Hi, this is Dan. My company is currently under contract working on the Peerplays prototype. There are 4 of us working fulltime on the prototype at the moment, 2 C++ guys and 2 Javascript guys. I'm also hiring more people for follow-on development after the prototype is complete.

If you're dumping that small a stake, I would have expected you to have sold it all by now with the current demand. That's why it implied to me you had a large stake. Steem is in very high demand.

It's been going up ever since the first successful payout. First payout was on the 4th, then it was like everyone was holding their breath to see what would happen next on the 5th. People starting successfully cashing in their Steem Dollars, and the price took off as the rate of new signups went thru the roof.

Because all that data is stored on a separate blockchain run by many people. The web server is just displaying data from the blockchain. Actually, anyone can run a website that displays data from the blockchain. Here's one example that does it now:

https:/steemd.com

Lol, that's pretty funny. If you're "dumping like crazy" into a super fast rising market, why is the price going up the whole time? I'd be very interested to hear just what your huge stake is...

I'm not sure what percentage they own, but they can only withdraw it over 2 years, so there is no way for them to dump it all.

At initial launch, steem wasn't easy to mine, because it required decent coding skills to compile it and configure miners properly. Still a number of people besides steemit guys were able to successfully mine it during the first week. I was able to get my miner going without assistance on the first day of mining, but it probably helped that I'm familiar with the graphene code base used by steem (my company wrote the p2p layer for graphene).

It wasn't an instamine, but someone (maybe smooth?) referred to it as a "ninja-mine", because it required skill to mine, wasn't subject to easy mining by bots (you have to give the miners private keys, so a botnet miner would have had to risk his private keys), and the devs threw a lot of computing power from aws servers to pick up a big stake (I would estimate upwards of 5K worth). Despite all this, I, smooth, steemed, nextgencrypto, and several others were able to accumulate a decent size stake.

There was a lot of FUD generated during the launch that scared away a lot of potential miners. Most of the FUD was from steemed, IIRC (can't remember what handle he was using here on bitcointalk), who was continuing to mine the whole time he was attacking the coin publicly. I don't have the thread handy, but if you find it, bear in mind that most of the FUD posts were put up by a guy who was actively mining the whole time while trying to discourage as many people as possible from doing so. He finally admits to it late in the thread. Naturally, this didn't deter the devs from mining, so it worked out in their favor.

FYI:limited number of pre-powered up steem acounts for sale:

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@blocktrades/limited-time-sale-high-steem-power-accounts-for-serious-investors-only

At this point, BitShares has moved beyond a single leader, which IMO is a good thing.

There are many groups actively developing and promoting BitShares in different ways:

SVK and xeroc develop and support tools for the users (web wallets, python api tools, docs, etc).

BitShares Munich group (led by Chris and Kencode) develop and support an android/ios mobile wallet. They also are integrating BitShares into point-of-sales systems. They've also expressed plans to update the web wallet to support stealth transactions (blinded and stealth transactions are currently only supported in the command-line interface wallet).

OpenLedger, led by Ronny, supports a number of gateways for selling popular crypto and fiat assets on the decentralized exchange and they are constantly adding new ones.

Roadscape develops and supports the block explorer, www.cryptofresh.com. Transwiser provides a gateway for CNY and a couple of cryptocurrencies as well.

BlockTrades.us (my company) runs a shapeshift-like service that supports popular cryptocurrencies. We manage a "blockchain maintenance worker" that adds new features at the blockchain layer and we also make fixes when necessary (I'm happy to say there haven't been any significant bugs at this level for quite a while). We're currently working on adding a feature to allow UIAs (user-issued assets) to pay "dividends" to their holders. We've also hired a new web guy to improve the web wallet in areas of most interest to us (i.e. bridge functionality and gateways) and I'm in the process of hiring another C++ guy now.

There's also a couple of other groups working on mobile wallets and fiat-tracking assets for several different countries.

Cryptonomex, led by Stan, still works tirelessly to promote BitShares and is constantly seeking new partners to join our ecosystem.

Please note this is by no means a complete list of the groups working to build up the BitShares ecosystem, this is just some of the ones I know reasonably well.

DAO deposits and withdrawals from the distributed exchange (DEX), OpenLedger, have been fully functional without any hiccups for the past few hours. A number of customers who bought DAO during the pre-sale (via open.dao markets) have successfully withdrawn DAO to their ethereum wallets, and we've also had new deposits by those who've claimed DAO and are ready to trade it on the DEX. There are several active markets for DAO on OpenLedger:

https://bitshares.openledger.info/#/market/OPEN.DAO_OPEN.ETH (DAO/Ether)
https://bitshares.openledger.info/#/market/OPEN.DAO_OPEN.BTC (DAO/Bitcoin)
https://bitshares.openledger.info/#/market/OPEN.DAO_BTS         (DAO/BitShares)

Since OpenLedger is a decentralized exchange, you can also create your own "active" markets by finding others who are interested in trading between DAO and any other asset traded on the exchange.

You can trade these now.

My name is Dan Notestein and I'm writing to confirm my involvement with the PeerPlays project. I've provided free technical consulting to the PeerPlays management team for the past several months with the understanding that they would contract with my own cryptocurrency company, BlockTrades, to help develop the software if they were successful in raising funding for the project.

I operate two companies: SynaptiCAD (http://www.syncad.com) which is a US-based developer of electronic design software that has operated for many years and more recently, BlockTrades (http://blocktrades.us), a Cayman Island's-based company which specializes in cryptocurrency software and operates a crypto-to-crypto "instant exchange" platform which is well-known in the BitShares community.

It's fairly dated at this point, but there's a small bio about my experience prior to getting involved in cryptocurrency here: http://www.syncad.com/manateam.htm

I got involved in cryptocurrency somewhat by chance: SynaptiCAD was contracting to help out on an engineering software contract headed up by Dan Larimer of BitShares notoriety at his previous employer. When Dan left that company to begin work on BitShares, he hired me and later contracted to bring on more of SynaptiCAD's staff to assist in the development for BitShares. Among other work there, we developed the peer-to-peer networking code for BitShares 1.0 that was later re-used in the Graphene toolkit that powers both BitShares 2.0 and STEEM. To my knowledge, this is the fastest operating blockchain (currently operating with 3s blocks although the original design goal was 10s blocks).

I very rarely post on bitcointalk as I'm not a prolific poster, as you can see from my posting history, but I have been posting for several years on bitsharestalk.org (almost since it began I guess) as dannotestein. I've made a post there to confirm that this account and that account are linked: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,22410.msg291798.html#msg291798.

I have also begun posting recently on the blockchain-based social media platform steemit as "blocktrades", so I've also posted confirmation there: https://steemit.com/account-linking/@blocktrades/confirmation-of-accounts-i-control-on-bitcointalkbitsharestalk

If you're lost on a fork, you can add these checkpoints to your config.ini file in your witness_node_data directory and resync:

 checkpoint = [488069, "0007728505ded84f6eb06f67208ea5221b0a4a63"]
 checkpoint = [488100, "000772a47e6d7a87be5c344b8330fde1ce16015f"]
 checkpoint = [488150, "000772d6f636d3c3de23d8e86846d8177da24c73"]
 checkpoint = [488200, "000773081eba1db265f9b63c0c010a1ff937766d"]
 checkpoint = [488250, "0007733a2e40a3c566d8b24b2089cb9c3f9856a5"]
 checkpoint = [488300, "0007736c68331e05a67261eba31fc8f68edfbbc1"]
 checkpoint = [488350, "0007739e63f85deeade33229aa81bc5a3516a64c"]
 checkpoint = [488400, "000773d081a7f864babcdedfa1c6ff20e8535d19"]
 checkpoint = [488450, "00077402057707c637074b360c2a5d8944737bf1"]
 checkpoint = [488500, "00077434e851a8174beea1b8c867e5262f0fb5c5"]
 checkpoint = [488550, "000774661c96c75b1dc738fe998ba8d94d3bfca6"]

it should be really fast, I think, say around 3s

I get what you're saying about Ethereum-style contracts (Java-like) and AT-style contracts (running on a virtual CPU) being too slow on current computer systems (this is why BitShares went for an extensible set of high-level operations for given problem domains like distributed exchange transactions, voting, etc instead of a low-level scripting language).

If I understood your post correctly (and I'm far from sure of it at this point), you want to support some kind of SQL-like API to the distributed data stored in the blockchain and "commits" would involve pushing a transaction to the blockchain that updates the database. Do you have examples yet of usages of your API that would clarify how this would work for common smart contract applications.