[ANN] BitShares 2.0 Pitchfork Date is October 13, 2015

[StanLarimer]

[ANN] BitShares 2.0 Pitchfork Date is October 13, 2015

The foreshadowing began back on April 6th with this subtle hint:

Pitchforks.  When hard forks just aren't enough!

BitShares Loves Puppies Archives

The final hint came just hours ago when Bytemaster spilled the beans, um, I mean, actually announced something ahead of schedule for a change -- here:

2 days left now.  How are you guys feeling about the testnet?  On track for friday?

I believe that the test network has proven robust enough to replace the BTS 1.0 network in 30 days.

We have some graceful fallback positions that can be taken without missing the upgrade deadline:

1.  If all witnesses are on a single node then the network works perfectly, even with 1 second blocks
2.  Have several different witnesses all run from the same Amazon or Digital Ocean location
3.  Have all witnesses use a dedicated server to relay messages through while being geographically diverse
4.  Have all witnesses use current P2P and reduce block times to 5 seconds

In any event we are confident in the market behavior and evaluation of transactions and see no reason to delay upgrading the protocol simply because of networking/communication issues.

On the user interface side we have a viable wallet that supports:

1. market operations
2. transfers
3. voting
4. backups

Over the course of the next 30 days we will continue to refine the user interface, but at the very least it should be better than BTS 1 long before 30 days is up.

In other words, I am feeling pretty good about having the upgrade date be:  Tuesday, October 13th  (middle of work week)

So, yes, it's true.  

And as an added bonus, you all get a super deluxe 34-day countdown at no extra charge.

If you were planning on having the World's Best New User Training and Referral Funnel (WBNUTRF) ready to sign up new users when we go live, I'd suggest you start sprinting now.

[StanLarimer]

[StanLarimer]

The secret is not to fork up.

[gaba]

Just another topic to hide scam and theft of (AGS) investors. They even change the name of their company. You can't hide Mr. Stan. Everything is in the blockchain: http://www1.agsexplorer.com/

Do you really think that all AGS holder are the same? You changed shardrop target from AGS to BTS. The problem is that we (post 28/2) didn't received BTS (never will) and of course in the number of shares. We are not the same sharedrop target! Personally I did't wont to be part of BTSX. I invested to become part of all future DACs - as you promised. You can simple give us back our BTC, you returned PTS did't you. Do you really want to be remembered as crypto scammer?

[favdesu]

excellent news! let's see if we need pitchforks after October 13th

BitShares 2.0 Smartcoin Overview [YouTube]

[StanLarimer]

Just another topic to hide scam and theft of (AGS) investors. They even change the name of their company. You can't hide Mr. Stan. Everything is in the blockchain: http://www1.agsexplorer.com/

Do you really think that all AGS holder are the same? You changed shardrop target from AGS to BTS. The problem is that we (post 28/2) didn't received BTS (never will) and of course in the number of shares. We are not the same sharedrop target! Personally I did't wont to be part of BTSX. I invested to become part of all future DACs - as you promised. You can simple give us back our BTC, you returned PTS did't you. Do you really want to be remembered as crypto scammer?

I'm curious where you are getting your information.

ALL AGS donors have gotten nice stakes in BTS, NOTES (MUSE), PLAY, and Identabit, with much more to come.  AGSers have definitely remained "part of all future DACs".  What other community has even come close to this number of spin-offs with this much diverse potential?  

There's a complete audit trail across all these chains.

If you want to focus on one key consideration that should make you feel better (if you want to), it would be that post-2/28 AGSers got an unexpected bonus of about 10% of the BitShares SuperDAC that contains all the future DACs that are compatible with it.  Our intent was to make it a better value than they already had, and with the advent of BitShares 2.0, it seems clear to us that is exactly what happened!

That said, it has always been recognized that third party DACs were free to apply BitShares Sharedrop Theory in whatever way made sense to them and the supporter / investor demographic(s) they need to attract.    

With all the moving parts in the BitShares ecosystem, every decision is bound to be suboptimal for every individual.  Hopefully you can see us working hard to strike a balance for all concerned and can graciously admit that "crypto-scammer" is a bit unfair.  

I suggest you do a bit more homework, and if necessary, get some help from the community at bitsharestalk.org  Just post your issue there and ask them where you are wrong. Hopefully they will share their various perspectives, although right now everyone is pretty busy celebrating October 13, the next major leap in BitShares history...

[gaba]

Bitcoinsatan and Stan how convenient.

I didn't received BTS (dust) most of them are still locked. Yes I know that pre 28/2 AGS investors are happy because they received their (BTS(X)) twice. Stan you know better then me that we (pre and post AGS investors) don't have the same sharedrop percentage.

It was all about (sharedrop target)  when you ask for our (my) money.

"BitShares AGS, or Angelshares, represent a way to gain a stake in this new and exciting industry without mining coins."

How can pre 28/2 investor have bigger stake in future DACs than post 28/2 investors. Is that too complicated question? Yes I'am more than happy with my stake in NOTE and PLAY. Obviously you can do it right.

[testz]

Bitcoinsatan and Stan how convenient.

I didn't received BTS (dust) most of them are still locked. Yes I know that pre 28/2 AGS investors are happy because they received their (BTS(X)) twice. Stan you know better then me that we (pre and post AGS investors) don't have the same sharedrop percentage.

It was all about (sharedrop target)  when you ask for our (my) money.

"BitShares AGS, or Angelshares, represent a way to gain a stake in this new and exciting industry without mining coins."

How can pre 28/2 investor have bigger stake in future DACs than post 28/2 investors. Is that too complicated question? Yes I'am more than happy with my stake in NOTE and PLAY. Obviously you can do it right.

Don't forget that for post 28/2 AGS investors AGS shares costs much less than for pre 28/2, so it's not trivial match to calculate who get what. I think the winners who donate for AGS during all 200 days.

[StanLarimer]

Exactly.  This Grand Compromise has been settled since last fall, I'm surprised this ancient history is coming up again now.  Here's a summary for those who may have forgotten (or those just becoming aware of our amazing first two years):

AGS was a 200 day opportunity to donate to get on a "mailing list" for free shares in new DACs.  Each day was a donation competition for a fixed number of credits for that day.  When a new DAC was launched, its developer would take a "snapshot" of who had donated as of a certain announced date and give them "free samples" of shares in the genesis block of the new DAC.  The first snapshot was on 2/28 for the genesis block of BTSX.  Prior to 2/28 everyone knew that BTSX would only go to people who donated up to that snapshot - by definition.   After 2/28 everyone knew they were donating to support the remaining DACs in the pipeline (and getting less competition for those AGS because of that).  So, each new snapshot fixes the owners for that DAC and donors after these snapshots know that shares in past DACs are no longer part of the deal.  This has happened for BTSX, VOTE, DNS, MUSIC, PLAY and recently Identabit DACs, each sponsored by a different independent entrepreneur who had agreed to play by the same rules.

So when you say "two AGS's" you are missing the fact that there are "multiple AGSs", depending on how many snapshots were in the past on each of the 200 days people donated.  That fact entered into everybody's calculation for how much they wanted to donate, effectively letting folks get more AGS for the same sized donations in the latter days.  So, the later you donated the more AGS credit you got but the fewer DACs remained eligible for the giveaway promotion.

So I hope that answers your question, "How can pre 28/2 investor have bigger stake in future DACs than post 28/2 investors." 

They don't.  Post 2/28 donors got a bigger stake in fewer DACS - exactly the way everyone knew it would work.

Until the merger gave them a better deal - a stake in BTSX too.

When pre 2/28 donations ran out, we felt obligated to move on to developing the other DACs that AGS donors were expecting, but BTSX wasn't perfected.  Without its success, it was clear that the other DACs in the pipeline would suffer with BTSX if we left it forever in that state.  Further the other DACs would wind up implementing their own stabilized smartcoins that would compete with BTSX resulting in fratricide and diluted network effect.  So we realized that the only way to finish all DACs in a way that would be both successful and fair to all is to merge as many as possible into one SuperDAC - killing many birds with one stone.   

That was necessary, but painful, and resulted in
the Grand Merger Compromise of 2014:   

After the merger of all stakeholders that were willing and able to merge into the new BTS SuperDAC (BTSX+VOTE+DNS+AGS+PTS), we negotiated a compromise between holders of BTSX and holders of AGS/PTS:  BTSX holders would (barely) tolerate a two-year vesting dilution to (a) give AGS/PTS holders a stake in BTS (b) eliminate fratricide (c) gain access to continuing developer support for a common chain, and (d) become the new consensus share drop target.  Everybody got a somewhat smaller percentages of a much bigger DAC.  That's how mergers work.

So, no matter when in those 200 days you donated, you now have shares in all those promised DACs which is now able to grow and succeed where before it wasn't. 
 
Everybody hates compromises because by definition they have to give something up for a greater objective.  But without compromise, the whole project would have failed and everyone would wind up with nothing.  Was it perfect?  No, there was no single closed form solution and every new BTS stakeholder sees it differently when they crank in their own numbers. 

But because we didn't give up,
we now are able to launch the amazing industrial strength BitShares 2.0 "Super Duper" DAC
in just 32 days.

This has been an exercise in willingness to find a way to succeed in the middle of the Great Crypto Depression which had cut the legs out from under our planned funding strategy.

It wasn't pretty, but we all made it!

[box0214]

is there a bitshares 2.0 demo video that walks through the features?

i'm open to looking into it further, but i dont want to install anything. a quick run through would be great.

[favdesu]

is there a bitshares 2.0 demo video that walks through the features?

i'm open to looking into it further, but i dont want to install anything. a quick run through would be great.

here's a tech overview video: http://blog.smartcoin.pw/2015/07/bitshares-20-smartcoin-tech-overview.html

and you can test the current demo on the testnet: graphene.bitshares.org

[box0214]

is there a demo account we can login with to see prefilled in orders and transactions? i created a new account and everything is just blank as expected.

so does bitshares 2.0 run its own web server like how nxt does it and you just access it via the browser?

also can i send messages on the bitshares network to another account like how nxt has arbitary messages?

[StanLarimer]

BitShares 2.0 will have a browser-based wallet as the most common way for new users to get started.

That will be available on the test network next week and on the real network at launch on October 13.

There will also be downloadable wallets coming available as they are ready.

Messaging is in the pipeline but not this release. 

More details in Bytemaster's blog post today:  https://bitshares.org/blog/

[StanLarimer]

Here are the details Bytemaster posted on his blog today
at https://bitshares.org/blog/

It has been a long wait for since the June 8th announcement of Graphene and the plans to upgrade to BitShares 2.0. Back in June we said that we would complete BitShares 2.0 by the end of the summer and that we would give a 30 day notice after completion before upgrading. The last day of the astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere is September 22, 2015 which means we have reached our goal and can start the 30 day countdown 11 days early!

Test Net Results

Over the past 2 weeks we have been running a test network non-stop that has proven to be reliable. Despite some known issues with the P2P networking / synchronization code we feel confident that a reliable network can be launched in a month and that we have sufficient contingency plans if things cannot be fully resolved in time.

Durring this testing members of the community have hammered the blockchain with as many transactions as they could produce. People were running out of test BTS with which to pay fees. These tests pushed throughput up to 20 transactions per second and the network kept chugging. You may notice that 20 TPS is a long way from 100K TPS so I would like to explain this a bit.

The performance of the test network is mostly hindered by existing P2P protocol and not by the CPU load of processing transactions. To reach 100,000 TPS would require high-end servers with Gigabit, low-latency, connections between them. At a minimum it would require 30 MB per second just to receive the stream of data in real time. This is clearly beyond the reach of our humble testers using low-end VPS nodes.

The real proof-of-performance/scalability lies in how quickly we can replay the blockchain once we have it downloaded. Our replay performance continues to be above 100K transactions per second. The networking issues will get resolved as demand increases. For now the existing protocol can easily handle 3x the volume of Bitcoin which is over 30x the current volume of BitShares transactions. By the time the network is averaging 30 transactions per second it will be earning an average of $8000 per day in fees ($3M per year), the market cap would be much higher, and as a result worker proposals would easily be able to fund all of the innovation needed on the networking layer.

Changes since June

A lot has happened over the past 3 months and some compromises had to be made to reach our goals.

1. Postpone Bond Market

Back in June we announced on the forum the decision to postpone the Bond market features until after BitShares 2.0 was released. This decision was driven by an inability to fully test this feature and the belief that it was the most likely to need refinement, community feed back, and that it would woudl be unusable without a GUI.

2. Added Confidential / Stealth Transfers

One of the things we lamented in our original announcement was that bitcoin-style privacy was an illusion. Ironically on the same day we announced Graphene and BitShares 2.0, Blockstream released an implementation of Confidential Transactions which is well understood and computationally viable. After reviewing their approach we decided to implement them in Graphene for BitShares 2.0.

Confidential Transfers hide the amounts being transfered while still allowing those who validate the blockchain to verify that the balances transfered sum to 0 and are not negative. Stealth transfers are used to automatically generate a unique key for every transfer. The combination of these two features means that it becomes pratically impossible for a 3rd party to identify how much you have sent or received or who is sending money to whom.

If you are willing to reveal who is sending to whom (but not how much) then it is even possible to use confidential transfers with regular hierarchical threshold multi-sig accounts.

Currently the web wallet does not support generating or receiving confidential transactions, but the command line wallet has full support for them. More details on how to use confidential/stealth transfers will be made available in the weeks ahead.

3. Added Desktop Client

Not everyone wants to rely on a web browser to secure their funds so we have put together a new desktop client that can operate either as a full node or a light node. This client uses the latest Qt WebEngine which is based upon Chromium rather than Webkit and should be much more stable than the BitShares 0.9x wallets which were known to crash from time to time (especially on Windows).

4. Reduced Scope of Initial GUI

We had originally intended to have every feature available in the GUI on launch. We have scaled back the feature set for the inital release to do little more than provide at least the same level of features as BTS 0.9x. Some advanced features such as recurring payments, permission management, confidential/stealth transfers, asset management, and the like will be added as we have the opportunity to do so.

5. Increased Block Interval to 3 seconds

Our goal of 1 second blocks has been postponed due to limitations in the P2P code we inhereted from BTS 0.9. Initial tests showed on a global scale the latency would result in too many forks without developing a new P2P protocol. We have designed a new protocol that should be have dramatically lower latency. The witnesses/delegates can lower the block interval to 1 second without a hardfork as soon as they are confident that the network communication can operate reliably at 1hz on a test network.

Launch Plans

We will be taking the snapshot on a Tuesday so we have time to prepare on Monday and support it through the rest of the week. The actual snapshot time will be the last block prior to 9:00:00AM EST. BTS 2.0 chain will then launch no later than 4PM EST, Oct 13.

[favdesu]

-snip-

reasonable changes. I really like how you guys are pushing a release.

what I would love to read more is about the referral program; how to use it? what do I have to setup to make it work from day 0?

[StanLarimer]

Yesterday's Global News Conference with Bytemaster is now available here:

https://beyondbitcoin.org/bitshares-dev-hangout-bytemaster-bitshares-2-release-date/

It contained a ton of good questions and other information about the October 13 launch of BitShares 2.0

It had about 100 attendees, could be a record.

[StanLarimer]

The transcript for the above global news conference is now available:

COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT



Here's a sample, that I found particularly interesting:

[00:36:42] fuzzy: Community question, “What gateways do we see as viable or likely or likely for public Graphene blockchain without required person to account identifiers?”.

[00:36:57] bytemaster: Are you asking about gateways that don’t do KYC? I don’t think that you’re going to find any legitimate fiat gateways that don’t do KYC that are not at risk of being shut down. But, I do think that you’ll probably see lots of people performing bridge functions. And bridge functions are an entirely different animal.

[00:37:25] bytemaster: They allow one person to trade one asset for another asset with no ongoing liability. No deposit. It’s just like buying or selling a baseball card. If you have that type of thing going on then there’s probably a lot of potential there. I can see people wanting to do that with local BitShares type things where you meet people locally.

[00:37:51] bytemaster: Once we have escrow transactions in a future hard fork. Probably the same one that supports the payment channels we discussed earlier. Then you’ll probably have lots of direct person to person trades of fiat for bitUSD. You have to go person to person. If you go through any type of centralized exchange doing large volumes, it’s more convenient but it’s going to be KYC enforced.

[00:38:23] fuzzy: Are you familiar with how IDentabit is planning to do KYC validation and how will it be different?

[00:39:59] bytemaster: The main difference with IDentabit is that the blockchain will actually look at the whitelist and require all accounts to be blessed by an active identity provider in order to transfer. Basically that means before you can receive funds or transfer above a certain threshold you need to get your account verified and then the blockchain will allow it.

[00:40:33] bytemaster: That’s the main difference. In BitShares it’s optional on the blockchain, it doesn’t enforce it. I think it amounts to the setting on the core asset of the blockchain the whitelist flag and then having the delegates elect the accounts that get to be the whitelist providers.

[00:40:58] bytemaster: So the required set of whitelist providers are going to be controlled by the stakeholders. That’s my understanding, of course you should check the IDentabit whitepaper for more information.

[00:41:12] bytemaster: There’s been some discussion about whether or not they’re going to have a referral program that’s similar or different from ours. They have lots of opportunities to do different referral programs because they have stake they can share with every new account that signs up and they can prevent sybil attacks on that because they’re doing identity verification.

[00:41:35] fuzzy: Are you guys seeing places where BitShares will work alongside with IDentabit or do you see them kind of not having any real crossover?

[00:41:49] bytemaster: As much as possible I’d like to keep the two protocols compatible with similar operations for things. So that tools developed by IDentabit can be used for BitShares and vice versa.

[00:42:03] fuzzy: Is that the kind of relationship that you feel comfortable that as long as that remains intact as far as the protocols, the relationship aspect of it is such that these things will be generally made available to things like BitShares?

[00:42:19] bytemaster: That’s the goal. It saves everyone money.

[00:42:26] fuzzy: I’m just curious if you’ve had any conversations with respect to this to John or any other people who are working on similar projects that are DPOS based.

[00:42:38] bytemaster: I’ve been almost entirely heads down on BitShares 2.0 release for the past several weeks. Since IDentabit came out I actually haven’t talked to John at all about IDentabit. I reviewed some of his whitepapers and added some clarifying points but that’s the extent of my involvement these past several weeks.

[00:43:02] bytemaster: I suspect that once he gets the funding that he’s seeking to build and develop it that my involvement will increase as we try to nail down the exact technical implementation. But for now I refer you to his whitepapers and his website if you want to know what he’s thinking of building.

[00:44:10] Brindleswan: Most people get their cryptocurrency from Coinbase and then they have to go through identity verification anyway. I see IDentabit as a way to get into a cryptocurrency without the centralized identity verification, and then you buy your BitShares.

[00:44:31] bytemaster: The thing IDentabit is going to provide that I’m most excited about is the public headers of all transactions. Which means that you can prove payment on the IDentabit network. You can’t prove payment in the current financial system in any easily verified way or freely verified way.

[00:44:54] bytemaster: So if I send you money, I know the transaction, you know the transaction and everyone knows that the hash of that transaction is in the ledger. If there’s a dispute between us I can show the details of the transaction to an arbitration agent who can then do something as a result.

[00:45:16] bytemaster: So if you are in the IDentabit system and it gets successful and it’s integrated with the financial system like John Underwood hopes. Then I can transfer you dollars on that network and you can transfer me bitUSD on BitShares with escrow and if there is any dispute that escrow on the BitShares network can verify that dollars were sent on the IDentabit network and then it can automatically and securely arbitrate the payment.

[00:45:48] bytemaster: In fact the arbitration can be entirely automated on the blockchain. So I think there is a lot of benefits that IDentabit gives to a network like BitShares or any blockchain. Because most transactions are private but you’d have an easily verifiable arbitration of payment.

Read the rest here.

[r0ach]

Who is working on BTS 2.0 wallet?  I tried it and felt it had too many different screens with functionality spread out way too much.  This was my proof of concept mock up of a better version of it with explanation below:

Every page that you want to access in the program should fit into tabs in that left box (curent list is a dummy list).  You don't need a top menu and a side menu.  You could also get rid of the settings widget thing at the top right and place a settings menu in the box on the left side since it makes it less cluttered.  The "memo" button on the transactions area would open a pop up that centers full screen.  The "Recent Transactions" text could also be a drop down menu to select between incoming, outgoing, and possibly address book as a 3rd, then you just scroll up and down.  The address book would obviously be used to auto-fill the "send to" box.  Some options on the left menu would open into a screen that doesn't have the menu box visible.  You would hit a back button to get back to the menu.

[StanLarimer]

I'd start by talking to valentine or bytemaster via PM on bitsharestalk.

[gaba]

Don't forget that for post 28/2 AGS investors AGS shares costs much less than for pre 28/2, so it's not trivial match to calculate who get what. I think the winners who donate for AGS during all 200 days.

Thanks on your offer to help.

I'am that 'winner' so I know exactly what is all about.

I received, still receiving about the same amount of BTS from both period even I invested in post 28/2 at least 5x more. That period last longer! Again I don't have any problem with my share in BTS. The real problem here is that you changed (without voting) sharedrop target. It seems that you just took our money. That story will follow you forever. Let us vote with our shares. 1 AGS 1 vote, 1 PTS 1 vote! It seems that voting works only inside BTS now when you distributed shares as it suits you.


@Stan
I really believed you. I even persuaded friends on investment, unfortunately for them after 28/2. What do I tell them?

You are trying to solve one of the biggest problem in financial industry and in the same time you can't solve basic problem with your BTS distribution. Who can trust you. You constantly changing the rules. I know that is tempting for new investor to buy BTS now because it is cheaper than it was for post 28/2 investor but you will scammed them as you scammed me. This is what you have made.  Maybe we can get some Brownie.PTS for AGS .

Too bad, because you do not need that. In these space trust is equally important as technology.