Yeah so like the major advantage of these contracts is they have deposits. So anyone who doesn't submit a report can't get their payment released and if they don't perform they might not get their extension and risk losing deposits. The employer can choose to automate his payments in Bay (or if he really wants use other payment methods in a custom contract). The software also tracks fiat value and has a stop loss in so if the fiat value drops too much it makes sure the employer handles the payment manually. It's pretty good, Craig has been using it and he can tell you how convenient it is.

So I guess it is sort of like Bitwage or Upwork or Freelancer or something. And also, crypto projects are notorious for flakey or tricky employees mainly because payments are irreversible so to be honest I'm not sure how other crypto contractors even work without a system like this.

Every other crypto is down too. My entire portfolio of pretty good coins and each one is like 1/5th it's value that it was in BTC (not including fiat drop). So I don't see how these things are related. There aren't too many orders now most people are waiting for peg. However you already should know we have sold real estate, do our employment contracts and some users sell goods. Also why do people always complain about price? In January anyone could have sold for almost 4000 times the original fiat price from the bottom. Those types of gains outside of crypto are almost unheard of and I barely sold on that peak (actually sort of regret not being a bit more aggressive but there was a lot of things factoring into how I handled it). What more could anyone want? Our team works really hard instead of coming here to complain why not just spread the word?

Besides... it doesn't really matter if people use it. The point is it solves a huge problem of trust for people who need it and want it. It will always be here to solve those problems for them. This software will be here in 100 years waiting for people who want to do deals without worrying about someone breaking it.

The peg is an entirely different subject and although I'm not sure when the guys will be able to translate the desktop app to web, if they do I could imagine more adoption for the actual markets.

The market has only a few orders in it at times. However it gets used for a lot creative things. For example, it was used to sell real estate without escrow making it one of the first real estate transactions in California history using Bitcoin/altcoins. And definitely the first without escrow. It has been used to sell gems, shirts, hardware, coins, collectors items, etc. Currently we use the employment template to pay our employees with automated payments and it's been working really well.

We will definitely need volume so perhaps we will give some users a way to resell their items from popular sites like Amazon or something. It would probably be a little more expensive to buy but would at least fill the markets.

Yeah those are all options. Actually, even a basic atomic swap from BitBay to BitHalo would be nice enough to do. Komodo and Blocknet or any other change only needs a few modifications. I would have to think about it actually, since they just have to be careful not to send reserve funds to a timelocked account. I'm pretty sure Komodo dev will work with me on that. We want at least a few good central exchanges for the common trader regardless of who takes us. As long as they have a decent reputation and security we should be fine. At first Bittrex was a little bit unsure of why I needed them to have custom code. Now they want me to email a proposal I'm waiting to finish final touches on peg. If we lose them, it's no big deal. That's something we have all the time to do, broker good relationships. At first it concerned me but then later I realized people only need a place to trade with half-way decent volume and there is always new exchanges on the horizon. Besides, they stand to benefit too... even they must be tired of all the volatility. If we even get 1% of Tethers volume they could be raking in millions. It's worth it.

I'm not sure how many features users will be able to demo when they release it. However I know they are working as hard as they can and a new dev just came on full time.

Yes so the demo pegging client is going to be released very soon probably by the end of the month. Users can at first volunteer to just test the feel. I'm probably going to whitelist addresses for that. Then we just have to focus on brokering exchanges and that is anyones guess to how long it takes. We will get a better idea when we know who is willing to track it.

Well it is bleak as long as nobody uses Halo or nobody takes charge to add more features to the chain. Investors should consider that for 4 years we have had the only software in the world that does peer to peer unbreakable contracts which can be used for trustless wires, trustless international trade, unbreakable employment contracts and for any deal where escrow is not an option. That is even ignoring the insane amount of savings of not having to carry insurance, not having to pay third parties and not needing to worry about theft. Not to mention on top of a decentralized market on Bitmessage.

The issue is, nobody wants to use Bitcoin, they just want to speculate on it. That and if they are on clearnet, people want to pay the middle man because of volume. BlackHalo benefits with increased userbase of BitHalo and visa versa.

The irony of decentralization is when there are so few leaders things become disorganized. If investors are along for the ride, they pretty much get what they put into it. If they lead the charge forward they reap the benefits. For BLK to move forward someone needs to start improving it's blockchain to keep up with the competition and there is a lot of things that BLK can add. There is sidechains, shared stake or sharding, dynamic block sizes, pruning, even some sort of scalable scripting language.

It's no big deal, Poloniex is not the biggest exchange anymore. Blackcoin is very well covered in terms of exchanges. The price drop is a
bit excessive. Blackcoin still is better than a lot of projects out there.

I just think that we need to stop strumming that old tune "POS is more economical than Bitcoin". That worked years ago, it doesn't work anymore.
Things are far more competitive than they used to be. Investors are going to start comparing coins far beyond who was the first full POS coin.
It's of course important but it's too monotone. Investors are going to seek tools that better their lives.

Blackcoin should champion it's unique features. BlackHalo/BitHalo, the colored coin wallet, Lore, etc, etc. Also we could always just fork and improve the
staking/scaling process. A lot of great developments have happened for POS that can be added to strengthen the system and scale it.

Well it does get pretty technical however they would still have to code and understand the ideas behind it. We will still be the first.
Most likely, it can inspire further research

We can set a bounty for a sig campaign if someone is willing to make this.

Great idea on that alliance Josh. We could try to implement some of the solutions talked about.

It was due by the middle of the month. So in a few days or perhaps a bit more if they edit it and want to change some things. I think they wanted to add some sections but that may be for the final draft.

Hey so I've just updated the whitepaper for the peg. And now I'm just trying to complete the code for the GUI, mempool, escrow and other things for the peg. Then I have to work on speeding up calculations and stuff and do the exchange API and QT. So it's still a bit of work. Our team is doing well, they are working on trying to understand my code and adapt it for the web markets. They are trying to do the simplest possible implementation but even that is a lot of work and I have no clue how long it will take them. On the marketing front, we signed with a PR firm so hopefully they deliver good results. Expect the demo client of the peg to be on or ahead of schedule.

Building and uploading that today actually. They may test it for a day or so before official version change and perhaps to market that. Will ask the team. However yes, very soon.

Agreed, it honestly surprises me a little.

Regardless, I've done the major peg calculations and I'm finishing up the database part. Then I will test with a whitelist of addresses and after that do some of the changes in the GUI. Then I have to make something for the exchanges and QT to work with it.

I've never heard that use case before that's a pretty great idea! The escrow is only needed for the trust aspect. Kind of similar to Barter I guess. I finished
all of those templates including Python contracts where users can program their own. However, I'm waiting to see if more people use the basic features
before activating them in the code. For now users should at least experiment with custom contracts and P2P cash deals.

Regardless, the market is still gambling too much now. It's going to take time for the masses to continue to migrate to actual usable software. We are
doing a web implementation at Bitbay eventually I think and of course the peg is almost done and at some point I would be interested in doing "Atomic double deposit" so users can mix deposits from various currencies. It was a newer concept of mine. In order to do that though I need to see more users. And still, Halo is the original brand and deserves much better. Never did I think I would find Namecoin, Peercoin, Blackcoin and so many of the "original" coins on page 3 or 4 behind a bunch of sleazy projects.
We deserve better.

Hmm without Janko and rat4 we are a little short on devs. Still though wish people would use BlackHalo/BitHalo more often especially for OTC cash deals. I have finished all the templates and features for it actually. A new release comes out at the end of this month.

It's possible at some point you guys may want to fork and update the protocol to support more advanced features... perhaps pruning of the chain, contracts, rep system, more random stake selection, etc.

If none of those things take place though it might be a grind. Didn't see any new developments with "Blacknet" other than a name change. I'm assuming at some point this will have to fork if there is a 2nd network but even so nothing was clarified with the community which was I'm assuming the motivation for this thread.

Hey there, I work on BitBay mostly. BitHalo still works perfectly and is a great escrow program, some people use it for OTC cash deals. BitBay
I'm almost done with all the obligations there working on the "Dynamic peg" to rid crypto of volatility and such. I've stayed pretty quiet
just working. 

The TPS hype like most hype trains are probably orchestrated with pumps from exchanges anyways who are probably in on it.

Even if it wasn't, DPOS is not better than POS3.

It has the drawback of not being able to see the genesis, no reputation system, the voting can be gamed and politicized via offering incentives, there is not enough nodes.

It's a great start for extremely large scalability and has proven that. But it needs to be not so rigid such as a limit of 101 delegates or X delegates. It needs to be where people upgrade their hardware, offer it to the network, prove they can handle the volume, etc. No voting required, just reputation, benchmark, and very well planned pruning techniques that leave almost no doubt of botnet or fraud. I've learned a thing or two from watching the rise of Larimer and it was obvious he wasn't gearing up for decentralization but commercialization. He chose a technique that would get him adoption by getting users regardless of how much decentralization was sacrificed. The strategy worked, I knew it would.

We have already taken a page from that, we are now looking to teach our team about web based markets. We think of simple systems that can be used on phones, we look at architecture that can scale the chain.

The peg database actually has to prune or else it will simply fail. The transactions for the peg are 100 times larger unless put into a liquidity pool per account after a certain number of blocks. If we had a million users it would be probably around 40 gigabytes for that and another 20 gigabytes to support 100k tx per 400 blocks (temporary not pruned storage). I'm building it to scale. Users can always rescan and verify that data again. But the blockchain itself can't currently be handled with pruning until a very major change to protocol happens. (to support high TPS). At BitBay we do things correctly.

We tried but they are difficult to communicate with and I think expensive. Yet they list hundreds of shitcoins.

However there is another thing to consider. I'm almost done with the peg test client. So we should probably start thinking of exchanges that will actually work with it. Otherwise why pay for a listing we might lose a few months later? So we should be looking for exchanges willing to list us with the peg calculations from our API.