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

[bytemaster]

Mining is interesting and all, but I really thought there would be much more discussion about the revolutionary nature of BitUSD and BitGold as well as options and shorts.   

I'm already enthused on the possibilities, most interested in the nuts 'n' bolts of mining to be prepared with an optimized platform when it starts since this is one of the shortest lead items per your announced schedule.

I have just posted the latest algorithm for the proof of work that we will be reviewing closely. 

Some notes: 
- I reduced the memory requirement to 8 MB so that I could achieve the target of 0.25 sec / hash on a 2.3 Ghz Core i7 single thread.
- The function has a unpredictable runtime which should choke many data-parallel systems like GPUs which must idle cores on branches.
- It uses AES to randomly encrypt and re-encrypt random bytes spread across the buffer, you cannot determine ahead of time which bytes will be needed.
- The inner part of the algorithm cannot be made parallel in any manner because every step depends upon the prior step in a cryptographically secure way.

Code:

pow_hash proof_of_work( const fc::sha256& seed, unsigned char* buffer )
{
   auto key = fc::sha256(seed);
   auto iv  = fc::city_hash128((char*)&seed,sizeof(seed));
   memset( buffer, 0, BUF_SIZE );

   uint64_t* read_pos  = (uint64_t*)(buffer);
   uint64_t* write_pos = (uint64_t*)(buffer+32);

   fc::aes_encoder enc( key, iv );
   for( uint32_t i = 0; i < BUF_SIZE / (BLOCK_SIZE/2); ++i )
   {
      uint64_t wrote = enc.encode( (char*)read_pos, BLOCK_SIZE, (char*)write_pos ); 
      read_pos  =  (uint64_t*)( buffer + (write_pos[0]) % ( BUF_SIZE - BLOCK_SIZE ) );
      if( write_pos[2] % 117 == 0 && i > 32 ) { i -= write_pos[3]%32; }
      write_pos =  (uint64_t*)( buffer + (write_pos[1]) % ( BUF_SIZE - BLOCK_SIZE ) );
   }
   auto midstate =  fc::city_hash_crc_256( (char*)buffer, BUF_SIZE ); 
   return fc::ripemd160::hash((char*)&midstate, sizeof(midstate) );
}

This code should be peer reviewed to check for security flaws. 

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[CIYAM]

Looks like an interesting project and CIYAM Open https://ciyam.org/open would be happy to list this project "fee free for life" (as one of the first 10 projects to be listed) if you are interested in using a task workflow control system (please view the slideshow at http://ciyam.org to see how this works).

The project Moneychanger is listed and has attracted a few developers who will have much of the skills that this project requires (and am sure would be interested in working on tasks for BTC when they have completed their current work).

Welcome to PM me for further details.

[Xenland]

Oh lala, Looks like something I'd be interested in, I'll have to wait till I full fill my other contracts before I start this one. I will be available by October if someone wants to give me a ping by that time if this project hasn't been started. I constantly lurk on ciyam so if you post it there no need to ping I can keep track of the status naturally.

[marcus_of_augustus]

We are working to integrate BitNames with a Chrome Extension to allow one click login to compatible websites.     BitDNS will come a later and will offer high-value, paid-for, names at auction using a system designed to prevent squatters.  The combination of BitNames & BitDNS means we can eliminate man-in-the-middle between websites and their users due to compromised Certificate Authorities.    Our aim is to promote the protocol with the W3C web payments group as an alternative to Open-ID and other proposals that ultimately rely on a central authority (your email provider) and have a broken certificate system.

Namecoin project is already doing many of these parts ... how will bitnames and bitdns be different/improvement? ( I note you are using names others have suggested back in 2011, are you affiliated with them somehow?)

Also, I haven't read the white paper but it is honest and typical to provide proper attribution when extending the seminal concepts, ideas and works of others. If you haven't done from day one, with the sincere intention to do so, it can be a source of FUD rot that when planted at the very beginning will only fester and corrode the project forever. Just so you have been warned.

[bytemaster]

We are working to integrate BitNames with a Chrome Extension to allow one click login to compatible websites.     BitDNS will come a later and will offer high-value, paid-for, names at auction using a system designed to prevent squatters.  The combination of BitNames & BitDNS means we can eliminate man-in-the-middle between websites and their users due to compromised Certificate Authorities.    Our aim is to promote the protocol with the W3C web payments group as an alternative to Open-ID and other proposals that ultimately rely on a central authority (your email provider) and have a broken certificate system.

Namecoin project is already doing many of these parts ... how will bitnames and bitdns be different/improvement? ( I note you are using names others have suggested back in 2011, are you affiliated with them somehow?)

Also, I haven't read the white paper but it is honest and typical to provide proper attribution when extending the seminal concepts, ideas and works of others. If you haven't done from day one, with the sincere intention to do so, it can be a source of FUD rot that when planted at the very beginning will only fester and corrode the project forever. Just so you have been warned.

We certainly attempt to give credit to anyone who's ideas we leverage and build upon.    We did not go back and review all of the proposed names but as far as I know there is no current BitDNS or BitNames project and the names are rather obvious.   We have certainly given Namecoin, BitMessage, and Bitcoin ID credit for their inspirations.   We will not be running with any name in use by an existing project when we launch without the blessing of the existing owners.

As for why we are not using Namecoin:

1) Bandwidth requirements and storage requirements are too great for our 'account' system and it will not scale like we want for 1 billion accounts.
2) Domain squatting has not been solved with Namecoin and namecoin violates some of our economic axims against price fixing.  We have solved the domain squatting issue for the most part.
3) People don't want to 'pay' for a login name
4) Tight integration will allow a better user experience.

We haven't put together a full white paper for the designs of our DNS and Name system yet, but I have talked about the concepts in other threads on this forum.

[bytemaster]

Oh lala, Looks like something I'd be interested in, I'll have to wait till I full fill my other contracts before I start this one. I will be available by October if someone wants to give me a ping by that time if this project hasn't been started. I constantly lurk on ciyam so if you post it there no need to ping I can keep track of the status naturally.

I am working with Ian to get us on ciyam because it looks very promising as a way to decentralize our development process an invite participation of the community.   By October there should be plenty of tasks for you on there.

[OneBTCJay]

If this could be merge mined with bitcoin I think both the project and miners would benefit.

[bytemaster]

"BitDNS will come a later and will offer high-value, paid-for, names at auction using a system designed to prevent squatters."

I don't know what this is supposed to mean but I can tell you right now this will be a hard sell.  If you plan to require a plug-in like Namecoin (or the numerous other systems) because it is not compatible with the ICANN root then I would forget this part because it will be too difficult to get people to use it.

It seems you want to prevent ASICS, prevent "squatters", etc.  It sounds like my local City Council who now wants to ban smoking OUTSIDE in public parks. 

Rather than prevent ASICS, I want to promote decentralization and if we can get decentralization with ASICS then I have no problem.

Preventing squatters is just a side effect, I want to promote the highest economic allocation of business names.

I have higher goals than DNS, but DNS is just one aspect of it.

[favdesu]

BTW: the sooner we have a decentralized secure email system the better. that alone will give you huge PR!

[td services]

"BitDNS will come a later and will offer high-value, paid-for, names at auction using a system designed to prevent squatters."

I don't know what this is supposed to mean but I can tell you right now this will be a hard sell.  If you plan to require a plug-in like Namecoin (or the numerous other systems) because it is not compatible with the ICANN root then I would forget this part because it will be too difficult to get people to use it.

It seems you want to prevent ASICS, prevent "squatters", etc.  It sounds like my local City Council who now wants to ban smoking OUTSIDE in public parks. 

Rather than prevent ASICS, I want to promote decentralization and if we can get decentralization with ASICS then I have no problem.

Preventing squatters is just a side effect, I want to promote the highest economic allocation of business names.

I have higher goals than DNS, but DNS is just one aspect of it.

I'd rather discourage ASICs. Aside from the centralization issues they seem to be a waste of development effort and resources for a highly specialized "make work" type application. Also, since they are manufactured and deployed in batches, they create discontinuities in the mining curves. A steady stream of CPUs entering the mining pool is a lot smoother. Unlike ASICs, CPU systems can be re-purposed and run other applications.

Discouraging domain squatting is also a good thing. Will this network evolve to have anonymization and encryption like TOR?

[phelix]

gmaxwell,
[...]
   What I gather from your post is that we shouldn't attempt innovate and we should conform to the status quo.

Nah, pretty sure here that's not what he meant. Also you have to admit that other post on Github was not so nice.


Why not use Scrypt with proper parameters (unlike Litecoin)? It was created to solve the problem at hand.

The problem with changing the algorithm every year or so is that it could bend the system towards centralization.


Similar to what MoA said: Bitmessage (http://bitmessage.org) has Namecoin ID integration now. Also there is NameID (http://nameid.org), a Namecoin based login system. And there is a working Namecoin TLS Firefox plugin to replace certificate authorities. There is more coming but I won't tell as I am afraid you will stuff it all into Bitshares.  

When a miner enforces a margin call, he uses the backing BitShares to repurchase the BitUSD and thereby redeeming it. After BitUSD is redeemed it no longer exists.

So that means the BitUSD are squeezed out if BitShares drop in value? How much will the collateral be?


Hope you will succeed, Cryptocoinland needs a decentralized exchange.

[becoin]

Nah, pretty sure here that's not what he meant.

Freedom is the room IN BETWEEN you and the law.

What if the law is crafted to not leave any room IN BETWEEN? Should we try get slimmer to have some freedom?

[bytemaster]

Nah, pretty sure here that's not what he meant. Also you have to admit that other post on Github was not so nice.

Yeah, thats the problem with digital communications things said out of frustration have a way of haunting you long after they would have otherwise been forgotten.  Unfortunately, the context is often forgotten as well.

If you have a suggestion for parameters to Scrypt that you think would achieve the goal I am open to it.  After all, I am not tied to any particular algorithm just the goal of decentralization.

Depends upon how the algorithm is changed every couple of years.   Obviously current hash power would have to 'vote' to move to new a hashing technique.  

BitMessage & Namecoin are great proof of concepts.  Yes, they are solving the problem in similar way.   We think we can offer a better user experience with better scalability.  

If BitShares fall in value relative to BitUSD then those who are short will face a margin call where they are forced to accept the lowest ask.

Example:
Initial Condition:
Sam:  1 BTS
Alice:  1 BTS
$1 USD = 1 BTS

Sam decides to short, alice goes long...
Sam:   2 BTS held in blockchain-escrow backing 1 BitUSD
Alice:   1 BitUSD

Time passes....
$1 BitUSD = 1.5 BTS
Miner forces Sam to accept lowest ask... 1.6 BTS per USD
Alice (or someone she traded with) was the one asking 1.6 BTS / BitUSD

Result:
Sam:  .4 BTS
Alice:  1.6 BTS

Of course, all BitUSD is fungible and the miner could have just as easily covered the margin with a new short position... in which case the result would be:

Sam: .4 BTS
NewShortOwner:   3.2 BTS held in block-chain escrow backing $1 BitUSD

Notice... the price as a result of the margin call went above market value (1.5) to 1.6... thus profit opportunity for new short.   Of course, rapid movements would result in a short squeeze which will bring in new capital.

[phelix]

Nah, pretty sure here that's not what he meant.

Freedom is the room IN BETWEEN you and the law.

What if the law is crafted to not leave any room IN BETWEEN? Should we try get slimmer to have some freedom?

LOL. (If you see a connection between my quotes I missed it.)

The answer is no - you need to maintain the law so that there is always some space around you. Unfortunately a lot of people don't see that, though, and are comfortable as long as anything they currently like to do is legal.

Nah, pretty sure here that's not what he meant. Also you have to admit that other post on Github was not so nice.

Yeah, thats the problem with digital communications things said out of frustration have a way of haunting you long after they would have otherwise been forgotten.  Unfortunately, the context is often forgotten as well.

That's why you have to be extra careful with what you say. (I will stop picking now )

If you have a suggestion for parameters to Scrypt that you think would achieve the goal I am open to it.  After all, I am not tied to any particular algorithm just the goal of decentralization.

Just crank up the parameters until it uses the amount of memory you want it to.

Depends upon how the algorithm is changed every couple of years.   Obviously current hash power would have to 'vote' to move to new a hashing technique. 

IIRC this has been discussed somewhere before. Changing algorithm would be a great solution but what if voters don't want to move on until it's too late?  E.g. ASICs are coming up but most CPU miners are at the RAM limit.

BitMessage & Namecoin are great proof of concepts.  Yes, they are solving the problem in similar way.   We think we can offer a better user experience with better scalability. 

I hope you do. We will work on it, too.

If BitShares fall in value relative to BitUSD then those who are short will face a margin call where they are forced to accept the lowest ask.

Example:
Initial Condition:
Sam:  1 BTS
Alice:  1 BTS
$1 USD = 1 BTS

Sam decides to short, alice goes long...
Sam:   2 BTS held in blockchain-escrow backing 1 BitUSD
Alice:   1 BitUSD

Time passes....
$1 BitUSD = 1.5 BTS
Miner forces Sam to accept lowest ask... 1.6 BTS per USD
Alice (or someone she traded with) was the one asking 1.6 BTS / BitUSD

Result:
Sam:  .4 BTS
Alice:  1.6 BTS

Of course, all BitUSD is fungible and the miner could have just as easily covered the margin with a new short position... in which case the result would be:

Sam: .4 BTS
NewShortOwner:   3.2 BTS held in block-chain escrow backing $1 BitUSD

Notice... the price as a result of the margin call went above market value (1.5) to 1.6... thus profit opportunity for new short.   Of course, rapid movements would result in a short squeeze which will bring in new capital.

There might be situations where everyone wants to just get out (bank run, loss of trust in BitUSD). Will it not break then?

[AnonyMint]

Kudos on the innovative concept of BitAsset (#5 below), as this is the first time I've seen that idea. The P2P exchange in #4 was already proposed by others, yet this is the first time I've seen it proposed as a way to decentralized the same protocol for an altcoin (obvious, but that point didn't register in my mind until now).

1. I have a superior name for your coin (and the domain names too). Forget "Bit" that is so copycat and lost in a sea of similar name permutations. I've demonstrated marketing skills in the past with 335,000 web sites published with my Cool Page as verified by AltaVista circa 2001. Brandable names express meaning and are dissimilar from everything already in use, e.g. when I "Google", I am "goggling". When I "Yahoo!", I am "hurrah! I found it on the web".

2. Why C++ yuk!? If you used Scala (3 times less verbose than Java), and stub in C for performance only where needed (through the JNI), then I might contribute coding (maybe even for free) instead of creating my own altcoin. No way I am going back to 1990s with C++. Been there, done that. Hey that was 15 years ago when I wrote Cool Page in C++!

3. The coindesk article claims, "BitShares aren’t designed to be spent with merchants in the same way that bitcoins are". Where in the whitepaper does it say that BitShares can't be sent to another keyname? Even if that was the intention, it is trivial to create a new BitAsset named BitSharesAsset which is the value of 1 BitShares. Thus BitShares is a new currency unit, so this is an altcoin.

4. Your whitepaper says that BitShares may have multiple chains. Thus BitShares from different chains would have different values and are only fungible by using the cross-chain transaction, i.e. P2P exchange. Thus I think they should also have different names, e.g. BitShare-Chain___.

5. BitAsset isn't concisely summarized in the whitepaper. Let me take a stab at it, while simultaneously improving the design of it. A BitAsset is designated to mirror the percentage price moves (not the exact same price) of some real world asset. The designation of which asset is made by the creator of a BitAsset, who also names it if it hadn't already been created by others. More copies of a named BitAsset, e.g. BitUSD, can be created in this same way, and the same name is reused. The creator either wants to take a long position on the BitAsset so makes a bid offer, or wants to take a short position on the BidAsset so makes an ask offer. The offer is made in units of BitShares. When a counter party makes a matching ask or bid respectively, the BitAsset is created and the BitShares from both parties are deposited into the blockchain, thus the collateral is initially 2x the market value of the BitAsset. As new copies of that named BitAsset are created, the market value fluctuates according the settlement of bid/ask by miners as described in the whitepaper. If the market value increases 50% above the short position's deposited collateral, the miner issues a margin call against the short. Whereas, if the market value decreases 50% below the long position's deposited collateral, the miner issues a margin call against the long. The BitAsset is retired at the cost of abs(market value - collateral) and the excess collateral is returned to the short or long respectively. These threshold's appear to be an arbitrary design decision? The short and long owners can independently (or each other) deposit extra collateral at any time to avoid a margin call.

6. I assume that long and short owners can sell their position at any time thus transferring it to another keyname (i.e. anonymous entity)?

7. Can the short and long enter an algorithmic contract to exit the position at a preset expiration date?

8. What is the redeemable concept? Do you mean to say the long or short can close their position at any time without permission of the counter-party? How can that be fair?

9. In the margin call, the BitAsset is destroyed, so what happens to the collateral of the counter-party which did not receive a margin call? If it goes to them, why are they forced to redeem their BitAsset prematurely? Wouldn't a better design be let the BitAsset remain for the counter-party? Also why does the redeemed money go to the dividend pool (for that BitAsset or all BitShares?) and not to counter-party, so that the counter-party gets some leverage?

10. There is the risk that the market value moves to more than 100% of one-side of the collateral before than the miner can issue the margin call. There is no default here, it is just the redeemed money is not as great as it should be. If the redeemed money was going to the counter-party instead of the dividend pool, then the counter-party would lose some real-time time-preference, but this isn't designed to a be a real-time trading system any way.

11. It is presumed that the market will try to maintain the market value of the BitAsset proportional to the price changes in its designated asset. I have some doubt in this concept. Has it ever been tested before? Economics 101 says price is determined where the marginal supply and demand curves meet. Ignoring the proposed dividends relative to interest or leasing rates of designated assets, and relative value of holding an asset proxy in a decentralized digital store versus holding the real asset, the supply is the distribution of people who think the price will go down, relative to the premium and time-preference offered. The demand is the distribution of people who think the price will go up, relative to the premium and time-preference offered. Thus if you want the BitAsset to track the designated asset, then the expiration period should be relatively short, so that the secular price trend of that asset is not biasing the supply and demand and instead you have fairly balanced expectations for relative exchange (BitShares <-> designated asset) price moves in either direction over the short-term. I am not confident that I have captured all the math that would apply. Should we be looking at models of options, e.g. Black-Scholes?

12. Kudos on determining market price from the bid/ask that don't settle (due to positive bid/ask spread), i.e. the marginal supply and demand, as that is correct economic theory of price. And also because as you say the transactions that do settle (due to zero or negative bid/ask spread) could be transactions to self if also control the miner with winning PoW block (although they incur a transaction fee, and probably also capital gains tax if the system isn't perfectly anonymous). But couldn't a miner also exclude bid and asks, thus manipulating the market price? This appears to be a major flaw in the design.. I don't have idea for a solution yet.

13. Why canceling bid/ask takes 24 hours when blockchain becomes secure after roughly 6 blocks, e.g. 60 minutes?

14. Dividends allow idle capital to not invest in mining, we want to maximally secure the blockchain.


...to be continued, I have more analysis and thoughts to share on this...

P.S.  I am age 48, math, engineering, computer science, entrepreneur, and deep conceptual thinker.

[charleshoskinson]

P.S.  I am age 48, math, engineering, computer science, entrepreneur, and deep conceptual thinker.

Kudos on the post and I'm sure Daniel is going to have a great deal of fun thinking about your points . This is how a great product is built.

[AnonyMint]

Perhaps the following is why tracking ETFs are known to lose value during periods of volatility, because they roll over short-term futures contracts usually daily.

I need to think more deeply about this and the math. This was just off the top-of-my-head, as I just quickly read the first half of your whitepaper a couple of hours ago. Someone sent me a PM with a link to this thread.

11. It is presumed that the market will try to maintain the market value of the BitAsset proportional to the price changes in its designated asset. I have some doubt in this concept. Has it ever been tested before? Economics 101 says price is determined where the marginal supply and demand curves meet. Ignoring the proposed dividends relative to interest or leasing rates of designated assets, and relative value of holding an asset proxy in a decentralized digital store versus holding the real asset, the supply is the distribution of people who think the price will go down, relative to the premium and time-preference offered. The demand is the distribution of people who think the price will go up, relative to the premium and time-preference offered. Thus if you want the BitAsset to track the designated asset, then the expiration period should be relatively short, so that the secular price trend of that asset is not biasing the supply and demand and instead you have fairly balanced expectations for relative exchange (BitShares <-> designated asset) price moves in either direction over the short-term. I am not confident that I have captured all the math that would apply. Should we be looking at models of options, e.g. Black-Scholes?

[AnonyMint]

9. In the margin call, the BitAsset is destroyed, so what happens to the collateral of the counter-party which did not receive a margin call? If it goes to them, why are they forced to redeem their BitAsset prematurely? Wouldn't a better design be let the BitAsset remain for the counter-party? Also why does the redeemed money go to the dividend pool (for that BitAsset or all BitShares?) and not to counter-party, so that the counter-party gets some leverage?

The leverage I proposed apparently can be controlled by abs(market value - collateral) x leverage ÷ 2 as the amount of collateral of the losing side awarded to the counter-party.

12. Kudos on determining market price from the bid/ask that don't settle (due to positive bid/ask spread), i.e. the marginal supply and demand, as that is correct economic theory of price. And also because as you say the transactions that do settle (due to zero or negative bid/ask spread) could be transactions to self if also control the miner with winning PoW block (although they incur a transaction fee, and probably also capital gains tax if the system isn't perfectly anonymous). But couldn't a miner also exclude bid and asks, thus manipulating the market price? This appears to be a major flaw in the design.. I don't have idea for a solution yet.

So far, my only idea for a solution is that market makers should be separate entities from miners. Miners must take all the bid and asks sent by each market maker (take it all or none, so more difficult to hide manipulation). Each market maker resolves the bid/asks before sending them to the miners. Market makers need to receive some compensation. Users choose which market markers to use based on their performance. The miner still resolves the margin calls, using the market pricing from the market makers which the miner included in the block. The miner will have much fewer variables to play with, since users will pick market makers. Users can't pick miners, because PoW does randomly (weighted by miner's share of difficulty).

This has another benefit of enabling market makers to present real-time data of their bid/ask distributions.

It is not perfect (relies on trust which is inherently centralizing, although freedom-of-choice and P2P is more decentralized than the trading systems we have now), but no such trading system will ever be. At least you can make this P2P and the barrier-to-entry for new market makers is fairly low. Users keep it honest by monitoring the market makers they trade with.

This is why we must keep the altcoin transfers (PoW mining) orthogonal to trust based trading. The market marker will always have to be trusted.

I think an axiom is to never never make miners responsible for time-preference transactions, because there is too much conflict of interest that corrupts mining from its primary purpose which is to secure the block chain. When transactions don't have a strong time-preference then the random selection of miners by PoW insures that transactions are likely to go through, unless one entity controls a large % of the difficulty.

When I wrote my Bitcoin: The Digital Kill Switch (mirrored on a popular financial site), I was primarily worried about corporations gaining a large percentage of the PoW and then using such a cartel to gain leverage w.r.t. to time-preference of consumer transactions, e.g. Amazon's quick checkout (1 click). Later I came to find out the key developers and Satoshi had long planned (the link is buried in my posts) for Bitcoin to be taken over by the large corporations (which is very dangerous given we are headed into a period of fascism due to the need of boomers to tax at greater than the Laffer limit in order to sustain the bankrupt socialism with a police state). We are in the dangerous stage where the financial center of the world transfers, this time to Asia after 2033 with lots of pain between 2007 and 2033 (mirroring 1929 to 1955). Btw, inflation is necessary and also this link, it is centralized inflation that is bad.

Btw, I think I may have already solved the level playing field for GPU/ASIC-resistant PoW (some details buried in my posts, no code written yet). I see you are coming closer to my ideas on that since the astute (obviously very intelligent) core Bitcoin developer Gregory Maxwell challenged you.

P.S. I had some tangential misconceptions (e.g. thinking Bitcoin could be a Ponzi scheme) when I first got seriously into Bitcoin when I wrote The Digital Kill Switch. Nevertheless, the main aspect I was concerned about remains my concern.

[AnonyMint]

Discouraging domain squatting is also a good thing.

I have been involved with domain for over 15 years.  I can absolutely assure you that there is no way to even define "domain squatting."  Waiving your hand and claiming to discourage things are really "feel-good" statements and there is no way to actually do it in practice.  Even if there was a way I don't want a system that replaces a "nanny state" with "nanny developers."  If you ever hung out with anti-spam people you will know what I mean.  If they had their way they would eliminate just about every privacy law there is and cut half the world off from the Internet in their pursuit of stopping spam.  Sure, you can say discouraging spam is a good thing and most will agree but just try to actually do it without disrupting things.

Many domains that I registered and never used, ended up being used by others after I gave them up because of the hassle and cost of maintaining the $10 per year registration fees wasn't worth my possible use of them someday.

You can't give away for free a resource that is finite (the number of good brandable names is finite). One of my examples is the toll road from Makati, Manila to the airport in Pasay costs about $1 and takes 20 minutes. The free public roads take about 1 hour. Which economy do you want? Gridlock or efficiency?

I am a rational min-anarchist, so generally I agree with your ideology. But my rationality (and the min-) says that if you let people sit on capital forever without incurring any costs or dilution, then the economy must mathematically stagnate. This is why I am frowning on the proposal for dividend pools (socialism!), we need decentralized (not centralized top-down control of) inflation (c.f. the links I provided in my prior post). It is very important to understand the math at the above link. Many (probably most, if not 99% of) people who claim to be capitalists are really socialists because they don't understand the concept in that link. I also recommend reading the following tutorials on economics:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/18/money-had-never-been-tangible-period-if-you-do-not-understand-what-money-is-you-will-lose-your-shirt-more/

More:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/24/gold-5000-why/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/24/14007/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/22/no-single-investment-will-ever-be-perpetual-it-all-changes/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/21/as-the-war-cycle-turns-up-middle-east-is-going-nuts/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/24/yes-in-a-mad-max-dark-age-not-even-gold-has-value/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/23/gold-the-coming-slingshot-move/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/24/the-fire-is-burning-we-need-more-fuel/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/19/emerging-markets-collapsing/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/05/how-empires-collapse-a-orderly-path-to-conclusion/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/03/27/are-we-head-to-a-mad-max-scenario/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/05/23/mad-max-begins-in-spain/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/05/08/the-mad-max-outcome/

BRIC-by-BRIC global collapse (underway)

[AnonyMint]

HELP.org, you and I are in complete agreement.

Unfortunately I detect a whiff (not too strong) of socialism-leaning slant to the designers of this proposal. I urge them to back away from the instances of "equality" (e.g. BitShares-wide, wide-area dividend pools) in their design (unless these can be economically justified) back to the time-preference (opportunity cost) return on capital as a model of economics. Capital != money. Capital != wealth. Those are proxies for capital, which is the human productivity.

The only known global optimization algorithm where the dynamic variables are not known a priori is simulated annealing (why ice formed with slow cooling has less cracks than if flash frozen), i.e. maximum degrees-of-freedom (i.e. independent actors) with many microsteps of the state machine (slow cooling).

Binding things together (pools, sharing, and centralization) is the antithesis of degrees-of-freedom, e.g. a train has less degrees-of-freedom of movement than an offroad motorcycle (although the train has more degrees-of-freedom in cargo capacity), c.f. my two relevant blogs:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#2nd_Law_of_Thermo
http://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html#Entropic_derivation

Sometimes we tradeoff degrees-of-freedom in some facet in return for greater short-term efficiency (expediency) in another facet, e.g. closed source is more expedient but over the long-term it is less optimal.