So as an update on possible collaboration, I think we agreed that keeping things informal is the best way forward at this point. No official partnerships or mergers of any companies or any coins/projects, and it doesn't really make sense to copy-paste codebases in either direction either. But we are happy to participate in standardization efforts and collaborative discussions on technical issues as long as it's an open tent where any crypto-2.0 project can participate. I think there definitely are a few areas (eg. proof of stake algos, client standardization) where that would be quite beneficial.

Thank you for having us over, Bitshares team! Look forward to talking more online and offline in the future.

This week I am meeting with Vitalik to discuss a partnership between our two projects.  We spent several hours last night and 5 hours to day talking about blockchain technology and challenges we both face.   I am happy to report that we are finding some common ground and are planning more regular collaboration.

Some of the things we have discussed is:

Moving Ethereum to DPOS
Honoring AGS/PTS with some of the stake saved by not mining Ether.
Distributing the Mining Rewards via Delegates
Improving the performance of Ethereum
BitAssets, DNS, and other market algorithms.

Vitalik seems to be of the opinion that DPOS is the way to go and the best overall compromise.  He appears to recognize proof of work as dead and I have shown him that the "nothing at stake" argument does not apply to DPOS.    We will be working to improve upon DPOS.

With respect to Turing Completeness and claims that Ether can do everything and anything, we had a deep discussion regarding the lack of first class data structures (heaps & trees) in Ether and even had some discussion on alternative abstraction on their data store.    DPOS could significantly enhance the types of contracts ethereum could run by greatly increasing speed and effectively eliminating the potential for chain reorganizations.  

Effectively my goal is to make both projects better and to secure AGS/PTS holders a stake in Ether.  Our two communities can then work together to fill the various niches in the DAC ecosystem as we both agree that in its current incarnation Ethereum is not well suited to implementing many of the algorithms we have proposed for BitShares DACs.

Other areas of potential collaboration is our wallet technology.  Our architectures are very similar and there is potential we may be able to combine resources here.

Vatalik is a smart guy and the two of us working together really helps sharpen both of us.  

Nothing final at this stage, but I am optimistic a lot of good will come out of this.

Vitalik and I are not very "political" and mostly care about the best technology for the job.   I am merely expressing my perspective on the conversation and will let him speak for himself.  

Perhaps it indicatives technological shortcomings of Ethereum and that they have to "annex" Bitshares (like Hitler annexed Austria to get their small arms and then annexed Czechoslovakia to get their superior tanks)

All I know is that when stuff like this starts happening on a Hot August Night in the deserted streets of Raleigh, NC you get cold fusion, flux capacitors, and warp drives...

One of the things we have discussed is lessons learned from Ethereum and BTSX and ways to generalize things better:

1) We agree that smart contracts are useful
2) We agree that smart contracts + BitUSD are very powerful
3) I would like to see a full up relational DB with SQL support as the basic abstraction for the block chain.
    a)  This would allow constraints to be placed on the tables / rows
    c)  This would make indexes easy to maintain
4) I would want to use a lua scripting engine to validate transactions relative to the SQL database
    a) Ethereum currently runs at 1.3 Mhz with their C++ interpreter, storage access via level db is the most expensive operation right now.
    b) I think the data set should be kept in RAM validated by delegates.   Delegates may need $15K servers at scale, but that should be reasonable.
5) One of the major slowdowns for Eth. is the use of merkel trees to support light-weight proofs.  I would do away with this feature.
    a) On a proof of stake chain you cannot validate block headers independent of block contents because you can not use POW as a proxy for trust.
    b) With DPOS + Bonded validation agents you can get cryptographic proofs good enough for light weight clients.  Delegates can lose their job for lying.
    c) Merk. trees help serve as a "double check" on the "deterministic application of transactions", but otherwise are unnecessary.  The check can be performed independent of the consensus algorithm.

As you can see the idea that Eth. represents can benefit significantly by working with our team and we benefit from their challenges as well.   Whether or not Eth. implements DPOS you can bet that V. and I will probably keep pushing the technology forward for future chains.

Does it mean both Vitalik and Dan are so afraid of NXT that they have to join efforts now?

Does it mean both Vitalik and Dan are so afraid of NXT that they have to join efforts now?

What is market pegged BitAssets and why are they important?