[Announce] Project Quixote - BitShares, BitNames and 'BitMessage'

[bytemaster]

What about Mozilla Firefox support ?

It's open sourse.  Hopefully someone will add it

[CoinJay]

I had a chat with the Invictus founders this morning and confirmed that there were indeed a couple of errors in the article:

1) Users don't spend BitShares to earn BitNames (they're free).
2) CPUs and GPUs don't in fact rely on branch prediction.
3) We said that  positions are closed out in a move called a 'short squeeze'. I should have said 'margin call'. And I said that if a trade doesn’t have a suitable counterparty, and it leaves a short position that can’t be covered, the miner automatically exercises a margin call. In fact, short positions can be covered when a margin call is issued, because the protocol issues the margin call before there are insufficient funds to cover it.

These have now been corrected. I also added one piece of information about the block chain to clarify that you can simply start your client once a year to avoid being charged a 5% transaction fee for having your old outputs automatically moved forward in the chain.

Thanks for your patience and I apologize for the errors.

Danny Bradbury
Coindesk

[bytemaster]

I had a chat with the Invictus founders this morning and confirmed that there were indeed a couple of errors in the article:

1) Users don't spend BitShares to earn BitNames (they're free).
2) CPUs and GPUs don't in fact rely on branch prediction.
3) We said that  positions are closed out in a move called a 'short squeeze'. I should have said 'margin call'. And I said that if a trade doesn’t have a suitable counterparty, and it leaves a short position that can’t be covered, the miner automatically exercises a margin call. In fact, short positions can be covered when a margin call is issued, because the protocol issues the margin call before there are insufficient funds to cover it.

These have now been corrected. I also added one piece of information about the block chain to clarify that you can simply start your client once a year to avoid being charged a 5% transaction fee for having your old outputs automatically moved forward in the chain.

Thanks for your patience and I apologize for the errors.

Danny Bradbury
Coindesk

Thanks Danny.     You did a great job explaining the concept in readily understandable terms.

[Skinnkavaj]

Damn. I'm so looking forward to this!! Excited 
Do you guys have some IRC-channel? 

[favdesu]

Damn. I'm so looking forward to this!! Excited 
Do you guys have some IRC-channel? 

and/or a reddit?

[bytemaster]

I don't know how i would ever get anything done hanging out in an IRC channel all day.     We have our web developer actively working to setup forums dedicated to this project and until then this thread will be the one were conversation on this topic will be focused.

[dacoinminster]

Hi bytemaster,

I finally took a look at your whitepaper; this latest version of your project is much more ambitious than I had imagined! The sheer scope of what you are attempting boggles my mind. The name you have chosen, "Project Quixote", definitely seems appropriate given those grand ambitions.

Do you have a feeling for when mining of bitshares will begin? Am I correct in assuming that mining will begin well before the planned feature set is complete? How much code has been written so far?

I'm frequently amazed at how unimaginative people can be when they try guess where distributed currency might be going and what might be possible. Your project definitely does not have that problem.

Best of luck!

[dddbtc]

Will be watching  best of luck!

[bytemaster]

Hi bytemaster,

I finally took a look at your whitepaper; this latest version of your project is much more ambitious than I had imagined! The sheer scope of what you are attempting boggles my mind.

Do you have a feeling for when mining of bitshares will begin? Am I correct in assuming that mining will begin well before the planned feature set is complete? How much code has been written so far?

Best of luck!

This software will be released in phases testing the less critical aspects throughly with a large user base of 'Bit Message' and 'BitShares ID' users who can use it for communication without really risking much financial value.   The goal is to have the Test Network up by Thanksgiving and hopefully launch the live network as soon as we can go a month without any major new bugs showing up.    The blockchain should support short/long, options, and cross-chain trading, multi-sig, and simple escrow at launch, though full support for the escrow system will be built out over coming year.  

While the block chain will be ready and usable with an RPC / command line interface, the GUI will take longer to mature.   Our schedule is highly dependent upon finding good developers and testers!

[bytemaster]

You're hiring?  What jobs and skills are you looking for?

 C++, Qt, Boost, Java Script, PHP, Browser Extensions, CSS, HTML5

Our team currently has a part-time drupal developer handling the web work.   We are hoping to leverage the work that Joe Cascio has done with Bitcoin ID as the model / template for our implementation.  He already has a proof-of-concept chrome extension.

Send me a PM with your contact information if you have skills that could help.

While there are some paid positions at the moment, there is amble opportunity to get involved via open source contributions.  We are likely to pull from the pool of volunteers before hiring outsiders as we grow so get involved.

Our company is based on very deep philosophical foundation of freedom, voluntary association, and the principle that the free market should be able to provide all of the services traditionally "provided" by governments without relying on the initiation of force.   Our IP philosophy is relative unique in that we view Intellectual Property as a government granted privilege backed by force and that violates the rights of others to produce and express themselves.  We are committed to only use Intellectual Property as 'self defense' against those who would attempt to claim they 'own' IP and may exclude us from the market.  Thus if you Live by IP.... well you know the rest.   

Our profit model is not based upon vendor lock-in nor do we intend on relying on licensing IP.   To compete with our business you must be equally as open and decentralized.   In fact, our goal is to keep Invictus Innovations as decentralized as possible because corporations are themselves creatures of the state and represent yet another form of centralization and control that we hope to decentralize.

Joining our team with BitShares is just the beginning of what we have planned because by the time we are done you will no longer have to rely on the government to defend your life, liberty, and property....

[Operatr]

Very interesting, I like that it has a mining aspect to it, will be watching the project for sure

[becoin]

Our company is based on very deep philosophical foundation of freedom, voluntary association, and the principle that the free market should be able to provide all of the services traditionally "provided" by governments without relying on the initiation of force. 

While I appreciate what you try to achieve I still don't understand why did you decide to create new blockchain? Why colored coins over bitcoin blockchain is not sufficient for your project?

[bytemaster]

Our company is based on very deep philosophical foundation of freedom, voluntary association, and the principle that the free market should be able to provide all of the services traditionally "provided" by governments without relying on the initiation of force. 

While I appreciate what you try to achieve I still don't understand why did you decide to create new blockchain? Why colored coins over bitcoin blockchain is not sufficient for your project?

Colored coins have no value beyond the bitcoin backing them without an issuer using the colored coin as a bearer bond.    BitShares has no issuers, BitUSD is not a promise to pay.  Colored coins cannot do this.

Secondly, the Bitcoin blockchain is fatally flawed in several ways:

1) full nodes will soon be beyond the reach of the average user who cares about having spare bandwidth and disk space.
2) mining is being specialized by extremely wealthy VC firms which are building ASICs for their own use and ultimately the 'decentralization of mining' depends upon pools of one form or the other. Pools are 'centralized' and the hardware required to even participate in a pool is also specialized.   
3) colored coins do no enable 'margin calls' in a decentralized manner.   Ultimately colored coins are not decentralized any more than Open Transactions which is far more effecient.
4) the bitcoin block chain does not have a reliable block production rate, it is currently over 55 days ahead of schedule and thus fundamentally broken from an inflation control perspective and thus not a reliable time source for options expiration.
5) the transaction size and bandwidth requirements of bitcoin are larger than necessary
6) bitcoin does not support merged mining
7) cross-chain-trading with bitcoin is not currently supported as a 'standard transaction'
bitcoin can not handle the transaction volume of an exchange
9) there will be more than 1 BitShares chain to enable scalability and offer a wide variety of BitAssets each with a decentralized market.
10) I need data maintained with every block header beyond the data stored in transactions.

I could go on, but I think I have made my point.   Please demonstrate how you can achieve everything BitShares does with colored coins and you will quickly understand the problems.

[greBit]

Seriously just wow.

Have you got some rough list of tasks/milestones/priorities. Github? How can a volunteer get stuck in and help make this happen?

[gmaxwell]

What they wrote on Github just now might shed some light with their strategy for interworking with the Bitcoin ecosystem:

Charles Hoskinson <notifications@github.com>
2:28 PM (59 minutes ago) to bitcoin/bitcoi., me
Milly,
I've given up on working with the core devs and started the fork I promised:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitshares-p2p-trading-platform-to-offer-dividends-on-bitcoins/
We have over a half million in funding and are rapidly growing. It's over
for them.
Charles

In any case, this thread belongs in alternative cryptocurrencies, not project development.  Cheers.

[jedunnigan]

Seriously just wow.

Have you got some rough list of tasks/milestones/priorities. Github? How can a volunteer get stuck in and help make this happen?

From bytemaster:

The code has been open and on github from day 1.  https://github.com/InvictusInnovations/BitShares

Though it is not ready for consumption by anyone other than our dev. team or those looking to be very involved.   We are still filling in the core components, but it is coming together very rapidly. 

October at C3 release I think.

[bytemaster]

What they wrote on Github just now might shed some light with their strategy for interworking with the Bitcoin ecosystem:

Charles Hoskinson <notifications@github.com>
2:28 PM (59 minutes ago) to bitcoin/bitcoi., me
Milly,
I've given up on working with the core devs and started the fork I promised:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitshares-p2p-trading-platform-to-offer-dividends-on-bitcoins/
We have over a half million in funding and are rapidly growing. It's over
for them.
Charles

In any case, this thread belongs in alternative cryptocurrencies, not project development.  Cheers.

The BitShare ID & Communication framework will work with bitcoin to make it easier to use and eliminate the need for bitcoin addresses.   So this is more than just a crypto-currency, the blockchain / crypto currency is just one aspect of Project Quixote

[charleshoskinson]

What they wrote on Github just now might shed some light with their strategy for interworking with the Bitcoin ecosystem:
Quote
Charles Hoskinson <notifications@github.com>
2:28 PM (59 minutes ago) to bitcoin/bitcoi., me
Milly,
I've given up on working with the core devs and started the fork I promised:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitshares-p2p-trading-platform-to-offer-dividends-on-bitcoins/
We have over a half million in funding and are rapidly growing. It's over
for them.
Charles
In any case, this thread belongs in alternative cryptocurrencies, not project development.  Cheers.

Thanks Max for quoting me out of context in a post that has since been removed in a conversation  on github that started four months ago. I really appreciate it. We are perfectly comfortable in the Bitcoin ecosystem and support all cryptocurrencies equally. That statement was in reference to the blockchain bloat, the lack of community involvement in decisions regarding the open source development of bitcoin and also the general resistant amongst devs to embrace emerging new ideas.

There are some clear philosophical differences between your vision and ours including the threat of ASICs and the continuing centralization of Bitcoin. But let's be very clear, BitShares is not meant as a replacement of Bitcoin, but rather the infrastructure needed to ensure compatibility between cryptocurrencies and fiat monies in general. Our primary design goal has always been to reduce volatility and increase liquidity for all cryptocurrencies. Since we are playing the posting thread game let's go down history lane: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=229315.0

My statement about Bitcoin's death comes from the idea that new cryptocurrencies using our ecosystem will be better positioned for the needs of the future and thus more competitive when compared with Bitcoin. In a free market, the best product wins. 

But please do take a single deleted statement out of context from a four month old thread that resulted in the creation of the Bitcoin Press Center as a statement of our business strategy. As I recall specifically because of the issues mentioned above. We have gone to great pains to explain our vision and goals in our whitepaper, partnerships, media interviews and upcoming conference lectures. And we will continue to do so as much as possible. Successful open source projects all require a rich, diverse community that has a legitimate opportunity to participate in the evolution of the software.

We are an entirely new ecosystem combining some amazing innovations from decentralized identity management, always encrypted communication and p2p decentralized exchange into a single protocol and a single easy to use multi-platform piece of software. This is not an alt currency. It is an ecosystem for all cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin.

[gmaxwell]

Four months ago?  That comment was left an hour ago and explicitly links to a URL that didn't exist until today.

[bytemaster]

Four months ago?  That comment was left an hour ago and explicitly links to a URL that didn't exist until today.

He was referring to the age of the thread, not the post.  I was confused by that myself.