At the request of sigmike I would like to make a modification to the B&C 5.0 specifications, which are described in the original post.

There has been discussion around adding the capability to abstain from voting when minting for a long time, going back to at least December 2014 when woodstockmerkle wrote about the possibility.

I have been wary of any solution that would require shareholders to actively and specifically vote no on a grant or motion to prevent its passage. There is, however, a limited manner in which abstentions can be employed without creating a situation where "no" voting is a necessity. Rather than set default data feed providers, I am persuaded that simply setting the default voting behavior on a new install to abstain is the best course of action to address the noise that comes from apathetic voting. We can do this with a simple check box labeled "Abstain" located to the right of the voting buttons on the Voting tab.

Blocks found by abstaining minters simply won't count when deciding whether a motion or grant has passed. Consider a scenario where 50% of blocks in a 10,000 block series have an abstention. This would mean that only 2501 blocks need to have a vote for a particular grant in order for it to pass.

We will still be including a new drop down list of data feed providers, so they will be much easier to select and configure than they are now. We just won't automatically set a default.

Other than these changes, the 5.0 release is now code complete. Hopefully the team will be able to make the changes quickly and we can release very soon.

In thinking about how to set up an election for default data providers, I start from the point that what we need in the client is a list of data feed providers, along with URLs, signature URLs, address and the percentage of the votes the provider received.

To derive the percentage of votes for each provider I suggest that all data feed providers submit a motion that represents their candidacy to be a default data provider. It might say something like this:

Voting for this motion will increase the probability that provider A will be chosen as a default data feed provider upon a specific installation of B&C Exchange version 5. This represents the candidacy of provider A to become a default data feed provider.

While data feed providers will likely want to say why shareholders should vote for them, that shouldn't be a part of the motion in my opinion.

The date at which votes should begin to be counted will be April 25th UTC. This means @Cybnate, @Cryptog, @crypto_coiner and any other candidate will need to post their motion well in advance of that so it can be added to clients and data feeds. And yes, of course each data feed provider will vote for itself and no other. That works to accurately reflect the real popularity of each feed. Voting will end when the 5.0 release is otherwise code complete. A minimum of 5000 blocks and a maximum of 20000 blocks of votes will be counted, starting on April 25th. Individual shareholders may vote for none, one, some or all of the competing default data feed motions.

A hypothetical example will clarify how votes are to be counted:

The release is code complete except for the default data feed voting results 12,000 blocks after the start of April 25th. Within those 12,000 blocks, provider A received 6000 votes while provider B received 4000 votes for their respective motions. This means that 60% of the time running through the client install, provider A will be selected as the default data feed provider while the other 40% of the time provider B would be selected initially by default.

Any data feed provider who receives even a single vote will be included in the 5.0 release as a default data provider.

For any release that occurs more than 90 days from the release of 5.0, a new vote will be held for default data feed providers.

Very interesting.

What options are there to distribute dividends with other currencies (say maybe Nubits or something like Grantcoin) while still retaining the network effects? Or will this require a fork, with all the associated dilution.

Yes I have heard good things about TomJoad, I will attempt to contact him later this week. I do appreciate the community offering private purchases, there are very few exchanges I find trustworthy at this point so having a p2p option will be excellent.

Please feel free to link me to any relevant information on BlockShares, I still have quite a bit of research to do in order to get up to speed 100%.

Thanks!  

I don't currently have an account with CCEDK but I am interested in buying some BlockShares. Could someone post a direct link to this market on CCEDK or provide some information on otc vendors ? Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Why doesn't B&C Exchange have a Facebook page? I went to add it to my profile and noticed it was missing and not on the main website. At least with Peercoin, our Facebook account allows me to type out longer news updates to followers that would be impossible on Twitter, due to the character count limit. I noticed that Nu doesn't take advantage of this and only allows their tweets to be shown on their Facebook page. The lack of character count limit allows for better communication with shareholders and the community.

Would it be possible to have some updates on the roadmap and milestones along with when we can expect to have those milestones completed?
Tks

BKS pairs on [...] … are being flipped today! All open orders are cancelled. Pls redo. Thanks for your help.

whats with ccedk I have order still showing and can not cancel them I get page errors