a suggestion to make it faster for the other developers to get their delegates in.  The person proposing this already has his delegate in, so it's hard to call it greed on his part when he's just trying to get other people working on the project paid.

So please people, if you're a serious stakeholder, pay at least enough attention to vote intelligently so blockchain development can self fund properly.

IMHO is all we have to go on in the magical world of crypto, and we've seen more than enough dodgy shit pulled over the last year to excuse my cynicism.
For the record, I still believe that BTS is probably not a scam, or at least not a deliberate attempt to defraud, but I don't have a lot of faith in its long term future. That's not an attempt to FUD on BTS, just my opinion.

The opinion of the BTS community on this proposal seems, btw, to tie in with mine, that any attempt to vote in delegates by default (no matter how trusted they may be) would be a bad idea.

And lastly....I'm not a Nxt dev, check my post history: I'm just a very talkative guy.

Edit for typo.....

Here is a few proposals:

Don't dilute! Pretty simple. No inflation.

Quit altering the project! See something through for once. Every huge change lately has been because bytemaster and the others want more money. Tell me how I am wrong there.

You are asking us to give up our two most powerful competitive edges.

1.  BitShares is a self-funding start-up.  It pays its workers in equity, like most start-ups.  Its supply increases much slower than Bitcoin.

2.  BitShares is innovative.  It will keep changing and improving to be competitive.

Choose who you prefer to invest in:  Tessla or Coke.


  :)

It is supposed to be more decentralized than bitcoin.

101 delegates (who can be voted out at anytime) signing blocks instead of... how many mining pools with a monopoly on hashpower?

Bytemaster is transparent, and really cares about how the community feels. He had this idea, posted it, wanted people's feedback on it. He does this all the time because the community can often times come up with improvements to ideas he has, or explain better why an idea is terrible (like this). The idea was not to guarantee him and his devs a delegate spot, just to make their spots more secure by making them the default votes which could be changed.

Everybody told him that it's a bad idea. He said "got it. skip that then." (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=12869.msg169416#msg169416)

And this is an example of why the bitshares community is awesome. Everybody has a voice that will get heard if they want it to be.

"self funding" didn't come about until a month or two previous. Your crowd fund was supposed to carry you through development, but couldn't manage so bytemaster threatens to bail and develop a competitor if the community didn't agree.

I don't think DNS, VOTE, and PLAY were ever viewed as "competitors." They all serve different purposes.
BM just realized that if they all use different blockchains, then we may end up with 4 different versions of bitUSD.

pretty sure the plan was for all the devs to work on all these projects all along. I don't think that constitutes "threatening to bail and develop a competitor."

Well, this isn't going to be implemented (as said by Bytemaster) so there's that. Hopefully the devs can be voted in without making it a default.

I'll go ahead and predict that within a few months some "phantom" delegates will get voted in at 100% pay. Either controlled by the devs or by someone attempting to tax the blockchain without actually working for it.

I don't have a lot of money, and I'm normally not a betting man.

But man. I want to take this wager.

how about 30 bitUSD?

coins avoiding this forum normally have a reason to do so ...

No doubt.  Personally I avoid this forum most of the time because the spam/scam density is so high, but that's just because it's the biggest target around at the moment.

bitshares could certainly spam the altcoin section alot more.

in fact there was a thread about that very topic once acknowledging that not as much information is shared here as could be.

but there's so much activity I think bitshares really does justify having its own forum. it's not like all the information isn't freely available.

I personally don't come around here much any more because I kind of feel like these forums have been overrun with assholes. not to mention all the scams. but that's just my opinion.

there are people here that are critical and call a scam a scam - it's for these people you come here.

Bitshares now spamming the forum won't help a lot. It didn't ann here - i won't buy it.

Coins exclusively using the own forum is a good way to control the conversation. I really save myself the headache. 

it didn't ann here but protoshares/bitshare-pts has been on coinmarketcap forever.

this thread pointed out the existence of the plans to make bitsharesx: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313873.0

there have been plenty of other thread talking about it during that time too.

even some threads desperately trying to point out that AGS donation was coming to a close.

here's a post mentioning the february 28th snapshot https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=476312.0

anybody interested in alt-coins had PLENTY of time to learn about the ideas behind bitshares, and plenty of time to invest by buying PTS. more time than any other alt. you're right, there was no formal ANN. do you really need a formal ANN to recognize a good idea when you see it?

I'm not going to bet against you! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=905385.msg10009591#msg10009591)  ;D

How CENTRALIZED can you get?

I don't think anyone really thinks that he's a scammer.

Not very democratic to programmatically elect yourself as delegate. Its better to go with the will of the community of voters. As you would expect I'm against the proposal.

This is interesting. Would that be possible? Are there any extraordinarily large holders who could have the voting power to do that?

Maybe only due to voter apathy? So the answer in my opinion is to use a software agent or slates as has been discussed. At some point maybe require users to vote for delegates before they can make their first trade with a recommendation in the tool tip to vote for delegates who are critical to Bitshares.

You can list the developers but there should be other people listed as well who aren't associated with Invictus. You could list "Team Invictus" so people know they are part of a package but there should be other teams too.

This thread is FUD.

The idea was just to leave as default voted, which I don't like at all as it undermines the trust in BTS, buy anyway could be changed in a few clicks.

You just confirmed my OP and agreed with it. Did you mean the title was FUD? If so, I will go pull all the links where Bytemaster and Stan telling the community Bytemaster was going to go work for VOTE because AGS funds were soon to be gone and DACsun, the front for I3 in Hong Kong, had no money to pay Bytemaster to stay on board and he would leave the BitShares X. Let's all not forget that Bitshares X, the Exchange, or the "ideal free market financial system [IFMFS]" was Bytemaster's original idea, obligation and the reason most of us migrated to Bitshares and gave them money. For him to come out and say he was going to abandon a project because he wasn't going to get paid after he collected $millions to see the project through is greedy. That's why I titled the thread that.  He paid himself $100K or more in salary, and then received a couple $100K in BTS and he supposedly had no obligation to stay and maintain what he started? He would then be allowed to start a competitor DAC VOTE, And siphon money out of them to do the same thing there as he did for BTSX? That's like Bytemaster delegate signing all the forked chains just to be on board the longest one in the end. Don't you think at this point the BTS earned by the Devs is enough incentive to see this through? How many full time Devs does it take? I think BTC has 2-3 full time. We have supposedly 9? 9 full time and we can't get a anything released on time or anything stably released. 1.0 is already scheduled 3 months later than first announced. Let's not even go there yet.

Its your money so your decision and your risks. I would urge you to take a broader view for your own sake.

I am very active here, but barring the past few days, I've mostly refrained from mentioning Bitshares. Why? 'coz I know everytime I try to explain anything there would be too many people with vested interest who start shouting, and I never like engaging with them. I always felt bad as I thought (maybe I am blinded) that this is such an awesome, visionary project and most on here are missing out.

Don't forget the $50,000 bonuses (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=12806.0) they gave themselves.

What is your intention in twisting facts continuously? The bonus is a pay in advance for the next month. It was done in order to have no expenses in 2015. Otherwise there would have been a need to pay taxes on the fundraiser (35%)!

Newmine keeps ignoring the post I made before explaining the merger:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=913075.msg10027129#msg10027129

Regarding the whole discussion about whether to pay developers industry competitive rates: If you don't it makes more sense for a qualified dev to work else where and just buy into BTS with what he earns there. If you don't address trade offs like this the discussion is pointless.

Ignore him, he is the known troll cool4school or something like that. He realized everybody takes him as a joke and so started a new account.
His only intention is to make money by pumping up NXT.

If you guys are serious, I'd be happy to arrange an escrow for this bet with more specific details on what constitutes 'few months' and what constitutes 'phantom delegate'  ;)

Wasn't there a list somewhere about all the kinds of ways they took money off the system?
Do I have that right:
- They collected IPO's or donations for the development
- Then they took some initial stake of Bitshares.
- They also took stakes of the other coins they had (AGS or whatnot).
- Then profiting when merging those.
- Then they get the delegate inflation.
- The bonus mentioned above...
- Hm... and yeah, lol - they're actually selling the test-coins. Those are supposed to be a top20 coin too.

Forgot anything?
They also say they bought more shares early. They must have made millions. Pretty stunning that that's not enough to pay developers - so now they have to hardcode to make sure they get the tax.

I am not sure about an initial stake or premine, I don't think they did that.

They did take donations in BTC and PTS(protoshares) and the PTS was a double dip because they then got to keep the BTS allocated for all those PTS shares, which turned out to be a lot.

There was also some evidence of Devs being paid with donated BTC and then donating it right back which was a double dipping on two levels: 1. It artificially inflated the amount of donated BTC and caused other investors to not be able to get the "biggest bang for their buck"' 2. The Devs double dipped and had nothing at risk by basically giving BTC back that they "earned" the first time knowing it would go right back to the pot that pays them next time. It was kind of like a no risk loan for BTS shares because every BTC would be coming right back to them after they gave it to themselves and re-donated. (This is probably where the "bonus" came from)

The problem with voting is, it's fundamentally flawed, because most people are fundamentally stupid and have no idea what's best let alone to do research on what's being proposed.

Everything that was done was publicly disclosed and auditable.  Once employees are paid with donated funds (as intended by the donors) then the funds are theirs to buy lattes or donate to BitShares as they see fit.  Not a double dip at all - and all traceable on the blockchains and explained on public ledgers.  100% of all donations (and their resulting sharedrop dividends) are dedicated to developing the industry.  Zero profits were retained by Invictus and developers were paid merely average salaries.  Their year end bonuses bring them up to full pay for people of their caliber but they will have to live off those earnings for a while, because now they are all in elected positions that pay 1/4 of what they had been making.

There was no premine.  The very first ProtoShares (PTS) block was actually mined by Super3 of StorJ fame.  Our developers had to buy and rent their own mining equipment just like everyone else.  Most of our mining equipment, in fact, never got turned on because because it arrived three weeks late, after an overwhelming number of miners jumped into the action in those early weeks.  So, it was a classic mining gold-rush distribution where everybody got the same shot.  And that well accepted fair distribution was used by our innovative "share drop" approach to distribute shares fairly in future DACs.  Another innovation was our version of simulated mining (AGS) where an alternative fair distribution profile was generated via in a 200 day donation contest.  Now we had two very fair distribution profiles (one for miners and one for donors) which were used to sharedrop tokens in BTSX (now BTS) instead of using wasteful mining over and over again.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that every move has been debated and vetted transparently on bitsharestalk.org. 

NewMine is an outstanding propagandist.  He has an amazing ability to take everything that happened in broad daylight and turn it into a dark conspiracy theory.  You can believe his vandalistic tales if you want.


Or you can come on over to bitsharestalk.org and do your own research. 

Stan,

No dark clouds of conspiracy here. I am just pointing out that every major change as of late is only to the benefit of the I3 Teams wallets.

As for an outstanding propagandist, thank you. And just think of the wonders I could've done had I been incentivized to toe the line with a 3 million bts bonus...😉

I think you'll find that 2cool4skool (if DE is him, which really wouldn't surprise me  ;) ) is driven by a very serious philosophical belief in decentralisation and the original vision of Satoshi N., so dismissing him (and other Nxt'ers like myself) as simple trolls is getting dangerously close to being FUD.

I have no idea on the OP's intentions with this thread  (probably not very BTS-friendly, though) but I've got no real interest in kicking BTS unless there's a good reason for it, and I reckon I've treated BTS fairly on this point. I don't see BTS as a threat to NXT in any way, the world of crypto (and the financial 'real world' ) is more than big enough to support a good selection of crypto currencies/platforms, and NXT and BTS don't seem to be sharing all that much common market space.
 
BTW: $50,000 ? Fukinell......that seems like lots to me. How much cash are the core BTS devs pulling down per month?

The entire core dev team is currently paid automatically by the blockchain in a slow trickle of about 50 BTS (71 cents) every 17 minutes. This works out to about $22K per year at today's prices.

Last year, they wound up with Google-equivalent salaries for the top tier alpha-geeks they all are.
This year, they just get paid in equity worth 20% to 25% of what they had been making.

Thus, they are highly motivated to increase the BTS price to get their salaries back up to where they were!  

By the way, if you'd like to use these new innovations to launch your own self-funding decentralized start-up, read how to do it the BitShares way here:  http://bitshares.org/regulation-proof-self-funding-dacs/

This is a very good point however in the case of a blockchain, I'll take voting over mining pools any day of the week.  At least all stakeholders have a vote where as anyone can buy hash power and simple non mining users have no say.

That's just silly. I am not an I3 member, nor have I ever met one. But I have been involved with this project since the very first day of mining PTS (and even before that, when I read the white paper and articles on Let's Talk Bitcoin).

And EVERY change has been debated and has turned out to be to the advantage of my wallet as well. The Larimers are by far the most transparent and honest people in the crypto space. Their integrity shines through every action and decision.

Something entirely different adds an obnoxious odor to your postings, Newmine.

You can buy stake the same way you can buy hash power, with money. If I had $10 million to buy mining equipment for BTC, couldn't I take that $10 million and buy 1/4 or the BTS shares instead?

It wasn't a bet but, I'll bet you 5 bitUSD (easy amount, I will follow through with) if a Dev controls (by control I mean ends up with a majority of the shares per block produced by that delegate as some people are acting as surrogate delegates already) more than one delegate or some unknown 100% paid delegate appears to be voted in, a mystery delegate.

The difference is when you put $10 million into BTS/NXT/BTC/Doge you increase the value of the coins for the holders, with mining you make mining & power companies rich and usually coin holders get poorer as they're diluted via mining to pay for it.

Also you can look at the sell wall for any crypto... If the CAP is $40 million, $10 million doesn't buy you a 1/4 of the stake, it will buy you very, very little. Even with huge pacing.

Getting 25% of Bitcoin,  3.5 million Bitcoins would be very hard and make BTC holders very rich, meanwhile Ghash and others have shown getting 40%+ of hashing power is quite possible, while not making Bitcoin holders wealthier in the process at all.

Its getting off-topic so I will try to keep it short. We can continue over PM if you so wish.

I was interested in NXT sometime after the initial launch after I had overcome the disappointment of not getting in early and a decent portion of my portfolio in it. I had some trouble with the wallet so I checked out nxtforum to see if anybody else is having a problem, and during that time I saw that coolschool guy. He came across to me as childish who keeps shouting and making fun of others only to serve his own interests. Now, there are people like that everywhere, but I was quite shocked to see the other members supporting him and joining in with him and I decided to end my NXT interest there.

I'm a puny investor and you didn't lose anything, but don't try to portray him as something more than a greedy troll.

@sumantso:
I will continue to sporadically defend 2Kool...not against accusations of trollness ('coz, well, he is, kinda) but against the greed accusation.
He's pulled a lot of trollish stuff, but I really don't believe that greed is his main motivation. Good old-fashioned decentralised crypto-anarchy is.

Anyhow, not going to turn this into an off-topic session of 'Yes, he is' versus 'No, he isn't'
I am sorry that your experience with 2Kool soured you on NXT, I'd just like to point out that NXT has a lot of other viewpoints and beliefs contained within its community, and we do our best to be inclusive, not exclusive. 

If you want to come on over to Nxtforum.org again and have another look, check this out and maybe contribute:

https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/price-speculation/msg146011/#msg146011
https://nxtforum.org/pub-crawl/live-free-or-die!!!!/

You'd be more than welcome.....

My own personal position on the philosophy underlying crypto-currency is, btw, pretty much in line with 2Kools, but I'm somewhat more tolerant of other approaches. :D

I've always had a raised eyebrow.  So many levels of money from day one, to even just using the platform, and so many promises not met.  In fact, just about everything that is promised changes in some way. 

On a different note, I found bitreserve.  They do in one simple easy step what bitshares is trying to do in multiple steps.  Yes, it is centralized, but they in real time update their reserves so there is no fear of a whale jumping the Bitshares ship and crashing the market. 

I for one would much rather use Bitreserve than Bitshares anyday.  So much simpler and easier. 

Yes BitReserve have assets in a bank that are audited. Pity that banks work on fractional reserve, usually with 10% or less collateral and that collateral is questionable & many Western ones have made plans for bail-ins.

The beauty of funds on a blockchain is they're all 100% accountable no fractional reserve and in terms of BitAssets they have an average of 300% BTS collateral behind them.

http://www.bitsharesblocks.com/assets/asset?id=USD - Collateral and it's history is shown in nearly real time, I much prefer blockchain auditing.

I actually think BitReserve is worse. The thing I loved about BitShares is the fact that there is no counterparty risk with the assets. BitReserve operates on a promise that they will deliver, and Bitshares has made those promises too. And broken and altered them. So if a relatively quasi decentralized project breaks and alters promises, what could stop a fully centralized company, which according to some has a shady CEO or founder, from breaking promises. Post Mt.Gox and now BitStamp, I don't think it is impossible or improbable that some other huge player/business will scam or be hacked. Notice how the protocol is never the problem with BTC these days, it's just the centralized infrastructure built around it that causes all the problems.  If Bitshares had 1001 delegates and a sweeping all encompassing delegate vote/fire system it would be pretty decentralized. I.e a system where users can set parameters to auto de-vote people when certain reliability or performance flags are raised without having to manually do it upon community request. 

In the meantime Bitshares needs to focus on what they have and build that up so they don't have to worry about what they are going to be paid in the future. The whole "I want to make the world a better place, but I won't do it with out getting paid" crap is total bullshit. If you concentrate on trying to make Bitshares worth 5 cents more, 5 freaking cents more your now $2k a month salary turns into $8.4K a month. Or what you were supposed to rely on, your 100 million shares or more, they would be worth $6.5 million and you wouldn't have had to tax the blockchain at all because you got a lifetime salary from AGS donations.  But instead of working on the exchange and building worth, Bitshares is being blogged about, not marketed, diluted for some bullshit that we all know will never be what was sold to the Koolaid drinkers as it was going to be, has a now guaranteed constant sell pressure as with POW miners (at least everyone in POW has the ability to extrapolate some amount of coins and decide to sell or hold), and forked so I3's pockets can be fatter now and fatter than Gate's and Buffet's wallets if the pie in the sky rhetoric ever comes true.

Wow, I finally agree with Newmine:


So, how about helping us get the word out about its awesome potential rather than spreading harmful disinformation like your posts in this thread?  

After all, when you scare new people away falsely, you hurt:

1.  The hardworking developers who are working for annual salary of $22K right now.
2.  The hundreds of people in the BitShares community who are helping out every way they can.
3.  The thousands of people who hold BitShares and want to see those 5 cents soon too.
4.  The people you scared away - who will never get to know what everybody else at bitsharestalk.org knows (or will learn it too late, like most of us learned about Bitcoin too late.)

Of course, when we grow by that 5 cents, that's 400% gain at the cost of the less than 2% being spent on salaries at the moment.  Then we can either:

1.  Stop issuing equity in exchange for that work - spectacular growth doesn't have to go on forever, or
2.  Say, how about spending another few percent to get another 400% gain?

In any case, it will be the people who hold the BTS that will decide when they've had enough growth.  :)

Gosh Stan, you're just posting air. If you already bother to come here and reply, then at least pick one of the many issues he raised and answer.

I mean, I don't care either way - just watching this like I would watch an Breaking Bad episode. A guy that says repeatedly how he's all in to help humanity - fully motivated - with "integrity and passion in his eyes"... but then demands more money on top of the millions he got already, else he'll leave for better pastures.... well... interesting complex character. I'll definitely wanna stay and watch where that plot goes.

No one ever indicated any intention to leave for any reason.  Inconceivable. That's another total fabrication.

All of the funds donated have been spent carefully and documented on public spreadsheets.
They were spent in the most tax-efficient way possible with the understanding that time is of the essence in this industry.  Admittedly they didn't go as far as hoped due to the steady decline of Bitcoin's purchasing power, but they got the job done.  And we got innovation after innovation as a result.  In fact, there is a whole family of independent blockchain businesses based on the resulting BitShares Toolkit.  Check them out.

But a project leader needs to look after his team and make sure they are funded.  Expecially one with Bytemaster's grand vision.  There is much to do in a very competitive arena.  There is really no limit to what can be done with the BitShares model.   We are engineering a whole new alternative financial system - inside the secure and incorruptible confines of a blockchain.  The sooner we recognize the need for a sustainable growth funding model the faster we can get there.

That led to the most recent and best innovation (and most obvious in hindsight). If BitShares is a decentralized company, then it ought to act like one.  Startups often pay their employees in equity. BitShares is a decentralized start-up. The ability to allow its employees to work for equity gives BitShares a unique advantage (until everyone else realizes this is the obvious way to grow the entire industry).  It  adds a few percent of new equity each year (far less than Bitcoin's inflation rate) to pay developers and marketers to grow the pie for all stakeholders - increasing the value of its equity.  This strategy ensures a sustainable funding model for robust growth -- as long as the shareholder continue to vote for it.  And why wouldn't they?  If they get even a few percent annual growth they are ahead of the game.  We expect it to be more like a few hundred percent.   Time will tell, but I think its a great bet.

Read all about our lessons learned here:  http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2014/12/26/Stop-the-Crowd-Sales-Long-Live-Crowd-Funding/

Read some of the many detailed posts at bytemaster.bitshares.org or listen to a few interviews with Max Wright at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtCVRIwcBYU&index=1&list=PLjgfpSQFJTLqbgHm8mkgPdD-ma7t0bRhK

That's the best way to judge this team's integrity for yourself and see that all of this is for real.  I hope to see you over at bitsharestalk.org once in a while.  You owe it to yourself.  :)

You really need to lay off the BTS devs.  You know they're practically a charity case. (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=12806.0)  I don't know how they make it.

Now, I'll be the last one to say that making money is a bad thing.  I think it is safe to say we all got involved in cryptocurrency, regardless of our ideology, to at least make a little money.  It comes down to the issue of figuring out who is being honest and who is being disingenuous.

Since Stan is hanging around here, I'd like to here his response to a post I made earlier.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=905385.msg10009591#msg10009591 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=905385.msg10009591#msg10009591)

I'd specifically like to hear him address how he figures that DPoS is an "improved" version of PoS seeing that it is clearly a more centralized consensus mechanism.  In addition, how does Bitshares rationalize that it is "decentralized" when it is susceptible to and previously undergone a Sybil attack (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10937.0;all), where actually, Bytemaster voted ONE person into FIVE delegate positions?  Can you please prove for all parties that this attack on your consensus mechanism has been thwarted and that this individual no longer controls a delegate?  Please provide verifiable blockchain proof.

Although, maybe you are of the same opinion as one of your developers, toast.  He believes that multiple delegates being controlled by one individual isn't a problem. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=905385.msg9996005#msg9996005)  If you agree, please explain why having any type of consensus mechanism is needed for Bitshares at all.  If not, why does one of Bitshares' devs mislead people to believe otherwise.

Ok, these are legitimate questions which I will try to help with, although I'm just an old retired rocket scientist.  We'll probably have to get one of the devs in here to cover the fine points when one of them comes up for air.

But here's a good recent post that can provide a starting point:

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/bitshares/2015/01/04/Delegated-Proof-of-Stake-vs-Proof-of-Work/

The essence behind our thinking is that all systems tend toward centralization, and it is best to recognize this fact and specifically engineer controls into the system to manage it.  Without such controls, Bitcoin has centralized into about six or so entities who decide what software is "official".  People who join pools don't really provide any decentralization.  They just lend (delegate) their processing power to somebody running the actual signing software.  Pretty centralized and nothing really anyone can do about it.

Bytemaster recognized that providing a mechanism where stakeholders explicitly delegate their signing authority to authorized signers would allow token owners to reclaim that control - rather than leaving it to those who have unilaterally claimed the role by virtue of their ability to assemble a large centralized mining operation.  If one of those Bitcoin central miners start's misbehaving, well there's not much the community can do about it.   If the two biggest collude, well, game over.

Why 101 for DPOS?  Well, its less centralized than six!  But anyway, going from 1 to 2 delegates doubles your security.  Going from 100 to 101 adds less than 1%.  Yet each delegate added increases the cost linearly.  So its simply a case of diminishing returns on how much you want to pay for security.  Going beyond 101 simply doesn't buy you much.  We chose it as the sweet spot, but 50 or 150 would still be reasonable.

Another factor he recognized is that there is really very little damage that a rogue delegate can do.  Producing an invalid block simply gets her fired.  Recognizing that everything a delegate does is inspectable and detectable, the shareholders can quickly detect any misbehaviors and summarily fire the offender.  Again, stakeholders control their own destiny.

You do raise a valid temporary concern.  What happens if the community of stakeholders decides to vest trust in fewer than 101 unique delegates?  What breaks?

Well, 101 is just an arbitrary number that is much, much greater than six.  It's entirely possible for the community of stakeholders to decide that, for a period of time, they want to hire the services of an individual or small business that brings so much value to the ecosystem that its worth assigning more than one delegate slot to that individual.  Think of your favorite big name in the crypto industry.  What if the block chain could hire her at the expense of multiple slots?  Would the shareholders want to do that?  Should they have the authority to do that?

Of course.  BitShares is a company!  If the owning stakeholders think that will make them more profitable and grow faster, why can't a company decide to do that?  

In the short term, while shares are worth pennies, the hard limits on how much a single delegate can earn sometimes requires combining several delegate revenue streams to come up with a full time salary for a highly sought-after individual.  By the time those shares reach 5 cents apiece, there should be no further need to merge streams and things will settle down to 101 independent delegates.

In fact, by the time BitShares reaches Bitcoin's market cap, each delegate will be one of 101 small businesses, selected by the stakeholders, each using a revenue stream of several million dollars apiece to grow the ecosystem.  Powerful stuff to look forward to!

So your concern is really a harmless startup transient.  Security is already far better than it was for Bitcoin at this stage in its development.

As for Bytemaster having a lot of voting influence?  Not really.  He controls a small percent of the votes and usually waits for the community to show a strong liking for a candidate before deciding how he will vote.  He can easily be overridden (in ten seconds) by any small coalition of voters, should they get the urge to do so.   Most of the time they are content to rely on his judgement, but that is under constant vocal review every day at bitsharestalk.org.

Remember, BitShares is a company, not a currency.  It is a unmanned, decentralized company that produces and trades interest-paying "smart currencies" as its product.  So judge it by whether it is a good idea and implementation for a company, not a currency.  Then you can get past all the accepted rules that (may or may not) apply to future currencies and see clearly what the investment opportunity truly is here.

If you want to get really excited about where this is going, read Bytemaster's latest article about BitShares as the future of exchanges.  http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/05/The-Future-of-Crypto-Currency-Exchanges/

And if you'd like to get your questions answered in person, Bytemaster hosts a public meetup using Mumble every Friday at 10 or 11 Eastern Standard Time. It's not unusual to have 50 people attending from most time zones around the world.   Join us and ask your questions there.  Then evaluate whether his live answers to a world-wide audience measure up to your expectations of a serious industry leader.

You are assuming with your figures that each delegate is unique.  It is my understanding that there is no way to prove the delegates are independent.   Furthermore, I don't agree with your rational that limiting delegates is "a case of diminishing returns" because the cost of paying for security in PoS is negligible.  The ONLY reason PoW exists in Bitcoin or PoS exists in NXT is to prevent sybil attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack).  It seems that since DPoS cannot prevent such attacks that it is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED and therefore, Bitshares is NOT A CRYPTOCURRENCY.


You are assuming that all stakeholders will be diligently watching the chain for bad actors.  I can guarantee you this isn't the case.  Of course, there is "little damage A rogue delegate can do", but as I assume you know, the issue lies in multiple delegates colluding together and the fact that with DPoS it is IMPOSSIBLE to know how many delegates one individual controls.


You are doing so at the expense of chain security.  This is a TERRIBLE IDEA.


No, it's not.  PoW and PoS will always be more decentralized and secure than DPoS because it is mathematically provable through PoW and PoS that the chain is secured by a verifiable amount of hashpower or stake.

If I want to attack Bitcoin's PoW algo, I have to acquire 51% of the hashpower.
If I want to attack NXT's PoS algo, I have to acquire 51% of the stake.
If I want to attack Bitshare's DPoS algo, ALL I have to do is convince the stakeholders to vote me in.

This will become a bigger problem if the Bitshares ecosystem grows and it becomes more profitable for a malevolent actor to pursuade stakeholders to vote them into multiple delegate positions.

Can you please answer my previous questions?

1 - How is DPoS an "improved" version of PoS seeing that it is clearly a more centralized consensus mechanism?
2 - How does Bitshares rationalize that it is "decentralized" when it is susceptible to and previously undergone a Sybil attack (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10937.0;all), where actually, Bytemaster voted ONE person into FIVE delegate positions?
3 - Can you please prove for all parties that this attack on your consensus mechanism has been thwarted and that this individual no longer controls a delegate?  Please provide verifiable blockchain proof.
4 - Are you of the same opinion as Toast, that multiple delegates being controlled by one individual aren't a problem (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=905385.msg9996005#msg9996005)?   If you agree, please explain why having any type of consensus mechanism is needed for Bitshares at all.  If not, why does one of Bitshares' devs mislead people to believe otherwise.

As per your own words, since "Bitshares is a company, not a currency", I can only assume Bitshares are a form of equity.  This fact should be most unsettling to any Bitshares' holders who believe the Bitshares' platform is dependent on I3's continued development.  It is my guess that Bitshares, the company, is in violation of numerous US securities laws.


This seems like some type of poorly designed Communist ploy to provide subsidies to businesses paid for by the stakeholders.

I personally view BitShares as currency/company hybrid.

I want voting control, I don't want miners or anyone else to have it. BitShares gives me that. Hashers care about profits at the expense of Bitcoin holders hence why Ghash.io got over 40%. If Bitcoin holders had the voting power that wouldn't have happened.

You argue that 101 delegates is not decentralised enough but also argue that it's hard to individually vet delegates as unique. This process gets harder for the collective the more delegates you have. In a 500 delegate system it would be easier to get 251 fake delegates in place because the average shareholder simply couldn't process that many. With 101 we know who the majority are and at this stage are sometimes more happy with a high reputation, high trust individual having two positions. Over time the 101 number could change depending on what the free market deems optimal. I can't say it's immune from attack ever but it's the best decentralised system by far out there atm imo.

Your last point about it being a communist system is wrong. Whereas Bitcoin's distribution makes miners money, our distribution will be spent on developing & marketing BitShares. Imagine if the $500 million spent on miners a year was spent on developing & marketing Bitcoin. I think it's a tragedy that some of the best Bitcoin developers have to worry about making rent. Our maximum dilution is much lower than Bitcoin and I expect shareholders will keep it much, much lower in practice.

Over the last year, BitShares has made some decisions I vehemently disagreed with but there was no malicious intent. They felt they were adding value for shareholders every step of the way. Now that the funds have been spent and development is funded via the blockchain, it's up to us as a decentralised collective to
decide our future & make those decisions going forward.

The BitShares decentralised exchange & BitAssets are a technological triumph, arguably the most advanced blockchain in crypto. All accomplished in a year. Besides Daniel Larimer, the reason is because we have a lot of highly talented, well salaried developers. I'm certain BitShares will continue to pull away from the competition as it is able to innovate and develop at a much faster pace than competitors.

OP topic is not being implemented.  End of discussion:

http://thevalueswan.com/is-bitshares-undervalued-by-60-times-60x/

oops, wrong link:


Wow, that was easy.  Vote for what features you want implemented in your coin.  Eat your heart out bitcoin (and BitStamp too:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wczMKASQk6s&index=2&list=PLjgfpSQFJTLqbgHm8mkgPdD-ma7t0bRhK

).

We've had lots of fun with metaphors over at bitsharestalk.org and bitshares.org.  Two of the classics, written by Dr. Charles Evans, are linked here:

http://bitshares.org/decentralized-autonomous-jedi-mind-tricks/
http://letstalkbitcoin.com/a-bitrose-by-any-other-name/

Bottom line is that metaphors are helpful in explaining certain concepts until the light bulb comes on for people.  There is a duality to BitShares that allows you to view it as a currency or a company.  Both are true, depending upon the context.  

My favorite way to look at it is that BitShares are shares in a company just like Bitcoin are shares in a company.  (Just because I called Bitcoin a company in the classic article that introduced the concept of a Decentralized Autonomous Company (DAC) -- http://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-robotics/ (http://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-robotics/) doesn't suddenly make Bitcoin subject to securities laws.)

Both Bitcoin and BitShares are volatile crypto-currencies on their faces.  But, BitShares viewed as a company (a blockchain like Bitcoin) does much more.  It runs a full-up unmanned crypto-exchange providing decentralized trading services and the ability for users to create currency and commodity derivatives backed by BitShares collateral.  That's what we call BitAssets (BitUSD, BitGLD, BitBTC, etc.)  These are the real currencies we are aiming for.  Products of BitShares "the company".  These are what give you stability (pegging to real world assets) and pay you interest.  So, inside a single Bitcoin 2.0 currency you have a whole new financial system on a blockchain.  Speculators can use the built-in exchange and trade BitShares tokens thinking of them either as shares or coins or fuel tokens, or whatever metaphor makes sense to them.  Consumers just deal with the BitAsset products - the "smart coins".

So simultaneously you can find BitShares in the top 5 on coinmarketcap.com and BitUSD at around #35 as a non-volatile "smart coin" that tracks the value of the US dollar.

So we shouldn't get wrapped around the axle about the implications of a particular metaphor someone is using to explain a particular concept about BitShares.  I personally jump between metaphors a lot when explaining things to people.   My intent is to show that the design decisions are reasonable when viewed in the right perspective.  It helps people escape from preconceived mindsets and appreciate what we have here.

In reality, BitShares is a Whole New Animal.  We can only describe it like the classic story of blind men describing an elephant while touching its many dissimilar individual parts.  Hope this helps.

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/134568/file-1208368053-jpg/6-blind-men-hans.jpg

I spent a long time answering each of these questions in great detail further above.

Since 101 delegates is just an arbitrary number that could have been 50 or 150, the fact that the number of independent delegates might vary if shareholders allow it is not a big deal.  To become a delegate, you really have to work to convince people to vote for you.  You have to develop a reputation.  You can destroy that reputation in 10 seconds by misbehaving - because everyone can see what you are doing.  We all instantly know if you signed a bad block - and we know who did it.


As for Bitcoin, there's no way to know how much hash power is controlled by one individual.  We do know that too much is controlled by too few.  There is no way to know if a couple of the big pools or mining farms are colluding either.  In fact, they openly do it when a problem comes up.  And we do know that the only way to unseat them is to acquire a huge amount of hashing power from somewhere.  The only way to acquire similar power in BitShares is to drive everybody's price up trying to acquire a large stake.  We like those kinds of attacks.

With BitShares, a misbehaving delegate is instantly flagged to all shareholders who immediately wake up, vote him out, and go back to sleep.  It only takes one person paying attention to raise the alarm.  Then it takes several more trusted experts to verify the problem and post their opinion.  Then the rank and file owners respond and the problem is gone.  You can't do that with Bitcoin without inciting a damaging fork war - at huge cost to enforce any discipline at all.

Bottom line:  My only purpose here is to give fair-minded individuals a chance to recover from disinformation in the OP.  All these issues have been put to bed over the past 18 months in countless public discussions on the way to becoming a Top Five cryptocurrency.  We are all available to answer questions at bitsharestalk.org and in the live world-wide Mumble sessions every Friday.  Stop by if you are intrigued and want do your own homework.   I leave you with the chance to discover the magnitude of the opportunity for yourself.  Or you can wait until everybody agrees that it was obvious.  By then it will be too late to be an early adopter.  Choose wisely...




 

I argue that it's IMPOSSIBLE to individually vet delegates as unique IN BITSHARES because DPOS is vulnerable to SYBIL ATTACKS.  This is not true for Bitcoin or NXT because you either have to own the hashpower or the stake.  The ownership of the hashpower or stake is what provides the resiliency against sybil attacks in these two systems.

Bitshares DPOS is NOT "the best decentralized system by far out there".  This is an OUTRAGEOUS statement.  You are either misinformed or being disingenuous.  Are you going to try to convince everyone that limiting forgers is in the best interest of decentralization?  NXT's PoS system DOES NOT LIMIT FORGERS!  There are over 101 forgers securing the NXT blockchain.


Bitshares is imposing a TAX which redistributes wealth from currency holders to businesses.  This is the very definition of Communism / Crony Capitalism.  Being a NXT stakeholder, I would be upset if my stake was subject to a TAX imposed AGAINST MY FREE WILL to fund businesses in which I have NO INTEREST!


The fact of the matter is that Bitcoin and NXT are NOT shares in a company.  They are decentralized systems which have no incorporated entity behind them.  They are simply a token which are used between like-minded individuals.

Bitshares(TM) is a corporation based in the United States dealing, as you say, in "products" such as "currency and commodity derivatives" and "trading services".  From your explanation it seems that Bitshares is a trademarked "COMPANY, NOT A CURRENCY" selling "shares" that attempts to pass itself off as a currency to avoid US security regulations.


Actually, you didn't answer all of these questions.


From this statement, I am going to assume you believe multiple delegates being controlled by one individual, which is the very definition of a Sybil attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack), isn't an issue.

Can you please explain then why Bitshares needs any type of consensus mechanism at all?  I assume you know the purpose of all consensus mechanisms is to prevent Sybil attacks.


How can you be SURE that you eliminate all delegates controlled by the misbehaving individual even if some of their delegates don't misbehave?

Can you please prove for all parties that this attack on your consensus mechanism, referenced to on YOUR FORUM at https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10937.0;all (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10937.0;all), has been thwarted and that this individual no longer controls a delegate?  Please provide verifiable blockchain proof.

You didn't answer these questions:

1 - How is DPoS an "improved" version of PoS seeing that it is clearly a more centralized consensus mechanism?
2 - How does Bitshares rationalize that it is "decentralized" when it is susceptible to and previously undergone a Sybil attack (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10937.0;all), where actually, Bytemaster voted ONE person into FIVE delegate positions?

Someone having multiple delegate positions is not an attack.  It increases centralisation so is best avoided, but is not an attack.  Would you consider the moment gigahash.io briefly had over 51% of the hashpower on bitcoin an attack even though they didn't actually attack?  Having 5 delegates is no where near enough to even potentially attack the network so please refrain from making wild exaggerations.

I consider them both BROKEN AND NOT DECENTRALIZED!

The truth of the matter is that no one can be sure that he only controlled those five delegates.  He could very well still control multiple delegates.  As Stan Larimer says, If multiple delegates being controlled by one individual isn't an issue, then why is Bytemaster trying to figure out how many delegates he controls by asking the community (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10937.msg144404#msg144404)?

Your question 1 would be a great question to bring to Friday's world-wide mumble session and ask Bytemaster himself in front of God and everybody.  These sessions are recorded so anybody can get a download of you putting Bytemaster on the hot seat.  They are usually wide ranging and full of info like what you are looking for.  I've tried my best to explain it for you, but as I said, I'm just an old retired rocket scientist.  I'm sure Bytemaster will do a better job.  I will say that our evolution from POW to POS to TAPOS to DPOS is well documented in the bitsharestalk.org forum discussions last spring.  Each step was done to eliminate problems discovered along the way.  DPOS was judged by all involved as the most highly evolved we have come up with to date.


Your question 2 points to a period in our early history where delegates did not get enough vetting because... it was early in our history.  Back then, some delegates got elected without proper vetting since it wasn't hard to get into the top 101.  Now it is increasingly harder to get elected as a delegate and every time a new vetted delegate takes her slot, a less vetted delegate is bumped.  So it's an on-going Darwinian distillation process where over time the delegates that survive at the top get vetted better and better and have reputations that are worth more and more, making them unlikely to risk those hard-earned reputations on misbehavior that can instantly be detected.  A Sybil attack at the delegate level would produce candidate with no reputation from vetting. Who would vote for it?  Right now our star developers have taken days or even weeks to accumulate enough votes. Further, it costs two week's non-refundable salary (about $1100 right now) to apply to be vetted as a delegate, making  any attempt to flood the system with nefarious delegates impractical and unaffordable. 

Finally, because of the competition, every delegate gets challenged from time to time by people who want their job. 


Thus, we have engineered a system where it is very competitive to become a delegate, and only the most trusted best of the best survive.  Thus BitShares grows stronger every day.

I think this post proves that Bytemaster and team were leaving BitsharesX based on the amount of share VOTE allocated for themselves:  https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10279.msg134898#msg134898

Here it is pasted too:

I think this sums of the greed.

Oh don't give me any DACSun crap. We all know DACSun was a facade for I3 legally and you guys were the only Devs working on BitsharesX and had no intentions of leaving previous to the realization of Adams allocation for VOTE.

We still have never been told what the "secret sauce" was for VOTE as stated here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10118.msg132054#msg132054

What was the marketing Plan B that apparently no one but you could see? https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10118.msg132005#msg132005

Wait, what happened to Kevin Harrington and the infomercial crap?

What about the bitUSD debit cards?

*i will post links in a bit...

I could keep going. Since you are technically calling me a liar when I am clearly not, I am going to up my propagandist campaign. I think it will be pretty easy to show the world how big of a bullshit artist you are.

Here I will clean up a few remaining issues extracted from your post above.  (I've labeled them for reference.)


ISSUE 1.  I discussed this in my previous post.  Establishing a trusted reputation is much harder than establishing hashpower.  Competition to build a reputation - the most precious of commodities - is what makes the difference.  (This coupled with the certainty of getting caught misbehaving.)

ISSUE 2.  Without the reputation ingredient, more forgers are better because that's all you've got working for you is numbers.  Adding reputation and delegated authority to the "forgers" lets you get the same security with far fewer of them.  And actually, having too many forgers works against you because it waters down how well you can vet each one of them. 

ISSUE 3.  People voluntarily hold BitShares knowing that it operates like a startup company with employees working for newly issued equity.  People who don't understand that this is how most startups work, won't hold BitShares.  Those who do understand, will profit from its ability to fund its own growth.  It's a personal preference - invest accordingly.

ISSUE 4.  BitShares is not trademarked and is not a corporate creation of any government.  It is a free-space blockchain just like Bitcoin with zero footprint in fiat space.  References to it being like a company are metaphorical to help people constrained by the Bitcoin currency metaphor to break free from that perspective and see that other uses of blockchain technology are possible.

Ok, this is actually turning out to be good!  You go collect all the misinformation that you can find or make up and I'll address them here one by one.  Over time, this thread will be come a great resource for people to consult when they want to know the answers to such things. Sort of like a Snopes for BitShares.  I'll try to link to it here where ever I find one of your postings - one stop shopping for answers!  :)

I have labeled your various issues for easy reference in your quote below and responded in-line.

EDIT:  Here it is, written literally overnight...

Really? Because he posted this 2 days before the above post.
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10148.msg132915#msg132915
It is quite clear that before the merger was proposed, finances were in line for the year.

If Bytemaster was obligated to work on the DAC's, why was he not involved in the DNS previous to the merger, or NOTE/Play currently? VOTE was to be developed by other people just as NOTE/Play is and just as Toast was developing DNS/KeyID.

Bytemaster saw a chance for more money and threatened to jump ship and build a competitor to his original project. That's all I am pointing out. It seems each response of your gets more and more convoluted with circle talk, far fetched improbable qualifications and hypothetical justifications which is just fancy BS talk. Something you are pretty good at.

ISSUE 4 Your website says different.

http://i57.tinypic.com/o5qg6s.jpg

http://i58.tinypic.com/34ja9dy.png

Bitshares' Logo Trademarked on BitsharesWiki (http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/Main_Page)
http://i57.tinypic.com/2nb9h89.jpg

What's the deal Stan?  Is Bitshares trademarked or not?  If it is not trademarked why on all your logos are you using the TM mark?  The only reason you would be using TM while not "trademarked" is that you are applying for a trademark on the name.  If you are currently in the application process for trademarking Bitshares and it is your intention to do so, don't you think claiming Bitshares isn't trademarked is misleading?

Sounds like you're being disingenuous.

Doesn't NXT have leased forging? Where you delegate your forging power to a pool? So power like Bitcoin ends up being centralised around a handful of pools?
What % of active NXT do a few of them control at any given time?
How many of the pools are properly vetted?

I haven't looked at NXT for a while, so please explain if it works differently.

We can also vote for delegates with no/low dilution to the point that BitShares would be no inflation and profitable. BitShares holders instead currently vote for circa 1% annual inflation to fund development, infrastructure and marketing.  http://bitsharesblocks.com/delegates

Personally I like no dilution crypto-currency, but I can't see BitShares not growing very big very quickly by being able to fund itself at the early stage whereas other options seem pretty stagnant with no/low marketing and infrastructure development.

Nice work so far guys, keep up the good work !



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

Yes, NXT has leased forging, but as I mentioned in this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=905385.msg9998373#msg9998373), NXT does not force it upon its stakeholders.  There are greater than 101 forgers securing NXT's chain.  NXT's pools are just as "vetted" as Bitshares' delegates.  A main difference would be NXT doesn't charge ~$1100 to pool operators.

Yes this is the old, unfounded and incorrect argument that all systems centralize at scale due to cost and therefore, we should design centralization into them.  I find it interesting that Bytemaster is advocating designing "centralization" into Bitshares via DPoS, but they keep claiming to everyone that Bitshares is "DECENTRALIZED".  Hmmm...

Of course this argument fails to take into account that most forgers will be running their computer anyway, especially the businesses who need to run their hardware 24/7/365.

This "theory" was debunked over on the NXT Forum. (https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/nxt-pos-vs-bitshares-dpos/msg70839/#msg70839)

You should take a longer, broader view.


https://i.imgur.com/SDmLYw1.png


Only a handful are defying Bitcoins fall, only one of them is in the top 10. As has been the case for a while now.

Lol. That has convinced me to buy Btsx. Thanks for sharing!  I love you 2Kool4skewl

Hmm, I don't know. I'm pretty unbiased here and somewhat interested in Bitshares in general, but reading what happened there looks like a pretty clear case of a Sybil attack. Having one guy secretly holding five delegate positions until he was outed by his former group sounds like it fits that definition to me. That's assuming the intention of DPoS is one delegate = one person(or more). Don't have to attack the network itself to succeed in gaining more delegates through a Sybil attack.

I think theoretically you could get a pretty reasonable amount of confidence in 101 DPoS delegates if each delegate was forced to provide significant proof about their real identity including live streaming. Tax documents, IDs and such too. I'm someone who supports the right to stay anonymous in general and I don't put a lot of stake in people providing their real name and such. But some really invasive protocol to prevent Sybil attacks seems like it could plausibly work.

In NXT and in any PoW, all a pool has to do is offer low rent, or rewards on finding block and everybody would go there. That is a very dangerous option and DPoS forcing the responsibility to be shared between 101 delegates makes it much more difficult to grab 51% of the network.

In NXT/PoW - one individual or group can set up 2-3 pools with incentives and take control. The problem is much more severe in PoW as the shareholders and miners don't overlap fully.

In DPoS - one individual or group has to set up 51 delegates with incentives to take control. Depending on the number of already present known, trusted delegates it may even be impossible. For instance if somebody were to try this now, BM, toast and a few others would be kept voted in regardless. If we can have 51 known, trusted delegates there is no issue.

Its not written in stone but thats what we implicitly assume and expect to be. Keep in mind that the network is in bootstrap phase, and right now this gets some leeway.


Same issue here, that its in its early days. Right now I can name around 20 delegates who are publicly known and have been working diligently for a long time. Over time if it can go to 51 then there is no problem.

I can also foresee that shareholders won't be favourable to anonymous delegates in general. I don't expect 51 anonymous delegates to get voted in, no matter the incentives, over the older, known and trusted delegates.

Good point.
I actually think DPoS is a smart system at this early time. It will force the forgers to behave well, and support the network.
The issue I see is that politics around delegates will create problems on the social side - like politicking and profiteering. We're seeing it now - and it will get exponentially worse with every price rise.
Regular PoS will get more decentralized with a price rise - as the need to pool will go down.

The need to pool is based on the need to have a predictable income and reduce variance. The incentive stays the same regardless the level of decentralization. If anything having several big holders mean they are likely to forge on their own rather than feel a need to pool.

One advantage PoS has over PoW is that for pooling the coins have to be left elsewhere which is a big security risk and will play on the mind of the stakeholders.

Because of the increased interest, Bytemaster added this article to his blog overnight.


It describes how he used POS as a starting point and worked to address some of its remaining shortcomings.  Isn't this what innovators are supposed to do?  We all stand on the shoulders of giants.


Remember

Bytemaster started with a POW clone 18 months ago and moved to POS and then on to TPOS and ultimately DPOS.  So technology marches on with this one.  He is not afraid to incorporate valid innovations when discovered so if you have a solid case for something he missed, bring it on! 

Bytemaster seems to assume that everyone shuts down their node if it's not profitable. I don't observe that in reality.

What if everyone playing Skyrim was also running a node? Negligible cost and no reason for objection, especially if Nxt provided something in return.

If only there was a way of providing Skyrim players a better gaming experience while at the same time bolting a Nxt node on...



  ;)

[substitute Skyrim for any online multiplayer game, if you choose]

Let's focus on achieving the original ideology of Bitcoin.  Arguing about the merits of the technology is good but shouldn't result in a destructive food fight.  As I answered DE's concern about preserving Bitcoin's ideology in another thread this way:

Actually, returning to the original ideology of Bitcoin was the theme of Bytemaster's keynote address at the Las Vegas Inside Bitcoin conference:


His point is that most of us share the ideology of Bitcoin and are working to upgrade it for the long term success of the ideology, not the technology du jour.  No other industry's technology stands still these days, why should Bitcoin be stuck with its initial implementation forever?  A lot of technology has gone into aerospace since the Wright Brothers first flight. Should we still be using wing warping and pusher propellers?

Anyway, BitShares seeks to grow the Bitcoin ecosystem by providing a decentralized exchange to avoid what happened at Mt Gox and BitStamp.  The two can co-exist, and together with other serious block chains work to forge a solution to the real competitor: today's corrupt global financial system.


The best ideas will emerge and recombine until the Bitcoin ideology wins out over those who hold our freedom hostage today.

ISSUE 4 Your website says different.

http://i57.tinypic.com/o5qg6s.jpg

http://i58.tinypic.com/34ja9dy.png

Bitshares' Logo Trademarked on BitsharesWiki (http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/Main_Page)
http://i57.tinypic.com/2nb9h89.jpg

What's the deal Stan?  Is Bitshares trademarked or not?  If it is not trademarked why on all your logos are you using the TM mark?  The only reason you would be using TM while not "trademarked" is that you are applying for a trademark on the name.  If you are currently in the application process for trademarking Bitshares and it is your intention to do so, don't you think claiming Bitshares isn't trademarked is misleading?

Sounds like you're being disingenuous.

Good catch!

Those logos were made by one member of BitShare's decentralized community while another one was attempting to get the trademark approved.  The US government authorities declined to issue a trademark because, in their profound wisdom, the name was "too descriptive".

Apparently they thought it described a company that was in the business "sharing bits".  (I'm not making this up.)  No amount of reasoning by the BitShares lawyers could dynamite them out of that highly insightful position.

So, we need to circle back around and encourage all the independent decentralized users of the BitShares logo to properly reflect the current status.

A bit like herding cats, but that's the price we pay for total decentralization.  Nobody can order anybody to do anything.

Gotta love it!

:)

You are NOT preserving the original ideology of the movement.  You are unnecessarily centralizing nodes I suspect for your own gain.  Are you charging ~$1100 just to become a delegate.  If this is payment in arrears, it does nothing to prevent an individual from applying for multiple delegate positions.  If it is an upfront cost, you are disenfranchising stakeholders who don't have the means to pay your tax to forge on their own.  ALL INDIVIDUALS IN A POS OR DECENTRALIZED SYSTEM HAVE THE INALIENABLE RIGHT TO SECURE THEIR INVESTMENT FOR THEMSELVES.

Your son's article (http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/07/The-Most-Decentralized-Proof-of-Stake-System/) is factually inaccurate.

NXT didn't "recently" add leased forging.  It has been a feature for around eight months.

DPoS is a solution in search of a problem.  1000 TPS per second on any crypto network is extremely far off.  When we do finally reach it, hardware costs necessary to support such a network will be even cheaper than they are now.  A 64Mbps synchronous connection is nothing.  Most people in the developed world have extremely fast internet connections.  If transactions are broadcast to the next forger instead of all the potential forgers (implemented in NXT Transparent Forging) this cuts down on the bandwidth required.  Signing transactions doesn't take that much processing power.  It is arguable that reducing Bitshares' forgers to 101 puts more strain on those 101 nodes and results in decreased fault tolerance of the network.  If any chain starts accumulating 2TB of data per week, blockchain shrinking measures will be implemented.  This whole article is simply a rehash of Bytemasters' argument from months ago except he included more ridiculous examples.

He fails to take into account that businesses who use the payment network will be running hardware 24/7/365 anyway.  In addition many home users run their computers constantly and running a node is no additional cost to them.  Let's assume a home user runs his laptop 24/7/365.  A laptop consumes 35W * 24hrs * 365days / 1000 kW * $0.10 kWh = $30.66 a year.  They would be paying this anyway.  He doesn't take into account that running a node has a lot more benefits than simply collecting transaction fees.

He claims Bitshares has "the ability to leverage millions of users" to secure the network.  Let's not forget this is done through voting.  Voting has a history of being susceptible to manipulation.  Look at GHash.io.  How long did miners keep GHash.io at 51%?  They voted to keep their miners directed at that pool.  You are forcing people to centralize into pools that can't be verified to be independent.  It is my assumption that you are pursuing this route because you plan on monopolizing the delegates in the system for your own gain.

So, let me get this straight.  You tried to trademark it and would have, if you could have convinced the USPTO, but since they denied your application, you come on here and attempt to prove your "decentralization" by advocating the fact that you're not "trademarked" when in fact you attempted to do so.  Yeah, that sounds TOTALLY above board.  Hahaha

You might want to get around to changing those logos "Mr. Decentralization", it's been over THREE months since your application was rejected. (http://trademarks.justia.com/861/56/bitshares-86156522.html)  I'd hate for people to get the idea that you're a company.

The trademark symbol is not an indication that you are a company, it protects a brand to avoid consumer confusion.  One of our biggest independent supporters thought it would be good to protect the name for that reason and paid  for the trademark application.  He is an independent agent and can do what he pleases.  We appreciated his efforts.  

You can put ™ on anything; it simply means that you consider it to be a trademark for your product or service. The registered trademark bug ® is used to indicate that your trademark is registered with the government, which gives you a wider range of statutory remedies in case of infringement. You only use the registered bug if you've actually registered the trademark formally, but you can use ™ freely.

The BitShares graphic was developed by another graphic's artist.  All of the web sites and forums and blogs, etc. are run by separate independent parties in the decentralized BitShares ecosystem.  They will all make their own independent decisions.  I recommend they continue to use TM for the above reasons.

I assume no responsibility for their actions, I merely try to communicate the BitShares vision and help out wherever I can as, once again, an independent contributor compensated by the token owners of the blockchain to run around making myself useful as best I can.

The business about whether BitShares is a company or currency is a pedagogical metaphor selection issue which was asked and answered multiple places in this very thread, for example, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=913075.msg10059744#msg10059744 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=913075.msg10059744#msg10059744)

The best answer to this question was given by Bytemaster himself in his article What is BitShares? (http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/update/2014/12/18/What-is-BitShares/) where he used TEN different nested metaphors to describe it.  It is eye-opening in its scope.

Today I saw http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/13/Decentralization-of-Nxt-vs-BitShares/ and became interested by the title enough to spend some time on reading. The article is related to http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/07/The-Most-Decentralized-Proof-of-Stake-System/ and the both analyze the same phenomenon (decentralization), so I will treat them as a single article.

I'd like to comment some things mentioned in the articles.



I believe "people" means "accounts", we don't know how many people behind these accounts. There can be only 4 of them, or 400 (yes, one of the accounts can be controlled by a company which has its own hierarchy).



I see a reference to the 101 delegates. I'd like to point that 101 is not a big number, someone could successfully control 10 such delegates or 20 delegates could collude. I can safely bet that the 101 delegates distribution follows Pareto's Principle that states that "80 delegates are controlled by 20 entities" (numbers may vary). The point of "101 is not a big number" is that order of magnitude of this number (let's write it as 99 + 2) is roughly the same as deviation caused by external factors. When a measured value has the same order of magnitude as errors of measurement scientists trash such measurements. The comparison of number of forgers and number of delegates in a 720-block window doesn't make sense to me because of this very reason.



It's a long story why we have 2-minute blocks now, it doesn't influence distribution of forgers among forged blocks though and should be discarded.



A number would be much better. One could argue that it's not "far more" but rather "a little bit more".



This is an incorrect statement. Block generation and block confirmation are different things. All nodes confirm every single block indirectly by agreeing to propagate it over the network. All merchants confirm every single block indirectly by accepting money sent to them recently. All users confirm every single block indirectly by including the reference to a block generated 20 minutes back in their transactions.



I see a violation of CAP theorem there (if BitShares are decentralized). How do you know that a blockchain generated by remaining 50 delegates is legit while a blockchain generated by other 50 delegates is not?



You have the right to define decentralization in such the way, but practical usefulness of this definition is quite low. It assumes that all individuals are equal in their power and their intentions to save the current state of things. One person who is able to protect blockchain against a reorg is more valuable than 100 others who are unable to do it.



No, we will not. Imagine that one of the nodes is a computer controlled by 1000 people (a company). In Nxt users without computers take part in the consensus too, via Economic Clustering (though it's almost not used now).



It's true only for a system with a bad architecture. O(N) should be replaced by O(log N). I'm almost sure that Bitcoin, BitShares and Nxt networks are all follow O(log N) because nodes send packets to a fixed number of peers.



Why? If usage of a cryptocurrency network generates extra profit itself then fees can be as small as it's enough for fighting spam. Hashcash could be used to remove fees completely.



These systems can claim nothing. Only some of their users can.


I skipped the rest of the article because there are already so much disagreements that the rest of the math from the article is worthless.


PS: It would be great to see comments on comments...

Nobody has claimed this. Any claims have centred around "Bitshares can't be called decentralized". These are two different things.

unbelievably biased comparison!

i like how the way ethereum does this sort of things, much more mature and professional.

Please share the links with us.

He means Vitalik allows comments where claims can be questioned and discussed. Choose any of Vitaliks blogposts.

It's great to see you here, and I appreciate the civil tone of your comments!
(Its like a breath of fresh air.)

I have notified Bytemaster that you have made some serious comments on his article and I am sure that he will study them closely, and if necessary correct the referenced article.  We certainly don't want to misrepresent anything about the product of anyone else's blood, sweat, and tears!

I assure you that no attack on NXT is intended beyond an attempt to respond to others here who requested a concrete example.  We are in no way suggesting that NXT is not a viable product with a bright future.

There's a lot of discussion in these threads and the wavefront keeps bouncing around between three of them:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=920621.0;all (now apparently locked)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=916696.40
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=913075.0;all (this thread)

So I don't expect you to have come across the context or motives behind the subject article.

I think we have adequately dealt with the more reckless postings in these threads, but there is an interesting recurring debate (when you remove all the clutter) about the meaning of the word "decentralized".  Apparently one opinion is that the connotations of the word in this industry have moved it away from its dictionary denotations and that further evolution of its meaning in response to ongoing technological innovations should be resisted.

Our point has been that there are multiple valid ways to move control away from the center and that having all stakeholders select from a high-quality set of candidate block signers based on their established reputations has some design advantages over randomly selecting signers from a much larger group of candidates with unknown reputations. (At least for some systems with certain additional design objectives and target applications.)  Signing authority is uniformly distributed among the 101 most respected members of the community without regard to the size of their stakes.  This can change every 10 seconds and everybody has a chance to participate based on merit, not chance.  Signers have strictly limited power.  They can either faithfully do their job or be detected and immediately fired.

The key is recognizing that there are multiple design degrees of freedom we can play with.  We need enough scalable signing nodes to be fault tolerant and a decentralized way to select them.  Both NXT and BitShares accomplish this objective in different, valid ways.  Whether each stakeholder does the routine and transparent signing work on their own computer or on a computer from someone with a vetted reputation they are still selecting which computer they want to have do it.  I know I'd certainly rather pick somebody I trust to do the signing than take responsibility for that technical specialty myself!

All "trustless" systems allocate residual trust somewhere, usually by default.  We have made it explicit.  Making it explicit in turn gives us a unique by-product asset - trustworthy nodes selected by all stakeholders.  Our designs then leverage these assets to assign them other functions that benefit from established trustworthy reputations, where any breach of trust can be detected and instantly removed by all stakeholders as well.

A recent article I wrote with Bytemaster attempts to clarify this distinction by clearly highlighting the roles of decentralization, scalability, and fault tolerance in designing robust, profitible, and incorruptible systems.  We would value you feedback on it.

Thank you.



I noticed this too. People often confuse "decentralized" and "distributed" and sometimes they set the threshold for "this is decentralized" too high.



It's hard to do something immediately in a decentralized system. It's like trying to fly faster than light.



This part is not clear to me:

How the system of nodes can do it in a coordinated manner if the only reliable comunication channel is controlled by the delegates (and some of them are rogue ones)? A very similar problem is explained here - http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf (second half of part 3).

Whisper would work great for this.

Speed of decentralization is an interesting parameter. I can't comprehend its physical meaning yet, need to think more of this.



I see that you chose 101 because it's 50 + 51. To be able to decide which group to join if the network splits...

Well, I don't get why you think that at least one group will include at least 51 delegates, what if we get 34 + 34 + 33?

Also, take a look at this (from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/byz.pdf):
If BitShares can be modelled in terms of Byzantine generals problem then 51 is an overkill (because even 1 would be enough) or 51 is not enough (you need at least 67). Or maybe you see a 3rd option?

Thanks for this reference.  Indeed it concludes that the ultimate consensus mechanism lies outside Bitcoin and yet Bitcoin still works!  It is this realization that allows practical designs to be achieved that accomplish the true objective of  "sufficiently trustless" systems that are immune from the abuses of opaque central control. I particularly liked the exquisitely pragmatic concluding paragraph:


This is the ultimate point we have been making.  It is possible to design systems that work well enough without achieving a theoretically pure solution.  We chose to simply explicitly manage where residual trust is being placed.

This is why engineer's always achieve what mathematician's cannot.  Mathematicians are stopped from reaching their goals by asymptotes.  Engineers know how to get close enough for practical purposes.  :)

Why? Financial incentive is much lower in leased forging.

Are you saying that less than 101 entities is bad (easier for the network to be compromised), and more than 101 is not possible in the long run?
101 seems arbitrary to me, if noone would say otherwise, you try to make 101 look like the magical number where all is fine and decentralized.

101 is indeed an arbitrary number.   We could have chosen 51 or 151.  101 was chosen simply by an argument about diminishing returns.  Going from 1 to 2 signers doubles the redundancy.  Going from 100 to 101 increases the redundancy by less than 1%.  

The important thing to recognize is that the axis being analyzed here was how much redundancy, not how much decentralization.  We felt that dispersing the processing uniformly among 101 nodes would mean the loss of any one node would impact the system performance by less than 1% until it could heal by dynamic reconfiguration to insert a "hot spare" standby node.  Adding more nodes increases costs linearly, while improving performance robustness negligibly.

Decentralization of control in BitShares is a completely different design axis.  Every shareholder gets to choose which 101 of the available nodes they want to perform this fault tolerant processing function.  They are free to vote for their own processor or any other processors they feel will suit their interests.  If they do pick their own, and enough of their peers agree, their node will be used.

So, in BitShares, all nodes participate in building a consensus about what is the most trustworthy cost-effective fault tolerant configuration of available processors to run the system.  All stakeholders participate in this consensus according to the amount of stake they have at stake, so to speak.


Once you realize how the BitShares architecture has partitioned the design problem, it suddenly makes complete sense.

(At least to those who want to use and own the system.)

If there are enough of those people, that's all that matters.

101 is just a point of comparison with BitShares.   As I have discussed on my blog:

1) We assume that free market competition drives margins toward 0
2) We assume that to avoid subsidizing by stakeholders, transaction fees equal cost of block production
3) We assume that the market will drive transaction fees as low as possible via competition among chains
4) We assume that for a given number of transactions, the fewer block producers that must share the fees, the lower the fees may be.
5) We assume that no sustainable system should depend upon actors operating at a loss.
6) We assume marginal utility decreases for each additional block producer
7) We conclude there exists a number where fees / # producers == marginal utility of an additional producer.
8) We conclude that the lowest fees will be a system with one block producer
9) We conclude that no system will profitably operate significantly outside the same # producers
10) When measured on a log2 scale we submit that all systems will converge on statistically the same amount of decentralization *OR* fail their users.
11) When all systems converge on the same number of nodes, we submit that delegated voting creates a more TRUSTED and FLEXIBLE set.
12) We project that 101 nodes is greater than the # the market will naturally converge upon as being a sufficient between robustness and cost.

If you really want to increase the effective decentralization then you must double the fees for each additional level of decentralization when measured on log2 scale.  Given two chains with equal features, it would require a hell of a network effect to sustain 2x fees.  

It's really hilarious that you imply that NXT is susceptible to Sybil attacks when with NXT you actually have to purchase the currency to stake but with Bitshares you just have to be voted in.  If an individual in NXT does own multiple accounts and forges with them, that's not a "Sybil attack".  If they own the NXT, they have the right to divide it up into as many accounts as they want and forge with it.  Purchasing NXT validates their stakepower.  I don't even have to own Bitshares to obtain a delegate position.  Your father, Stan, even acknowledges that it is acceptable for an individual to occupy multiple delegate positions.  If that's not a "Sybil attack", I don't know what is.

It doesn't matter if you collect delegates' SSNs, driver's licenses, birth certificates and thumbprints, Bitshares' DPoS mechanism will always be susceptible to manipulation.  You have introduced a "social construct" (aka voting) which turns Bitshares' delegates into a "government of the wealthy".  No one will ever know what type of "behind-the-scenes" politics is going on which results in which delegates are selected.

Because you have instituted this ridiculous charade into chain security, all your figures on "decentralization" and "speed of decentralization" are speculative and assume that all 101 delegates are unique, non-colluding individuals.  The fact is all these delegates are not going to compete against each other for a position.  Who will become a delegate and control the delegate selection process are the wealthiest stakeholders.  This will be accomplished in a quid pro quo manner.  This means that really Bitshares is less decentralized than NXT because they will be able to form political/business coalitions which imo will result in them dominating the delegate selection process.  The wealthiest stakeholders in Bitshares can do this very easily because it is an "Approval Voting" process.  This allows stakeholders to put the entire weight of their stake behind each and every delegate they approve. The Bitshares' devs will deny this to the very end because they are part of this "ruling elite".

http://i62.tinypic.com/2s991l3.png

They actually warn about colluding delegates on their wiki (http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/DPOS/ApprovalVoting).  The problem is... How do you know who is colluding?  Do you really think that they are going to stand up and admit it?

Agreed.

So lets define it. I stopped by Wikipedia and snagged this:


BitShares delegates are known to the community and produce services or products of value.  They work with others in the community who know them.  They publish original thinking where it can be reviewed under their own name.  They reveal their own public identities.  


There is nothing cheap about earning the trust of the BitShares community.  Even the number one delegate, Toast, took many days to get voted in.

Thus, over time, the reputations of the Top 101 will become uncounterfeitable.  Before long, most slots will be held by small businesses who have established business level reputations.

Not that we trust opaque businesses any further than we can drop kick one of their executives, but the role of a delegate is so extremely limited and transparent that it is not possible to deviate from proper behavior without detection.  There is no dark place where a delegate can hide bad behavior.  Yet we can hold them accountable because of the size of their footprint in the real world.  Reputations are anchored to real world footprints.

You cannot hold an anonymous sock puppet accountable.  You cannot fire one that is easy to recreate.  But you can fire one that took a long time to create and fight its way into the top 101.

And that makes all the difference.  :)

I think I could make a pretty good argument that delegates' "real world" identities being known by the community doesn't really matter or prevent a "Sybil attack".  Imo, what would constitute a "Sybil attack" is the collusion of delegates' motives.  I'm also pretty positive that the colluding delegates wouldn't "harm" the Bitshares' ecosystem, but instead use their power to manipulate delegate elections to capitalize on the delegate positions.  Everybody can know everyones' name, but it's impossible to know their true intentions.

Any block chain has the problem that a few big players can collude, whether they are large stakeholders or large hashpoolers.  We dilute that down to under one percent influence per delegate, max.

Then there's the question of what they can collude about.  We can all observe whether they are performing their very limited block signing job to spec or not. We can look at their published price feeds. They have no other power.

That's true that in all blockchains stakeholders/hashpower can collude, but they can only collude in a one-to-one proportion to their stake/hash.  Since approval voting is used in delegate elections, I maintain that large stakeholders can effectively collude to a multiple proportion of their stake.  Whereby, for example, 20% of colluding stake can disproportionately influence the elections of more than 20% of the delegates.  This leads to a coalition of a few wealthy stakeholders being able to determine the outcomes of the mass majority of the delegate elections.  This is especially true considering that voter turnout of smaller stakeholders will be lower than the voter turnout of larger stakeholders.  As I said previously, it would be the intention of the colluding wealthy stakeholders to not harm Bitshares, but to elect delegates from which they would derive monetary gain in excess to their proportion of stake in the system at the expense of all other stakeholders.

I guess one man's consensus is another man's collusion.   :)

People are merely agreeing on who they trust, proportional to the stake they have at risk.

If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

Please give us the link where you trying to convince someone about questions of this topic.
Or you prefer to copy/paste that Satoshi says and run away?  :)

I've been waiting years to use that line on bytemaster and I figured this might be one of the last chances to do so. :P

He's a part of Bitcoin history: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 Probably the most famous Satoshi quote there is. :D

Well played.  :)

Before this thread goes to total off-topic I'd like to remind about my question.

I called your question to Bytemaster's attention, so it's in his queue.  

Keep in mind that the reasons for the number 101 also include the fault tolerance aspect.  As a design rule of thumb, loss of one node for any reason should not drop average block production rate per 1010-second rotation by more than 1% .  Now that BitShares also uses most-reputable-node delegate slots as a way to pay support providers we like having 101 such slots available for flexibility in stakeholder allocation of authorized equity funding streams.

When you fold in the fact that the 101 generals have public reputations to protect and that treasonous acts are detectable and correctable by the stakeholders, then even if you max out at only 33 allowable traitors, you are probably doing fine.  

This is just a space holder answer from someone who claims no qualifications to respond at your level.  I'll leave the more Byzantine parts of your question for Dan.

 :)

While we are waiting I'd like to add few words to the discussion above.

The humankind knows several ways to counteract Sybil attack and all of them can be categorized into two distinct groups - centralized certification and resource testing. BitShares uses an interesting approach, it's an alloy of the both, people can do their own certification and trust becomes a resource here. Quite often alloys have better qualities than their separate components, you guys should spend more time on formalization and analysis of your method to get rid of big part of accusations voiced upthread. Perhaps you could borrow some stuff from http://www.math.cmu.edu/~adf/research/SybilGuard.pdf, that paper sounds similar to BitShares delegates without bells and whistles.

Much appreciated. 
Thanks!  :)

Come-from-Beyond, your presence here is quite refreshing. Thank you.

Bytemaster asked me to post this for him (since I have a keyboard right now and he has an iPhone).  He thought your metaphor of an alloy was quite good.  He admits that he is "an engineer and not inclined to academic rigor", so his approach is to stand on the shoulders of giants, innovate empirically, watch to see how it works, and adapt.  


This is an opportunity for someone who is inclined toward rigor to step in and become famous by laying the underpinning theory for everybody.  It would probably be more generally accepted if somebody from outside the BitShares community did it anyway.
  

I envision that a deep thinker with suitable academic credentials could write an award-winning paper with a title something like,


We would certainly study such a paper if someone were to produce it!

:)

So Bitshares chose 101 nodes so the network with two chains would always have a majority, 51 to 50.

When asked "What if we get [three chains of] 34 + 34 + 33?" the answer is...




It seems you are saying there is no mechanism for regaining consensus in Bitshares for when there are more than two competing chains? If you don't have an answer to "what if we get 34 + 34 + 33?", then it would follow that there can't be a mechanism to resolve it in the protocol?


If that is true, how would any consensus ever be regained?





(hadn't planned to expand on my previous 'yikes!', but the mods didn't like just that on its own)

The academic vs engineer was in regards to the B. Generals problem.

If there are more than 2 forks then the delegates cooperate to resolve it.  We could automate it for most cases by picking the chain with the highest total shareholder approval where you sum the approval of the delegates producing blocks on each chain.  This would resolve the tie in almost all cases.   In practice, delegates in the smallest group would pick one of two largest groups.  IE: the 33 group would want to pick a horse as soon as possible so they can start getting paid again.   Eventually you would get 50/51 and then the losers would have to join the majority.   

There is no reason for a delegate to produce blocks on a minority fork unless he believes the majority fork is "bad" and is hoping the shareholders will vote new delegates to support his fork. 

Thanks largely to the recent professional example set by Come-from-Beyond, this thread has taken a decidedly more civil tone and therefore may be a candidate for us to engage in serious discussions with a community other than our own. Having read some of our sincere responses above, perhaps some of the many repeat viewers of this thread are a bit more inclined to engage with the BitShares community as potential friends.  We hope so.

We are often, correctly, criticized for not vetting ideas here on bitcointalk.  This is primarily because others were nice enough to set up a dedicated forum at bitsharestalk.org (http://bitsharestalk.org) and we wanted to support that generosity by spending a lot of our time there.  But I'll admit, part of the reason has been the same reason people learn not to touch a hot stove.  After getting burned a few times, the natural reaction is to stop touching it!

While this thread started out as an unfortunate attempt to inflict damage, it has thankfully now turned into something else entirely.  After 3500+ views it has become a nice little cross-pollinating mini-forum of its own where some good exchanges are beginning to take place.  We want to support that.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and post an article for discussion that Bytemaster just released.   The article is intended to share some the author's insights on a somewhat neutral topic in an edifying and professional way.  We hope you find it worth your time.  We would value all serious comments.   Those who have asked for a way to comment on Bytemaster's blog directly, you now have a test case before you:


Who knows?  If this works out, maybe we can continue to honor this community with useful content you can review on your own home turf!   I certainly would enjoy that.   :)

What makes BitShares attractive is that you have a developer who actually understands economics.  The blog posts are quite refreshing and serve as a reminder about the immense potential this experiment has.

I do not see many other crypto dev's that combine immense economic understanding with the ability to code.

Looks like a false flag attack to me.

A flase flag isn't needed. You fellas are doing a fine job on your own  :D


An aeronautical engineer of a new airplane design was asked "How do you know it will stay up if one of its three engines starts to malfunction?"

"I don't." came the reply. "When it comes to flight, I prefer to innovate empirically. But if you could work it out, I would be very interested to know. You could be famous.."


I can't imagine Come-from-Beyond will be back until someone has worked it out and it is documented, backed with analysis and not analogies or hand waving. It would be a waste of his time.


I will leave you guys to it.

I'm not a fan of whitepapers and math, I prefer modelling.

Indeed, modeling is a key component.

Here is a picture of a very small portion of the F-16C flight control system.  I spent a lot of time modeling it myself.


I can assure you that every gain, filter, and look-up table function was derived empirically by adapting earlier working designs, modeling them with experimentally determined wind tunnel data, observing the results, tweaking the design to remove undesirable artifacts, dropping in ad-hoc feedback loops and gain schedules, and iterating with tens of thousands of hours of simulations until everything was tuned up just right for first flight.

Over the next several years of flight testing, more and more experimental results were collected as the flight envelope was gradually expanded.  More and more ad-hoc experimentally derived changes and upgrades were introduced to tune the system.

In the history of manned flight I have never seen a Flight Readiness Review Board say, "Sorry son, you ain't a flyin' that thing until you get me a scholarly paper with an elegant closed form mathematical proof that fits on a single sheet of paper and has reached consensus on at least three different internet forums."

 ;D

https://i.imgflip.com/ghe1e.jpg


Unless you want run the risk of some seriously p!ssed people later on, it may be wise to inform your investors that this is the approach you take in crypto.

Then they can't say that you didn't warn them.

Since this is way of topic, I changed the title to better reflect my sentiment and the preceding posts.

Every step of the design and development and testing process has been an open book and subject to intense scrutiny at bitsharestalk.org.  We take the aerospace industry approach not the ivory tower approach.

Warnings about the developmental nature of the product are present in the software agreement everyone approves when they first load the software.  Similar warnings are permanently pinned to the top of the General Discussion thread at bitsharestalk.org.

I would rather fly in an aircraft designed by engineer than a theoretician, but that's just me.  :)

Why do you think you have to chose one or the other? Sorry, I changed my mind  :D I'm not that interested in the answer.

I'd like to have 'Gun Compensation' built into NXT, actually.

https://thelexicans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/716201365342pm.jpg

Stan,  if you get a moment....... ;D

On the question of 'better' tech.....this is something that only time and exposure to the real world can truly decide.
No matter how tightly engineered, mistakes and exploits are always going to be present in any new code.


 

Agreed!  We're all just having fun here.

Crypto is a rapidly advancing field and there are many paths to success.  I would never want to discourage someone from trying to make an advancement that benefits everyone.  (I remember Copernicus and Galileo had a little trouble with that nonsense about the earth revolving around the sun.)

As I've said before - Our challenge is who can put together a reliable system that customers like and that provides a profitable return for investors.  There is room for many such systems.   Other's seek systems that meet other philosophical objectives.

So we all don't even have the same objectives - how can we expect us to agree on a single solution?

In school we argued over whether electrical engineers or mechanical engineers were the Highest Life Form.

 :)

That's an excellent example of an ad-hoc design that doesn't really have an elegant closed form solution.
When you fire the gun there was an annoying tendency to pitch up.
So some clever engineer figured out a little ad-hoc cross-feed to deflect the elevator channel to compensate.

This would be comparable to us tweaking the market rules to require speculators to cover their shorts within 30 days in order to aid liquidity for sellers of bitUSD in a young market.

There are dozens of such examples that can only be tested in live action.  Just like you never really know how that artificial heart is gonna work till you try in on a real person - or what's going to really happen when you fire the Apollo's third stage engine for trans-lunar injection.

Arguing about which is better, NXt, Bitshares or Nubits/Nushares?

I like all of them! and I also like BlackCoin, HoboNickels, PeerCoin, ShadowCoin, PandaCoin, CryptoNote, and even DogeCoin!

Some are more profitable in the long-run than others, a Coin can have good tech or do good things but still be a bad investment. Only way to really tell if something is going to work long-term is to run with it in a live environment, no theory can match actual market conditions.

The more I look at proof of stake the more I see banks and wall street under a different name. Something tells me the regulators will eventually reach the same conclusion. So I will stick to proof of work coins. If one wants to diversify into proof of stake one can always buy shares in a bank. I like XBT, XMR and NMC right now.

I like Monero's anonymity but dislike the amount of Bloat created, I mentioned Cryptonote over Monero due to liking the underlying idea of the tech over the specific Coin. Why NameCoin? I haven't heard anything on NameCoin in forever.

Bloat is a legitimate short term criticism of XMR; however bloat is inherent in ring signature technologies. So basically it would occur in any Cryptonote. The argument is that bloat will become irrelevant because of advances in technology will make the cost of data storage, data transmission, memory etc., even more trivial than today. For example for an extra 15 CAD a month I get unlimited upload and download data on my Internet connection. This would have been unheard of as recently as 2008 when Bitcoin was created. A good analogy is credit cards. When American Express and Diner's club introduced credit cards in the 1950's the data processing technology of the time, tabulating machines and punch cards, could handle only a minuscule percentage of the credit card transaction volume of today. It was only in the 1970's with the advent of the mainframe computer that credit cards became viable as a mass consumer product. As for Monero over other cryptonotes it has the largest market cap and none of the controversy surrounding Bytecoin. Comparing Monero to Bytecoin is like comparing Litecoin to Tenebrix.

I like Namecoin because it provides a viable decentralized alternative to the ICANN DNS secured by the Bitcoin proof of work via merged mining. It is also used by the OpenAlias project, https://openalias.org/, started by the XMR developers.

Your words reminded me that I was going to read "Animal Farm" by Orwell...

I was bored and decided to get the answer by myself. I based my analysis on information from http://bitshares.org/documentation/group__dpos.html and came to a conclusion that our case is this:

We can lower requirement on the number of honest delegates from 67 to 51 if we add an extra assumption that blocks reach all the delegates within 10 sec (it's equal to block gap in BitShares). Another way is to change how we choose the best chain, instead of plain "longest chain is the best" some kind of weighing is required, but I don't have a good suggestion yet.

This is how I "attacked" the system:
1. Rogue nodes colluded and didn't extend blockchain if the last block belonged to a delegate outside of their group.
2. I assumed that every honest delegate had 50% chance to get a block from a rogue delegate and the same chance to get a block from a honest one.
3. Latency varied from 0 to infinity.

PS: Using something else instead of "longest chain is the best" is a better approach than adding assumptions on latency. In this case the system will be less vulnerable to an eclipse attack.

Come-from-Beyond, I think some of that may be outdated, describing an older version of DPOS. Specifically,


I could be somehow mistaken, but this does not seem to be the case (http://www.bitsharesblocks.com/delegates).

I interpreted 2% vote limit as a way to force stakeholders to vote for at least 50 delegates. If it means that none of the delegates is allowed to generate more than 2% of blocks then the attack above will lead to exclusion of 33% of legit delegates and 33% of rogue delegates from block generation process (because they can't sign another chain if they already signed the attacker's one). And this leads to worse consequences. The attackers may get more than 33% of slots in the next top 66 delegates that will replace current leaders (assuming that it's easier to be in top 200 than in top 100).


Edit:

Such "rating grinding" attack (when rogue delegates commit suicide and force some honest delegates to be excluded too) is a neat feature for attackers. In this case no need to have 33 delegates, N attackers can be fired together with N+M honest delegates (the same way as 51% attack can be conducted with less than 51% of hashing power). Repeating this process the attackers may slowly increase percentage of occupied slots... Note that I don't know BitShares internals very well, if someone explained the process of firing of delegates it would help to assess how feasible "rating grinding" is.

Yes, our documentation is always lagging behind the wavefront of progress.  If it ever catches up that means we've stopped progressing, I guess.  :)

Fact is, when all delegates are participating they each have uniformly less than 1%.

The only way to get more than that is to have delegates start dropping out.

If we go below 90 delegates, the yellow "caution flag" comes out on all wallets warning users to trade with caution.
If we go below 80 delegates, the red flag comes on warning users to stop trading.

This also alerts the remaining delegates (many of whom are developers) that there is a problem that may need to be worked out by the various fall-back consensus mechanisms that we have been talking about.

I'll have to give the rating grinding concept a little more thought. 
Thanks for helping out in the what-if department.

You should adjust numbers a little. I would change 80 to 67, in this case cost of double-spending will be equal to cost of network disruption. Humans can see the flags and open Twitter or BitsharesTalk to get more info, DACs don't have these means of communication. If DACs stop functioning when less than 80 delegates are working then 22 rogue delegates can easily break business processes controlled by DACs.

Uhhhhm, If I run a Ripple node whether I process 1,000,000 transactions or 1, the fees paid to me will be exactly 0.  Yes, people making a transaction have to spend a fee, but those fees are all burnt and do not go back to the nodes.  So yes, there is at least one way to make a blockchain run without someone being paid directly to validate blocks on a per transaction or per block rate.  As CfB mentioned hashcash is another.  I also know a dev that has been working on a third model where no fees are paid, but instead people running nodes will get special privileges in the system that others won't.  One who isn't just thinking about money all the time just need open their mind to find lots of possibilities.  Here is an example.  Lets say I am running an anon coin.  I can make a rule that only a node that has been active on the network for the last 24 hours can actually send anon transactions, all other nodes on the network less than 24 hours can of course still send and receive, but can't send anonymously. Here is another example, lets say I run a network and anybody that has been running a node for 24 hours will get 10 tokens.  Each transaction costs exactly 1 token.  All tokens are non-transferable.  So now to use the blockchain a person needs to run their node every once in a while for 24 hours and then they get 10 free transactions. I call that proof-of-participation. It is fairly easy to design a system that isn't just focused on money.  

The title got be kidding.

An oldie, but a goodie.

Heh, yeah.

The whole team has been operating at below minimum wage all year trying to make something they can sell to earn a living.

Very greedy indeed.



While you are digging up old inner city spray paint, here's the rest of them, lovingly preserved in the BitShares Loves Puppies (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=940298.msg10302404#msg10302404) thread.  Buried among all the nasty FUD are some real jewels - serious answers produced back when we weren't sure whether this forum took its trolls and other vandals seriously or not.

+1
Totally agree.  :)

Stan I had no idea the minimum wage in Virginia was $56,000 per year (based on the BTS you have received over the last 6 months not including what you have forgot to conveniently disclose regarding the 67 million BTS you still control).

Did you forget that on December 31, you each received 3 million BTS, worth $21,000 today and whole lot more back then. Plus you have received 916,000 BTS since, which is equal to $7000 at today's price.

Let's not forget about that 67 million BTS you are using to pay yourselves for 2015. Yes, 2015. That is this year and 67 million BTS is equal to $469,000 at today's prices. Oh, and I rounded these numbers down immensely.

You can lie all you want but I will continue to call you out for those lies.

Nice try.

And what about the millions of dollars in BTC you received as 'donations' for AngelShares? And what about all the funds you received from Protoshares?

'operating at below minimum wage'... you have to be kidding.


The fact that you guys change the name of your scheme and your companies' name every couple of months will eventually not be enough to protect you from law enforcment and neither will silly memes and center-aligned text.

No comment on your lies?

Your silence speaks volume.

Yes it does.  
You're just not getting the message.

 :)

Its funny how DE and Newmine always seem to omit the fact about all PTS being returned to the donors

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,11289.0.html

Are you retarded? They gave it back after they share dropped the BTS on themselves rendering the PTS worthless at the time they returned it. Stop selling lies or get your facts straight.

No, I get the message. You are a liar.

Stan: one of your boys left this on my lawn......



Thought you'd like to have it back.

Oh my Gawd! How dare the value PTS change overtime. It was suppose to remain the exact same like all other cryptos do!

You are one of the dumbest people I have come across. You can't track a conversation if your life depended on it.

The proper use of your terrible analogy would be:
You/me and everyone else bought concert tickets. We gave them to Stan so he could exchange for money and build us Bitshares. The band that was headlining the concert said tickets were for, gave vouchers for future show to anyone holding concert tickets after you gave them to Stan. Stan claimed said vouchers. The concert has come and gone and now Stan returns your ticket but kept the voucher for future shows.

Do you get it?

Stan and friends kept all the worth of PTS, which happened to be the BTS. If they gave us the BTS that was couple with the PTS, theirs and your claims would be valid. But that did not happen.

How about we dumb it down. Your wife (that's a stretch) buys you a coffee in exchange for a back massage. You drink the coffee and give her back the empty coffee cup. You then claim that you are giving her a massage for free out of the goodness of your heart because you gave back the empty coffee cup.

Get it? I'm going to bet not.

No PTS value can and always did change. Are you retarded? Track the conversation. Stan and Dan returned the PTS when it was worthless because PTS value was based on how many BTS you could get from one PTS. They returned them AFTER the snapshot date and all the BTS went to THEIR PRIVATEKEYS. PTS subsequently had very little value, only speculative that someone might sharedrop some unknown project to PTS.

This was obvious to everyone involved.
You act like you have discovered some epic conspiracy.

We returned the PTS because our internationally known accounting firm, Grant Thornton, wisely recommended that it would benefit both the givers and getters for us to do so. 

Consult your own tax advisors if you need it explained like you are five.




Of course, Kirk was just running a tactical PSYOP and we all know how that turned out for poor Kahn:


Khan: [quoting from Melville's Moby Dick] To the last, I will grapple with thee... from Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!

Good luck "explaining it" to these individuals.  I find it very hard to believe that they could be so dense as to not see what is going on in front of their eyes.  Stan doesn't even attempt to obfuscate this fact and they just cheer him on.  Either these "people" are really just sockpuppets of Stan, Dan & Co or you are witnessing a textbook case of Stockholm syndrome.  BTS holders can always sell to escape this nightmare, but how many cups of Kool-aid do you have to consume to sit here and defend those planning your demise?


So, you admit it was premeditated?

Dude, you are such a slime.

This was very "obvious" to everyone at the time you returned the PTS. The point of this dumb conversation was because I pointed out the fact that last year people gave you 416,000 PTS to develop Bitshares. Your response was:
clearly implying you had altruistically returned a PTS that was worth something. The fact is you received a shit ton of BTC, 5660 to be exact. You received a shit ton of PTS when they had a BTS value (yes, a Bitshares value) of ~$7.00 each.

You guys still have the BTS that made the PTS valuable but you got rid of the PTS. You guys have repeatedly, approximately every six months, asked for more money and now you are finding a way to ride off into the sunset by stealing Bitshares code we paid you to create free and open source, renaming it and licensing it when you should have been finishing the product in which you raised funds for originally.  This was never part of the plan. It was originated when your last money grab, the time you guys decided to dilute shareholders by sucking 4277 BTS per day per Dev, failed because the price dropped 80%.

So here we are back on track to the problem at hand. You were working on Graphene (Bitshares Toolkit renamed) while people were anticipating and expecting a Bitshares 1.0 that had been promised since March 2014. People were losing money because you guys wouldn't fix the problems that arose from Bytemaster's idiotic collateral rules. TonyK was pretty persistent in letting you guys know about that problem too and you ignored it to work on a slightly revamped code based of the original Bitshares so you can license it and make more money.

You guys have illegally collected money and sold shares in what is now a for-profit company using a smokescreen of crypto coins and dummy corps. SEC complaints are coming.

Please include...


in your complaint.