BitShares Loves Puppies

[StanLarimer]

Our marketing guys got on my case today.

"Why do you keep posting to that thread with the negative headline?", they asked.

"Because that's where my favorite troll hangs out", I said.  
"He brings in all kinds of eyeballs with his whacky graphics!"

"Yeah, well, it doesn't look good.  Can't you move to a thread with a more positive headline?", they grumbled.

"But nobody will stop by without some gratuitous controversy", I pleaded.
"His negative thread is where all the eyeballs will be!  There's been nearly over 7000 views on that one thread alone!"

"Don't worry", they assured me, "Your troll will move to the new thread if that's the only place you post."
"Then you can have the best of both worlds!  A warm, fuzzy headline and lots of great troll droppings!"

I'm still a bit skeptical, but I promised them I would give it a try.  So here goes.

BitShares Loves Puppies!

These are actual Great Pyrenees puppies raised by BitShares Founder Dan "Bytemaster" Larimer.

Stay tuned to this thread for periodic updates about what we're doing at BitShares.
(Historically we've been criticized for sticking mostly to BitSharestalk.org Forum.)
But as you can see, we've recently started working hard to bring more useful content here.  Hope you like it!

Stan Larimer
BitShares Delegate

[1715438139]

1715438139

[1715438139]

1715438139

[StanLarimer]

I'll use this spot to post useful links and try to keep them up to date.

Our main website is bitshares.org.

Bytemaster takes live questions from a worldwide on-line audience every Friday at 10 Eastern Time (UTC+5) here:
Talk With Bytemaster

Media Point of Contact!

Max Wright, the author of Bitshares101 and the host on BitShares.tv,
has agreed to be a contact person for media contact/inquiries.
You could forward his contact info to them:

max@bitshares.org
skype:max.bitshares.btc

You can learn more by downloading Max Wright's in-depth BitShares 101 ebook or watching Max's great interviews on BitShares.TV.
There's are links to both on Bytemaster's Blog

chapter 6 and 7 both have updates.

they can be found at

www.bitshares.tv/chapter6
www.bitshares.tv/chapter7

They contain videos which are also helpful.

Max Wright's #1 best-selling book is now available in video form.

BitShares 101 the Movie

If you can only watch one video, start with Max's Chapter 3 in the above series.  Awesome.

There's a nice set of wallet tutorials here:  BitShares Wallet Tutorial Videos

Check out Music and PLAY for their specific software releases.

You can find out about the other independent DACs at their own websites
as featured in this newsletter in our Newsletter Archive  

There's lots of folks happy to answer other questions at
bitsharestalk.org

Las Vegas Inside Bitcoin Conference Keynote Address - Dan Larimer

Here's a series of articles I wrote for this forum to provide some background on The Origin of BitShares:

Part 1   - It Began with ProtoShares
Part 2   - The Death of Mining
Part 3   - The Ideal Mining Pool
Part 4   - AngelShares and Virtual Mining
Part 5   - POW to POS to TaPOS to DPOS!
Part 6   - Sharedrops and Snapshots
Part 7   - BitShares Sharedrop Theory
Part 8   - Experimenting and Pivoting
Part 9   - What is a SuperDAC?
Part 10 - BitShares Unleashed

BitShares Wiki

Here's a nice set of tutorial videos
Riverhead plans many more, so check back here periodically.

http://whatisbitusd.com/tutorials/

Another great source of info on BitShares - Google's BitShares Community

And here is another site chock full of BitShares news:  http://bitsharesblog.com/beyond-bitcoin-show-talks-with-bytemaster-about-bitshares-development/

List of websites/blogs from forum members that have something to do with bitshares.)

http://beyondbitcoinshow.com/
http://abelljefrry.tumblr.com/post/104919639158/commissioned-work-for-bitshares-marketing
http://www1.agsexplorer.com/
http://bitsapphire.com/
http://bitshares.org/
http://bitsharesblocks.com/
http://bitsharesbreakout.com/
http://www.btsx.me/
http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/
http://digitalgaia.io/
http://freebit.lofter.com/
https://rgcrypto.wordpress.com/
http://thecomingbitsharesrevolution.website/
http://tuckfheman.com/tagged/Bitshares
http://whatisbitusd.com/
http://www.bitshares.kr/
http://www.bitshares.tv/
http://www.bitshares2.blogspot.com.es/
http://www.bts.hk/
http://www.btsabc.org/
http://www.btswolf.com/
http://www.galtreport.com/
http://www.isg3d.com/
http://www.letstalkbitcoin.com/
http://www.minebitshares.com/
http://www.roseebit.com/
http://www.scoop.it/t/bitshares
http://www.xfund.fund/
https://sites.google.com/site/38ptswarrior/

i skipped all the newbies because that would have killed me  

Finally, here is a nice product brochure that you can download and print...

English flyer in A4 print size (front):
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1T3mDxaa7U0IOaD251yNwNiqI_9Fier7QgtnBm3hCzyI/edit
 
English flyer in A4 print size (back):
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/10mf7scN4ldCoXy8alz7UCkzt7N3tTQwJWS81zXfNMxs/edit
 

Troll Chest

Finally, lest they be lost forever, we add links to our favorite troll graveyard.
In addition to some outrageous (even funny) troll FUD, these contain some serious discussions among the foul droppings.

Communist BitShares Wealth Redistribution is Theft
BitShares? interesting ! bullish
Even though BTS devs are greedy, it's still better tech than NXT and NuBits
Is BitShares a Blog or a Bitcoin 2.0 project?
Nubits vs Bitshares vs Bitbay
BitShares is Dead
Where are those Bitshares' Shills?
JOIN OR DIE! United We Stand... Divided We Fall!
BitShares Greed
More BitShares Greed

[StanLarimer]

One of the biggest strengths of BitShares, DAC is that it is able to autonomously hire its own developers and marketeers by automatically recycling a few percent of its growth to pay their salaries - without involving any corruptible manned company.  This is an often overlooked form of decentralization you don't find in many leading blockchains.

Of course, this leads to worries about whether delegates are earning their pay, so we encourage them to give periodic reports to the stakeholder community who elect and fire them.

I like to highlight delegates who are doing a particularly good job of implementing this "Hired by the Blockchain" vision.  Here is this week's admirable example of what having up to 101 paid delegate slots can do for a chain:

Delegate report from BitShares in Argentina
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11847.msg179915#msg179915

[EvilDave]

Hmmmm......think your marketing boyz should recognise that your 'favourite troll' is actually responsible for raising BTS' profile on BitCoinTalk in the last few weeks.
And, as the old saying goes, theres no such thing as bad publicity.  Not to mention that he may have a valid point or two......

Anyhow, all this is completely moot, because now that Stan has come out in favour of puppies for BTS, I have an announcement to make:

NXT! We love kittens more !



OK. NXT wins. Obviously.

Hmm, that seemed almost too easy.

[nomoreheroes7]

This is the best thread ever.

Who doesn't love puppies???



I'm officially all in BTS. How can you resist that face??

Sorry NXT, kittens just ain't doing it for me...

[Daedelus]

Hss the flaw improved security in Bitshares Come from Beyond suggested been fixed implemented? It only took 22 colluding nodes to bork the chain, according to his modelling.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Hss the flaw in Bitshares Come from Beyond found been fixed? It only taked 22 colluding nodes to bork the chain, according to his modelling.

That was not a flaw. Just some suggestions how to improve security, if I recall correctly.

[Daedelus]

Cunicula returns?

Post edited.

[Crestington]

There is no such thing as bad publicity and people are more likely to read through a thread calling Bitshares a scam than something bland and informative.

Hell, I learned a lot about Bitshares through that thread and thought the meme's were pretty funny

Just for kicks, here is another meme for you which represents Bitshares as a Cryptocurrency

[StanLarimer]

Now THAT is a more civilized competition!

And now a word from our sponsor:

Bytemaster just published some insights about how the BitShares Decentralized Exchange deals with front running.

Front running happens when a broker executes his own orders prior to executing the orders of his customers. This can be extremely profitable to the broker which can buy a stock just before a large buy order pushes the price up and then sell the stock just before a large sell order pushes the price down. This can occur any time one market participant has the ability to see orders from other participants and insert new orders in front of them. BitShares has an open order book and all transactions are broadcast for all to see with up to 10 seconds notice. This means that anyone can see your order and change their order to maximize their own profit. To protect users BitShares uses a you get what you asked for (YGWYAF) market engine that produces the same result for the market participants as perfect front running. This article explains why.

Read the rest here...  How BitShares Prevents Front Running

We now resume our regularly scheduled pet tournament...

[StanLarimer]

Hss the flaw in Bitshares Come from Beyond found been fixed? It only taked 22 colluding nodes to bork the chain, according to his modelling.

That was not a flaw. Just some suggestions how to improve security, if I recall correctly.

That's an amazing creature. 
Definitely innovative. 
What exactly is it?

[lucky88888]

That's an amazing creature. 
Definitely innovative. 
What exactly is it?

That is BCNext's true experiment! Half Cat half dog. To bring the dog and the cat loving community together!

[StanLarimer]

That's an amazing creature.  
Definitely innovative.  
What exactly is it?

That is BCNext's true experiment! Half Cat half dog. To bring the dog and the cat loving community together!

Looks like an innovative, stabilized Derivative to me!  

(But you should say "Half Dog and Half Cat",  never say "Half Cat and Half Dog",  Always say "Half Dog and Half Cat")

[Come-from-Beyond]

What exactly is it?

No idea. Maybe an old master of kung fu...

[Crestington]

That's an amazing creature.  
Definitely innovative.  
What exactly is it?

That is BCNext's true experiment! Half Cat half dog. To bring the dog and the cat loving community together!

Looks like an innovative, stabilized Derivative to me!  

(But you should say "Half Dog and Half Cat",  never say "Half Cat and Half Dog",  Always say "Half Dog and Half Cat")

OH MY GOD!! BITSHARES AND NXT ARE MERGING!!!!!

[StanLarimer]

This just out - integration with ShapeShift!  (I think that's a fox, not a cat, in their logo.)



What's cool about this is you can move your BTC to BitUSD in about 60 seconds and bring them back to BTC when you want to spend them.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, while it's in your BitUSD "Savings Account", you earn variable interest (generally at least 1% right now) and you are insulated from drops in BTC price.  Bring it back to your Bitcoin "Checking Account" when you want to make a payment.  (Or send it directly as BitUSD to someone with a BitShares wallet in just 10 seconds.)  

Conversion among other currencies and BitAssets is coming soon.

[StanLarimer]

You can see this at https://shapeshift.io/

This is brilliant,  +5%

I just tested with BTS to bitUSD just for fun: sent 1000 BTS, got ~10 bitUSD back in the next block. Pure awesomeness

Now if they can add bitEURO and bitCNY as well, maybe even bitGOLD, then they'll have a full pseudo-fiat <=> BTC service

Anyone know what their depsit limits depend on? Will they get increased with time?

[StanLarimer]

Smart Wallets and Instant Exchanges

Great video Max Wright interviews ShapeShift's head of operations about this whole new genre of "instant exchanges"

Smart Wallets are here! Bitcoin usage will explode in the developing world

[StanLarimer]

At the tail end of Max's video mentioned above, he gives a nice little tour of the bitAsset page at bitsharesblocks.com

[Crestington]

This just out - integration with ShapeShift!  (I think that's a fox, not a cat, in their logo.)



What's cool about this is you can move your BTC to BitUSD in about 60 seconds and bring them back to BTC when you want to spend them.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, while it's in your BitUSD "Savings Account", you earn variable interest (generally at least 1% right now) and you are insulated from drops in BTC price.  Bring it back to your Bitcoin "Checking Account" when you want to make a payment.  (Or send it directly as BitUSD to someone with a BitShares wallet in just 10 seconds.)  

Conversion among other currencies and BitAssets is coming soon.

So hot

Your missing a link to the website and people are pretty lazy to go and google it.

You guys should work on some games to add, big investors and a forum full of rocket scientists are great but surely you are missing out on the massive amount of noobs. DogeCoin doesn't have the tech but they do have a fun community which keeps people around and arguably some of the best marketing around.

[StanLarimer]

This just out - integration with ShapeShift!  (I think that's a fox, not a cat, in their logo.)

What's cool about this is you can move your BTC to BitUSD in about 60 seconds and bring them back to BTC when you want to spend them.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, while it's in your BitUSD "Savings Account", you earn variable interest (generally at least 1% right now) and you are insulated from drops in BTC price.  Bring it back to your Bitcoin "Checking Account" when you want to make a payment.  (Or send it directly as BitUSD to someone with a BitShares wallet in just 10 seconds.)  

Conversion among other currencies and BitAssets is coming soon.

So hot

Your missing a link to the website and people are pretty lazy to go and google it.

You guys should work on some games to add, big investors and a forum full of rocket scientists are great but surely you are missing out on the massive amount of noobs. DogeCoin doesn't have the tech but they do have a fun community which keeps people around and arguably some of the best marketing around.

I did post this further above but it never hurts to do it again.  You can see this at https://shapeshift.io/

I'd be interested in everybody's experience with it.  Right now it's in testing with limited transaction sizes but they'll open it up as soon as everything checks out.  I've heard nothing but good things so far.  Let's see what you guys think.

We were just discussing the role of games to help bootstrap awareness in Bytemaster's Live Q&A Session today.  I noticed the ideas were being kicked around on various threads at bitsharestalk.org.  Some like the idea, some hate it.  I suspect we'll see something along this line in a month or two.

[Crestington]

This just out - integration with ShapeShift!  (I think that's a fox, not a cat, in their logo.)

What's cool about this is you can move your BTC to BitUSD in about 60 seconds and bring them back to BTC when you want to spend them.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, while it's in your BitUSD "Savings Account", you earn variable interest (generally at least 1% right now) and you are insulated from drops in BTC price.  Bring it back to your Bitcoin "Checking Account" when you want to make a payment.  (Or send it directly as BitUSD to someone with a BitShares wallet in just 10 seconds.)  

Conversion among other currencies and BitAssets is coming soon.

So hot

Your missing a link to the website and people are pretty lazy to go and google it.

You guys should work on some games to add, big investors and a forum full of rocket scientists are great but surely you are missing out on the massive amount of noobs. DogeCoin doesn't have the tech but they do have a fun community which keeps people around and arguably some of the best marketing around.

I did post this further above but it never hurts to do it again.  You can see this at https://shapeshift.io/

I'd be interested in everybody's experience with it.  Right now it's in testing with limited transaction sizes but they'll open it up as soon as everything checks out.  I've heard nothing but good things so far.  Let's see what you guys think.

We were just discussing the role of games to help bootstrap awareness in Bytemaster's Live Q&A Session today.  I noticed the ideas were being kicked around on various threads at bitsharestalk.org.  Some like the idea, some hate it.  I suspect we'll see something along this line in a month or two.

The games and gambling are inevitable but I guess the challenge there is making sure that even if a government disagrees with the aspect of gambling that it is decentralized enough that there is no way to regulate it or intervene. People like games and gambling and social aspects so adding all of that increases exposure which would be better for Bitshares holders.

I think if you could do it where the gambling profits benefits the entire userbase equally then there would be no problem.

[StanLarimer]

Cruise ships are an interesting example.
When a ship pulls into port they close their onboard casino.
When they get to international waters, the casino lights up!

Sovereign DACs live in international waters by their very nature.
How are they different?

[Nxtblg]

All righty...since NFD finally moved from 2 satoshis to 3, and has stayed up there, I'll join in:

"All Into The Bowl."

[StanLarimer]

All righty...since NFD finally moved from 2 satoshis to 3, and has stayed up there, I'll join in:

"All Into The Bowl."

"I'm not uncovering the food until you guys back off!"

[StanLarimer]

Smart Wallets and Instant Exchanges

Great video Max Wright interviews ShapeShift's head of operations about this whole new genre of "instant exchanges"

Smart Wallets are here! Bitcoin usage will explode in the developing world

Here is BitShares' modest contribution to Bitcoin's success... "Just in time Bitcoins"

"With light wallets on the way and ShapeShift already integrated, It won't be long before someone releases a wallet that is both BTC and BTS integrated that uses ShapeShift to easily go back and forth between the two.  Now every user on the planet can download a single app and hedge BTC in a bear market with one click.  That will crush it."  - Max Wright

Now people can stay in crypto while hopping between ubiquitous checking and yield-bearing stable savings for pennies.

[JakeThePanda]

My Jake as a puppy.  Jake loves Bitshares.

[StanLarimer]

Indeed, that is one smart dog!

(I'll bet if you took a poll of all smart dogs they would each reach that same conclusion.)

Most smart dogs are also very freedom-oriented in their beliefs.  I can't tell for sure from the forum name, but I'll bet it was one smart dog that decided to create and post this transcript:

I listened to this one again. Dan's comments about his philosophy and the future of the block chain are worth rereading. Impromptu partial transcript below:

Max Wright: Share for us what your idea of the philosophy of freedom and the philosophy that you brought to bitshares….

Dan Larimer: The philosophy of freedom, for me, is all about “don’t do unto other people what you don’t want other people doing to you.” That’s the non-aggression principle. But if you apply that consistently, you can derive my entire worldview and philosophy. I use technology as a means of reaching the ends. A means of reaching that freedom, that ideal, of implementing that technology in society. There are a lot of places online where Libertarians rant, “the government is doing this, the government is doing that. Let’s petition them, let’s ask them, let’s beg them.” Some people say that we should fight violently and overthrow them. But I am very much of the mindset that the free market needs to be able to provide security--needs to be able to protect our life, liberty and property against all aggressors. That means that the free market needs to produce solutions that can protect us against today’s governments, without requiring that today’s governments disappear first. The solution needs to be so powerful and so effective that they work today, even in the middle of what many people consider to be a “big brother” government, a “1984” surveillance society.

Max Wright: Let’s talk about where this technology is going.

Dan Larimer: Where the Internet and block chain technology can take us as a society, where every transaction you do is settled on a block chain. Where every dispute that you have is resolved on a block chain. Where your reputation and identity are managed on a block chain.  Where your voting happens on a block chain. And where all laws -- that you agree to follow -- you can sign to, and post it on a block chain. Whenever you go to do business with someone, you bump your phones together and it verifies that you've got compatible arbitration agreements automatically. And when you make that purchase, you've got a signed record, a signed receipt of what it is that you are buying and what terms you agree to. So you've got these verifiable, provable signatures, you've got built-in arbitration, you are only accountable to your own laws, and every member of society can be bonded by posting a bond on the block chain in security against compliance with the laws that you have agreed to follow. And all of this stuff can be done in an entirely voluntary manner that does not depend upon initiating force or violence against anyone. It can be done in an entirely legal way because it only depends upon free speech and voluntary association.

So I envision that block chain technology will allow us to create a world where the incentives for being part of the... block chain community, that the efficiencies you gain are so strong, that your profits are so much higher, that being rejected or shunned by that community forces you to deal with people outside it -- people who have to charge higher fees, require security deposits for your utilities, for your rent, everything under the sun. The cost of doing business outside the system will be higher than the cost inside the system. I can see this creating a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle, where the more people that join and participate and start doing commerce entirely on a block chain -- merchants and consumers -- never having to lead back to the fiat world. You’ll start to see a growing snowball effect until it gets to the point that no one will dare being a government official because they would be excluded because they are participating in the initiation of violence against others. So these things are possible. I believe there is a solution. I do not believe that violence is a necessary response to violence -- that you must create governments in order to have law and order. I believe that good people don’t have to resort to bad things just because bad people exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wczMKASQk6s

[Crestington]

Indeed, that is one smart dog!

(I'll bet if you took a poll of all smart dogs they would each reach that same conclusion.)

Most smart dogs are also very freedom-oriented in their beliefs.  I can't tell for sure from the forum name, but I'll bet it was one smart dog that decided to create and post this transcript:

I listened to this one again. Dan's comments about his philosophy and the future of the block chain are worth rereading. Impromptu partial transcript below:

Max Wright: Share for us what your idea of the philosophy of freedom and the philosophy that you brought to bitshares….

Dan Larimer: The philosophy of freedom, for me, is all about “don’t do unto other people what you don’t want other people doing to you.” That’s the non-aggression principle. But if you apply that consistently, you can derive my entire worldview and philosophy. I use technology as a means of reaching the ends. A means of reaching that freedom, that ideal, of implementing that technology in society. There are a lot of places online where Libertarians rant, “the government is doing this, the government is doing that. Let’s petition them, let’s ask them, let’s beg them.” Some people say that we should fight violently and overthrow them. But I am very much of the mindset that the free market needs to be able to provide security--needs to be able to protect our life, liberty and property against all aggressors. That means that the free market needs to produce solutions that can protect us against today’s governments, without requiring that today’s governments disappear first. The solution needs to be so powerful and so effective that they work today, even in the middle of what many people consider to be a “big brother” government, a “1984” surveillance society.

Max Wright: Let’s talk about where this technology is going.

Dan Larimer: Where the Internet and block chain technology can take us as a society, where every transaction you do is settled on a block chain. Where every dispute that you have is resolved on a block chain. Where your reputation and identity are managed on a block chain.  Where your voting happens on a block chain. And where all laws -- that you agree to follow -- you can sign to, and post it on a block chain. Whenever you go to do business with someone, you bump your phones together and it verifies that you've got compatible arbitration agreements automatically. And when you make that purchase, you've got a signed record, a signed receipt of what it is that you are buying and what terms you agree to. So you've got these verifiable, provable signatures, you've got built-in arbitration, you are only accountable to your own laws, and every member of society can be bonded by posting a bond on the block chain in security against compliance with the laws that you have agreed to follow. And all of this stuff can be done in an entirely voluntary manner that does not depend upon initiating force or violence against anyone. It can be done in an entirely legal way because it only depends upon free speech and voluntary association.

So I envision that block chain technology will allow us to create a world where the incentives for being part of the... block chain community, that the efficiencies you gain are so strong, that your profits are so much higher, that being rejected or shunned by that community forces you to deal with people outside it -- people who have to charge higher fees, require security deposits for your utilities, for your rent, everything under the sun. The cost of doing business outside the system will be higher than the cost inside the system. I can see this creating a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle, where the more people that join and participate and start doing commerce entirely on a block chain -- merchants and consumers -- never having to lead back to the fiat world. You’ll start to see a growing snowball effect until it gets to the point that no one will dare being a government official because they would be excluded because they are participating in the initiation of violence against others. So these things are possible. I believe there is a solution. I do not believe that violence is a necessary response to violence -- that you must create governments in order to have law and order. I believe that good people don’t have to resort to bad things just because bad people exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wczMKASQk6s

The thing I find most interesting about governments is that there are so many that complain about the inefficiencies, surveillance and corruption but when faced with legal issues out of their control such as theft of their personal property or large scale fraud (Mt. Gox) that they would turn to their governments and demand that they solve the issues. The US Government in general is horribly inefficient with Democrats and Republicans spending all their time arguing over issues that nothing really gets done and  hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year in order to make the other side seem less credible along with over bloated pension funds and exuberant wages for basically doing nothing when that money would be better spent on basic needs. The Blockchain solves a lot of these issues by taking away the centralized control of the monetary system but the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the adaption of the Blockchain into a full nationwide monetary system is how Governments would pay for maintenance of infrastructure since it isn't like the average person would just go out and donate money to the Government in order to pay for these services. It seems inevitable that Governments would have to transition to Blockchain technology and the sooner they start to adapt the better but they have yet to even begin and the question would be, how they would make the transition?

[oblivi]

These puppies are so cute and huggable. Puppies are always a great marketing point of attraction. I think im going to buy over 9000 Bitshares as we speak.

[StanLarimer]

These puppies are so cute and huggable. Puppies are always a great marketing point of attraction. I think im going to buy over 9000 Bitshares as we speak.

[StanLarimer]

The thing I find most interesting about governments is that there are so many that complain about the inefficiencies, surveillance and corruption but when faced with legal issues out of their control such as theft of their personal property or large scale fraud (Mt. Gox) that they would turn to their governments and demand that they solve the issues. The US Government in general is horribly inefficient with Democrats and Republicans spending all their time arguing over issues that nothing really gets done and  hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year in order to make the other side seem less credible along with over bloated pension funds and exuberant wages for basically doing nothing when that money would be better spent on basic needs. The Blockchain solves a lot of these issues by taking away the centralized control of the monetary system but the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the adaption of the Blockchain into a full nationwide monetary system is how Governments would pay for maintenance of infrastructure since it isn't like the average person would just go out and donate money to the Government in order to pay for these services. It seems inevitable that Governments would have to transition to Blockchain technology and the sooner they start to adapt the better but they have yet to even begin and the question would be, how they would make the transition?

The only reason we have governments is because no one can stand the alternative. (That would be organized crime, but I repeat myself.)

I believe that the way forward is to provide better alternatives to government, things that make government irrelevant, things that restrict its abuses, but not the elimination of all that is barely keeping a finger in the dike of untamed human nature.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.    

-- Declaration of Independence

Anything that will work on the blockchain shouldn't need government - let the free market handle it.  Bitcoin funds itself via inflation at the tune of several hundred million dollars per year.  At government replacement scale, that would be many billions available to fund operations.  Um, if you didn't have to burn it paying miners to buy electricity.

At government scale using BitShare's DPOS "miners", all those funds would be redirected to pay for useful work like operations, infrastructure, and developing new services.

Of course, with BitShares we are only recycling a few percent of annual growth to fund growth.  Long before we reach government scale, we won't need to do that because we can fund it all out of fees for services rendered.  So far to date we have been net deflationary.

So, yes, move as much as possible of what the governments do onto the block chain.  That's ultimately what we are trying to do to wean ourselves away from dependency on government to enforce a level playing field and an incorruptible set of rules.  Providing a decentralized exchange and stabilized currency products is just our warm-up act.

[StanLarimer]

And there is a bigger problem than government corruption.  It is the chief source of that corruption...

Welcome to the Blockchain!  A nice tune to have playing in the background while you browse this forum...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnunXnLdJdw

[StanLarimer]

For the record, BitShares loves groundhogs too.

[bitcreditscc]

And there is a bigger problem than government corruption.  It is the chief source of that corruption...

Welcome to the Blockchain!  A nice tune to have playing in the background while you browse this forum...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnunXnLdJdw

You've resorted to copying my opening line???

bitcredits.website

[G2M]

For the record, BitShares loves groundhogs too.

This most certainly isn't a puppy.

[StanLarimer]

Four ways to hedge Bitcoin using BitShares.

Here's a quick summary of four efficient ways to step off the crypto elevator on down-swings and back onto it each swing up without having to exit to fiat.

1.  Use a Centralized Exchange to trade between real BTC and your favorite BitAsset (BitUSD, BitGOLD, BitEUR, BitSilver, BitCNY).

This stays in crypto (and does incur larger fees and counterparty risk while the exchange is holding your assets for you) but you are hedged against volatility while you are sitting in a BitAsset on that exchange.

2.  Use a BitShares Gateway to to trade between real BTC and your favorite BitAsset on the BitShares Decentralized Exchange.

This stays in crypto (and does incur exchange-like fees) but eliminates counterparty risk except the moments your are actually passing through the gateway to get to the safety of a decentralized exchange and the stability and yield of a BitAsset.

3.  Stay on the BitShares Decentralized Exchange and trade BitBTC against your favorite BitAsset.

This stays in the low fee / counterparty-free trade zone while letting your purchasing power track BTC when it is climbing and sitting out any down drafts by tracking some other BitAsset and earning yield.  This is the cheapest way to toggle risk-on/risk-off.  Pennies per toggle.

4.  Use a smart wallet with integrated ShapeShift technology to switch between real BTC and a BitAsset on the fly.  

You move between BitAssets and real Bitcoin at the touch of a button - just in time to spend it.  The rest of the time you are in BitAssets, safe from volatility and earning a yield.  You are only exposed to ShapeShift counterparty risk and fees during the moments it takes to transition through their gateway.

[StanLarimer]

You've resorted to copying my opening line???

bitcredits.website

Actually I linked to media.boreme.com/post_media/2013/thomas-jefferson-banking.jpg

But, Cool!  Anybody that quotes Thomas Jefferson and recognizes who the real Bad Guys are is a friend of mine!

Amazing fact:
  
John Adams (2nd President) and Thomas Jefferson (3rd President)
both died within 5 hours on the Fourth of July, 1826
exactly 50 years
to the day
after they signed the Declaration of Independence
 
and exactly 13 years short of two centuries
to the day
prior to the founding of BitShares (I3)
on the Fourth of July, 2013.

Mind-boggling coincidence?

[StanLarimer]

ShapeShift's Press Release

Here's an excerpt:

Site is now the fastest way to buy or sell BTS and BitUSD assets online

Canton, Geneva (PRWEB) February 02, 2015

ShapeShift.io has integrated the BitUSD and BTS digital assets into its instant exchange platform. Consumers can now buy and sell BTS and BitUSD anywhere in the world instantly with Bitcoin, Ripple, Dogecoin, NXT, or over 15 other leading cryptocurrencies with ShapeShift.io.

The speed and convenience comes from the platform's minimalist design, with no signup process or account required.

As the digital currency ecosystem continues to rapidly grow, integration between platforms is accelerating. ShapeShift.io, which launched in August 2014, has risen quickly as the most convenient way to buy or sell the leading digital assets. The site has integrated over a dozen of these currencies to date, enabling instant conversion between all of them directly.

Read More

[barwizi]

Among the so called 2.0 projects, only BTS has gone that far, so yeah props for that. The rest of the arguments are pretty much political and based on opinions not fact..

[Nxtblg]

[StanLarimer]

I knew NXT champions would eventually come to their senses.  This is a great start! 

[StanLarimer]

I ran across a new BitShares delegate proposal that I thought I would share with you.
I have no idea whether this individual will get elected (it's very competitive),
but this is certainly a well done proposal.

I bet there are a lot more of you out there who could write a proposal like this.
Why not give it a shot?

Hi!

tl;dr: I'm a professional software developer with 15+ years of experience and I'd like to work on the client and take some load off the core team. Please vote for me:

Code:

wallet_approve_delegate dev-pc.bitcube true

.

Delegate proposal website: http://bts.quisquis.de/delegate/proposal.html


BitShares Delegate Proposal

My name is Peter Conrad and I propose to create a delegate for funding my work. Please support my proposal and vote for me:

Code:

wallet_approve_delegate dev-pc.bitcube true

A. What I have to offer

I'm a freelance software developer and I would like to offer my expertise to the BitShares DAC. Read up on my professional background if you like. As you can see ;-) I'm not a GUI type. My preference is backend programming, network interfaces and console stuff.

I have done most of the backend work for porting PTS to PTS-DPOS. PTS-DPOS is basically a fork from BitShares-0.4.23.1, so I'm already familiar with the BitShares codebase.

I see my activities mainly in these areas (in no particular order, priorities will be worked out together with the core devs on a case-by-case basis):

1. Infrastructure

For PTS I have implemented a dynamic list of seed nodes published via DNS. Porting this to BitShares should be simple. I will create and maintain such a list for BitShares (and DevShares) and publish it in the DNS. These DNS names can then be added to the static list of seed nodes built into the client. Every time the client is started, it will fetch a fresh list of seed nodes from DNS and use these. (Once set up, the list is updated automatically and requires hardly any manual maintenance.)

To my surprise, the current client does not work with IPv6. This is a no-go for a brand new networking application, IMO. I will work on porting the networking code to IPv6.

I will continue to provide my Linux packages of BTS (and DVS) for the current set of distributions (CentOS, Fedora, openSUSE), free of charge - I would do that anyway. I can work for pay on adding support for Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu and ArchLinux.

2. External APIs

The BitShares code already contains a very elegant mechanism for defining and generating the external RPC API (also used by the GUI wallet). The same mechanism also generates the command line interface.

The next logical step is to use this mechanism for generating a common API for external applications. I'm thinking of a BitShares-Java API, a Perl module, C library etc., similar to what Xeroc has already started for Python.

In addition to generating the plain method calls, the parameter types and return types should be formalized as well.

3. Code Quality

A delicate subject. This is not about bashing other people's coding style. It is also not about throwing everything away and starting from scratch (only better this time). Nevertheless, objective metrics on code quality exist, and application on the BitShares codebase suggests that there is room for improvement.

What is code quality and why is it important?

Clean code is simple in the sense that it is easy to read and easy to understand. It is highly modular and well-structured.

When code is easy to read it is also easier to see bugs. This leads to a better product.

Code that is easy to understand makes it easier for new developers to join the team, reducing the time (and cost!) to get them up to speed.

Well-structured code is also easier to maintain, reducing the time (and cost) to find and fix bugs.

Modular code facilitates adding new features to an existing program. It is easier (and cheaper) to add a new module than to fiddle with many details all over the codebase.

Modular code also facilitates code reuse. Reuse reduces the overall code size, which leads to more simplicity, fewer bugs and lower maintenance cost.

How to get there?

•     Educate others. Not with long monotonous lectures, but by setting examples. By generating interest, explaining and giving pointers.
•     Introduce tools. I plan to select tools and metrics for evaluating code quality to highlight problem areas and measure improvement over time.
•     Apply the boy scout principle: Always leave the code cleaner than you found it.

4. Grunt work

There are currently (2015-01-31) 130 open issues in the main github repo. Some of these are more than 7 months old. This is not a sign of lazyness (there are more than a thousand closed issues), it's a sign of an overworked dev team. I can take up some of these issues, taking load off the core team.

In a similar way, I can investigate issues posted by forum users that never even make it into a github ticket.

B. Suggested mode of operation

1. Pricing

I can offer to work for the BitShares DAC for €55.00/hour including all expenses. (This is less than my usual rate, and more than 20% less than the average.) I will adapt the amount of work I'm doing to the exchange rate of BTS/EUR.

I will not charge for

•     time spent on the forum,
•     work that is immediately applicable to PTS-DPOS (the codebases have diverged and merging changes is a real PITA anyway),
•     things I would have done anyway (like maintaining my linux packages, see above).

2. Delegate Operation

I suggest that a 3rd party runs a 100% delegate on my behalf. This should be either an individual living outside the EU, or a business located outside Germany. This serves two purposes:

•     It is a tax optimization - in this setup I don't have to charge VAT.
•     It is an insurance to the DAC - the 3rd party can check that I'm actually working for my money, and withhold/burn the funds if I don't.

The 3rd party will have to make their identity (name and address) known to me, so I can send them a proper bill (for example on a monthly basis). These bills (excluding the 3rd party's identity) plus a more detailed report will be published here for you, the shareholders, to check.

The 3rd party should agree on a fixed price for their own service in this setup, which will also be paid from the delegate proceeds. Any remaining funds below a threshold (for example two weeks of delegate payment) will be carried over to the next month, the rest (above the threshold) will be burned.

The first two weeks of pay will be taken as compensation for the registration fee.

3. Delegate Operator

Cube has agreed to run the delegate for me. He's a long time member of our community and has been running very reliable PTS-DPOS delegates for a while now.

I am a IT consultant cum project manager by profession. I started as a developer and a system admin before moving on to a sys analyst, senior analyst and then the project manager role. My IT profession and experiences are over 20 years. I am one of the team members responsible for the release of PTS DPOS. I detailed my interest in crypto here.

- Cube

Cube will charge USD 135.00 per month for his services. This includes hosting, server maintenance and bookkeeping. At the current rate, USD 135.00 is roughly 10% of the total delegate earnings.

4. Vote for me!

Code:

wallet_approve_delegate dev-pc.bitcube true

Thank you very much!

[StanLarimer]

Here's a series of articles I wrote for this forum to provide some background on The Origin of BitShares:

Part 1   - It Began with ProtoShares
Part 2   - The Death of Mining
Part 3   - The Ideal Mining Pool
Part 4   - AngelShares and Virtual Mining
Part 5   - POW to POS to TaPOS to DPOS!
Part 6   - Sharedrops and Snapshots
Part 7   - BitShares Sharedrop Theory
Part 8   - Experimenting and Pivoting
Part 9   - What is a SuperDAC?
Part 10 - BitShares Unleashed

I've reposted the links here for your convenience.

[StanLarimer]

   

 
I&E 550: Innovation and Cryptoventures

Today Bytemaster had the opportunity to present a two-hour lecture at the Duke University School of Business in Durham, North Carolina under invitation from Professor Campbell R. Harvey (the guy with the necktie).  The forty students taking this course are a mixture of computer science, business, and law majors who are interested in learning about starting entrepreneurial businesses in the crypto industry. The class is divided into eleven teams, each of which is required to develop a crypto business as part of their course objectives.

As you can probably imagine, Dan talked about Decentralized Autonomous Companies (DACs) and how to make them profitable.  Among the opportunities he discussed were:

1.  Cloning the BitShares block chain using the BitShares Toolkit to produce independent businesses like MUSIC and PLAY.
2.  Adding your own business logic like VOTE and DNS to BitShares itself to leverage it's delegates, community, currencies and network effect.
3.  Using BitShares User Issued Assets (UIA) to issue regulation compliant shares in a brick and mortar and flesh and blood company.
4.  What it takes to add your own Market Pegged Asset (MPA) to BitShares.
5.  The opportunity to create a business based on issuing one or more Prediction Market Assets (PMA).
6.  Becoming a BitShares Delegate and using that to bootstrap a startup business.
7.  Creating supporting business for third party add-ons, services, and products inside the emerging ecosystem.
8.  Crowd Funding vs. Crowd Hiring to bootstrap and sustain block chain based businesses.

Unfortunately there are no notes or slides to give you since Dan's lecture was given "off the cuff," but we did record it and hope to publish some or all of his best riffs before long.

For some reason I found Professor Harvey's course reading list particularly interesting, but you should check out all the other resource links on the course web site as well.

Readings

Andrychowicz, Marcin, Stefan Dziembowski, Daniel Malinowski, Łukasz Mazurek, 2013, Secure Multiparty Computations on Bitcoin.
Antonopoulos, Andreas, 2014. Mastering Bitcoin. [advanced]
Back, Adam, Matt Corallo, Luke Dashjr, Mark Friedenbach, Gregory Maxwell, Andrew Miller, Andrew Poelstra, Jorge Timón, and Pieter Wuille, 2014, Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains
Fortnow, Lance. 2013. The Golden Ticket. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goldwasser, Shaffi and Mihir Bellare, 2008, Lecture Notes on Cryptography. [Advanced]
Grinberg, Reuben. 2011, Bitcoin: An Innovative Alternative Digital Currency.
Harvey, Campbell R., 2014a, Cryptofinance.
Harvey, Campbell R., 2014b, Bitcoin Myths and Facts.
Hearn, Mike, 2014. The future of money.
Isaacson, Walter, 2014. The innovators: How a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution. [Amazon link]
King, Ritchie S., Sam Williams, David Yanofsky, 2013, By reading this article, you're mining bitcoins. Quartz. [Explains mining process and network architecture]
Larimer, Stan. 2103. Bitcoin and the Three Laws of Robotics.
Nakamoto, Satoshi, 2009. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
Selgin, George. Synthetic Commodity Money.
Szabo, Nick. The idea of smart contracts
Szabo, Nick. Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks.

Perhaps the most amazing thing to me was that a university group of that size and diversity could reach unanimous consensus on anything.  But not a single person in that entire lecture hall expressed one shred of disagreement with Dan's unspoken assertion that dogs are much better than cats.

[StanLarimer]

Here's a tiny 30 second video sample:

Bytemaster on How Much Decentralization is Enough

[StanLarimer]

Over on The Thread That Must Not Be Named, DE has raised some legitimate questions and presented them rationally, so I am happy to address them.

http://bitsharesblocks.com/delegates

This picture really says it all.  The top delegate only has ~17% of the vote.  This is a perfect example to show how easy it is for the wealthiest stakeholders to control the delegates.

That's true that in all blockchains stakeholders/hashpower can collude, but they can only collude in a one-to-one proportion to their stake/hash.  Since approval voting is used in delegate elections, I maintain that large stakeholders can effectively collude to a multiple proportion of their stake.  Whereby, for example, 20% of colluding stake can disproportionately influence the elections of more than 20% of the delegates.  This leads to a coalition of a few wealthy stakeholders being able to determine the outcomes of the mass majority of the delegate elections.  This is especially true considering that voter turnout of smaller stakeholders will be lower than the voter turnout of larger stakeholders.  As I said previously, it would be the intention of the colluding wealthy stakeholders to not harm Bitshares, but to elect delegates from which they would derive monetary gain in excess to their proportion of stake in the system at the expense of all other stakeholders.

Let's give an example.  Remember, in "approval voting", voters do not just vote for one delegate.  They can select as many or as few delegates as they wish and the entire weight of their stake counts towards each delegate they choose.  Say for instance that the top delegate has 50% of the vote and the 101st delegate has 30% of the vote.  The voting spread percentage is 20% (50%-30%).  If the votes per delegate is a linear increase according to delegate rank, an additional 10% of the stake vote will move the 101st delegate to the 50th position.  Likewise, a removal of 10% of the stake vote from the lower 50 delegates will result in them losing their delegate position.  By strategically voting, a few wealthy stakeholders can influence a disproportionate number of delegate positions in relation to their actual stake.  In this example, a coalition of 10% stake was able to control 50% of the delegates.

Does this sound fair to you?!

1.  Non-voting owner's who are happy to accept the decisions of active voters are effectively delegating decisions to those who do vote.  It is their choice.  In the 17% voter turnout example given, it is clear that most owners are happy to go with delegate selection by those who do vote.  I will speculate that they do this for the following reasons:

a.  Rational Ignorance.  It's not worth their time to figure out who to vote for.  It doesn't matter to them which subset of generally acceptable candidates get elected because delegate ability to do something undesirable is negligible.  A delegate either signs blocks and includes transactions faithfully or not, and everyone can tell if they don't.  Those in full-time positions need to avoid having a lynch mob form to vote them out and so they need to continuously answer the question, "What have you done for us lately?"

b.  They have no objection to any of the delegates that are being elected by those who vote.  If an issue comes up, then they presumably are reserving the right to weigh in.  Low participation means owners are generally satisfied.  I don't vote my stake in cold storage for this reason, but if I'm not happy at some point, I will go to that extra trouble.  So that could also be the case for many of the other non-voting stake out there.  Similarly, smaller stakeholders can go to the extra trouble of rallying others to their cause (i.e. "colluding").

c.  In general, a large voter cannot vote in a delegate that doesn't already have broad support from everyone else.  It is true that a large voter can swing which of the otherwise lesser approved delegates get picked.  It is even true that a very small voter can switch who is in positions 101 and 102 by changing one vote.  Similarly, if many small voters agree on certain delegates, there is nothing a big owner can do about it.  This is how it should be.  The bigger your stake, the more you have at risk, and the more say you should have in who runs the business.  This is far more fair than many traditional business that are intentionally structured to disproportionately favor the big guys.

In this example, a coalition of 10% stake was able to control 50% of the delegates.

Yes, and another coalition of 11% of the remaining stakeholders is able to override them.  

2.  Owners have a right to form political alliances to achieve their objectives.  You can call it "collusion" if you want.  The rest of the owners have a similar right to team up (collude) to overrule them.  If an owner doesn't like what the "ruling collation" decides, she can sell her stake.  The company is, by definition, only owned by people who approve of how it is being run.  It is the right of those owners to run it that way.  Blockchain technology is there to ensure transparency in whether the agreed upon rules are being followed.

Bottom Line:  BitShares has been implemented with a well-defined transparent form of decentralized government.  We have tried to make it be fair enough to attract a large number of happy owners.  (We would be fools to do otherwise.)  Those who find that acceptable and profitable will own it.  Those who don't, won't.  If there are enough who want it run differently, they will actively vote for changes or clone a competitor.  So far, the current community seems happy with what they have.

[StanLarimer]

Here's another quick thought experiment on the above topic.

Suppose you have 10 accounts each with 10 shares and you decide that each account gets 1 vote.
One of the account holders divides her shares among 10 puppet accounts.  Now she has 10 votes.
So the rest of the account holders are forced to divide up their shares as much as possible too.

What do you wind up with?  1 vote per share!   

[Come-from-Beyond]

Here's another quick thought experiment on the above topic.

Suppose you have 10 accounts each with 10 shares and you decide that each account gets 1 vote.
One of the account holders divides her shares among 10 puppet accounts.  Now she has 10 votes.
So the rest of the account holders are forced to divide up their shares as much as possible too.

What do you wind up with?  1 vote per share!  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

TL;DR: BitShares ought to do extra voting rounds if total number of votes for outsiders is higher than number of votes for at least one of top 101 delegates. Otherwise you can't claim that the delegates are chosen in a fair/democratic manner.

[StanLarimer]

Voting rounds are continuous and voters can change their votes at any time.  The top 101 delegates are always those with the most number of shares approving them and everyone can look at that set and decide to change their approvals at any time.

So by your criterion, if "extra voting rounds" are needed to make things more "fair/democratic", then BitShares is infinitely fair and democratic because new voting rounds happen every 10 seconds forever.  

 

[Come-from-Beyond]

Voting rounds are continuous and voters can change their votes at any time.  The top 101 delegates are always those with the most number of shares approving them and everyone can look at that set and decide to change their approvals at any time.

So by your criterion, if "extra voting rounds" are needed to make things more "fair/democratic", then BitShares is infinitely fair and democratic because new voting rounds happen every 10 seconds forever.  

 

In the current version voting results are applied on the fly. To follow the criterion you need something like modern president elections (when the 2nd round is used if none of the candidates gets at least 51%):

1. All shareholders cast votes
2. If new top 101 don't get the overwhelming majority then part of delegates with lowest vote count is removed from the list of candidates and goto #1
3. Old 101 delegates are replaced with the new ones

PS: Also, you use "vote-outs". This mixes two different voting systems and may lead to a worse situation.

[StanLarimer]

We use approval voting. 
Everybody indicates all the candidates they approve of.
The 101 most approved of candidates are hired.
No need to make it any more complicated than that.

[Daedelus]

No need to make it any more complicated than that.

I lol'd 

[StanLarimer]

Interesting opportunity if you still have a lot of mining equipment looking for something to do.

Stan

MineBitShares bitUSD Mining is now live at @ http://pool.minebitshares.com

At the new MineBitshares sub-forum : https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14119.0

MineBitShares bitUSD Mining is now live at @ http://pool.minebitshares.com

'We aim to be the most profitable multipool with 0% fees and bonus payouts for every miner, every day'

We've just completed payouts of $439 bitUSD to 45 miners who have been mining on the pool over the last 3 days. This is at 0% pool fee and included 3 days bonus payments.

The pool website has been updated and now includes pool profitability stats.

Happy Mining!

[JohnnyBTCSeed]

No need to make it any more complicated than that.

I lol'd 

[Come-from-Beyond]

No need to make it any more complicated than that.

I respectfully disagree. You need a more complicated method because otherwise you have a weak spot. An adversary doesn't need to earn credibility to enter top 101. Lowering credibility of the competitors works too. What is especially bad is that the current voting is asymmetrical - you need N units of effort to earn credibility and N/10* units to lower credibility of other candidates because everyone will likely do the same. I didn't analyse this tactics closely but suspect that cooperation of outsiders trying to asperse the winners and take their place is a powerful trick.

-------
* - assumed for a case of 1000 candidates

[StanLarimer]

That's not how BitShares voting works.

The only thing that an individual voter can do is indicate which potential candidates are most acceptable to them.
If a candidate ceases to be acceptable, the voter can remove that approval.
That's all.

She has no ability to "down vote" anybody or concentrate negative votes on certain candidates.
There is no such thing as negative votes.

Each candidate runs in his or her own independent election.
Each seeks a high percentage of approval from the voters of all shares.

The 101 candidates with the highest approvals get the jobs.

Theoretically 101 candidates could each receive 100% approval.
In practice, our top delegate currently has about 18% and Delegate 101 has about 8%.

BitShares February Newsletter

There's a lot more to BitShares than you typically see on any forum thread.

It is very decentralized with a score of independent marketing and technical projects underway in parallel.

If you've wished you could have a one paragraph summary of every activity
and insights about who is doing what, well, now you can.

Here is the first decentralized BitShares newsletter.  
Legend has it that it simply wrote itself!  

[LiQio]

Legend has it that it simply wrote itself!  

[Come-from-Beyond]

That's not how BitShares voting works.

Good to hear. Update https://bitshares.org/blog/delegated-proof-of-stake/ please, statements like

Every share can be set to vote either for or against a potential delegate.

are very confusing.

[StanLarimer]

That's not how BitShares voting works.

Good to hear. Update https://bitshares.org/blog/delegated-proof-of-stake/ please, statements like

Every share can be set to vote either for or against a potential delegate.

are very confusing.

Agreed.  I had to go do a WTF on that myself.

You can set your defaults to follow the voting slate of some other delegate or group of delegates that you trust rather than picking the full set yourself.

If you do that, then the "thumbs down" icon means, "ignore any recommendations for this candidate".

So, you can toggle the thumb on each candidate between "Thumbs up - add to my custom slate", "Thumbs down - remove this one from my default slate(s)" or un-selected - "do what the default slate(s) I am following recommend".

But all this does is effect how your slate is defined.  When you vote, all you can do is add or not add votes to a candidate.

You can't do anything to subtract the approval they have from other voters.

[StanLarimer]

We just had a newbie drop by and talk about his first experiences with BitShares.
I figure, what the heck, there may be puppy-loving BitShares newbies around here too...

Hi, I'm also new. I'll share my experience thus far and maybe it can help.

First: Download the Bitshares wallet from the website to your local machine and set up your username and password. Then export you wallet file to your computer, and save it elsewhere. (Flash drive, email, cloud, etc.) Now that the "keys" (the backup file and your password) to your personal "vault" (desktop wallet) are secure, you then need to register the name with the blockchain and then fund your account. Go to http://faucet.bitshares.org to register you username. Once your username is registered with the blockchain, you can fund the account with Bitshares. But to do that, right now, you need to buy Bitcoin. In most cases, you'll buy a fraction of a single Bitcoin (In the beginning I assumed I needed to buy a whole coin, but this is unnecessary). 

Next:  The easiest way to get Bitcoin, for me (and in the same day and without much hassle) was to go to Localbitcoins.com and create an account (an online bitcoin wallet essentially). You can search for various methods of deposit, but I searched for a cash deposit option with a bank in my area. The details of the account and the transaction are understood when you use the site and find a seller. Essentially you deposit cash and verfiy it with a receipt and then the seller sends your equivalent amount in Bitcoin to your Localbitcoins.com online wallet. You now have Bitcoin and can exchange it for other altcoins. Almost there.

Finally: Localbitcoins.com is a good temporary wallet, but you'll want to download another Bitcoin wallet for more security (Bitcoin Core, Electrum, etc). But if speed is your main concern, then simply use your Localbitcoins.com wallet to hold your Bitcoins temporarily before exchanging them for Bitshares. This is where Shapeshift.io comes in, as it is the most convenient exchange service available right now, by far. Your personal Bitshares username or public key is the receiving address. Shapeshift.io even has a live chat function if you need some extra explanation.  By the time you're finished with the Shapeshift transaction (a few minutes), you should have Bitshares transferred to your local wallet. (sigh of relief)

As for what to do with your BTS once they are in your Bitshares wallet, this is becoming better explained with each new update. You can simply hold BTS or exchange them for BitUSD or some other asset. Or you can transfer BTS to another exchange, like BTER.com. But I suspect the wallet will become more intuitive and more user-friendly as time goes on. One note about the Memo field. Usually when you Transfer BTS to another wallet, the Memo field would be used to ensure the funds are attributed to the right account, and this information is usually provided by the receiving party.  They will offer a reference number or something for you to include in the Memo field. In the case of BTER.com for example, when you want to deposit BTS to an online BTER account, they will provide the Memo details.

Good luck!

[Crestington]

I think you guys need to get rid of the puppies and go for some more exciting marketing. The puppies look dumb, I actually preferred the old thread with all the meme's of Stan and Bytemaster.

Maybe you could do themed marketing where you base a bunch of your new ideas in terms of the theme.

Remember, you want Crypto to be EXCITING!

Grab some smoke machines and some laser lights and your halfway there.

[StanLarimer]

AAACK!  We just took heavy air-to-air fire!

No worries.  This thread is for sophisticated and erudite puppy lovers.

(But I am pleased to note that there are now more than six BitShares related threads that regularly make the front page here.)

Something for everybody!

[Come-from-Beyond]

(But I am pleased to note that there are now more than six BitShares related threads that regularly make the front page here.)

<A free bump>

[EvilDave]

I feel the need for some kitten action, tbh.

This kind of sums up my day:


But, if anyone (like Crestington  ) feels the need for some excitement, there will shortly be a chance to watch NXT zoom into the upper statosphere (or crash spectacularly into the New Mexico desert....)

NXT in Spaaace!

Thought Stan might like this, with the being a rocket scientist and all.
We're currently waiting on FAA permission for the launch, but it should be cleared pretty soon.

[StanLarimer]

That is maximally cute (for a cat), I must admit.

But this illustrates the essential problem with cats:

There he is surrounded by chicks and doesn't seem at all happy!

Meanwhile, something that makes me happy is this AWESOME short video from Max Wright
(Author of BitShares 101 - available in Six Languages already).

The State of BitShares - Feb 15th

Max summarizes everything the decentralized community accomplished in the past 50 days.

I especially liked his main point about the next big touchdown being how BitShares and Bitcoin maximally complement each other.

Good stuff!

[Crestington]

AAACK!  We just took heavy air-to-air fire!

No worries.  This thread is for sophisticated and erudite puppy lovers.

(But I am pleased to note that there are now more than six BitShares related threads that regularly make the front page here.)

Something for everybody!

I never said the ideas weren't good, I think highly of Bitshares. I was just saying that you should look for some more entertaining ways of presenting your ideas, like PBS meets FOX news.

[Crestington]

I feel the need for some kitten action, tbh.

This kind of sums up my day:


But, if anyone (like Crestington   ) feels the need for some excitement, there will shortly be a chance to watch NXT zoom into the upper statosphere (or crash spectacularly into the New Mexico desert....)

NXT in Spaaace!

Thought Stan might like this, with the being a rocket scientist and all.
We're currently waiting on FAA permission for the launch, but it should be cleared pretty soon.

Lol, NXT is literally going to the moon. NXT thing you know they are going to let you send transactions to their moonbase so you can buy lunar latte's.

[StanLarimer]

[EvilDave]

Well, there will either be a whoooshhh, followed by some zoom, and a gentle glide back to Earth......or whoooshhh, followed by a large KABOOM !

Here´s an overview of the project so far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Zz0cQjU_E&feature=youtu.be
http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/lohan/

[StanLarimer]

Wow, that is a really cool project!

Brings back many fond memories of times spent at remote test ranges.

(Testing remotes, of course.)

[EvilDave]

Well, if you guys want some range time and a visit to Spaceport America, I might be able to find some space(s) on the guest list for the launch, when we finally get a date.

[StanLarimer]

My Jake as a puppy.  Jake loves Bitshares.

It has come to my attention that Jake may, in fact, be a Panda and therefore technically a "cub".
However, we have established that he likes BitShares and therefore is very smart.
This fact alone establishes that he is not a cat.
And that is what is most important.

[StanLarimer]

Well, if you guys want some range time and a visit to Spaceport America, I might be able to find some space(s) on the guest list for the launch, when we finally get a date.

I would be most interested!

[HalFinneysBrain]

I heard a rumor that the reason Bitshares dropped a lot recently is that the developers had to sell a lot to pay taxes, is that true?  If so, does that mean its a good time to buy now or are they going to sell more?

[StanLarimer]

At this point, Invictus does not anticipate the need to sell any BitShares to meet its 2014 tax obligations.
I have no insight into the personal business of individual developers.

[TaunSew]

I heard a rumor that the reason Bitshares dropped a lot recently is that the developers had to sell a lot to pay taxes, is that true?  If so, does that mean its a good time to buy now or are they going to sell more?

Or you can be like Roger "the tax dodger" Ver.  In terms of taxation, a lot of countries ruled that PoW is self-income (and theoretically so are any rewards for maintaining any networks) and BitShares' delegate setup is likely subject to it too (it creates a pressing problem as the tax authorities will probably shake down Bitshares to reveal the identities of those 101 delegates).

[Come-from-Beyond]

as the tax authorities will probably shake down Bitshares to reveal the identities of those 101 delegates

Can't the delegates send them this as the id?

[StanLarimer]

I heard a rumor that the reason Bitshares dropped a lot recently is that the developers had to sell a lot to pay taxes, is that true?  If so, does that mean its a good time to buy now or are they going to sell more?

Or you can be like Roger "the tax dodger" Ver.  In terms of taxation, a lot of countries ruled that PoW is self-income (and theoretically so are any rewards for maintaining any networks) and BitShares' delegate setup is likely subject to it too (it creates a pressing problem as the tax authorities will probably shake down Bitshares to reveal the identities of those 101 delegates).

BitShares is a blockchain.
Blockchains ain't talkin' any more than Duke the Bush Beans Dog.

[Crestington]

I heard a rumor that the reason Bitshares dropped a lot recently is that the developers had to sell a lot to pay taxes, is that true?  If so, does that mean its a good time to buy now or are they going to sell more?

Or you can be like Roger "the tax dodger" Ver.  In terms of taxation, a lot of countries ruled that PoW is self-income (and theoretically so are any rewards for maintaining any networks) and BitShares' delegate setup is likely subject to it too (it creates a pressing problem as the tax authorities will probably shake down Bitshares to reveal the identities of those 101 delegates).

BitShares is a blockchain.
Blockchains ain't talkin' any more than Duke the Bush Beans Dog.

Looks like the Bush beans guy has no idea that his Dog just let out a chemical warfare attack on him.

[EvilDave]

Looks like the Bush beans guy has no idea that his Dog just let out a chemical warfare attack on him.

Yup, yet another good reason (of millions  ) that cats>dogs, especially in confined spaces like RV cabs.

[StanLarimer]

If you are a puppy lover and live in one of these countries you will soon be able to have physical silver shipped to your door using BitSilver to pay.

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Hong Kong SAR China
Iceland
Ireland
Isle of Man
Israel
Japan
Luxembourg
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Portugal
Romania
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Thailand
United Kingdom
United States
Vatican city

The nice thing about that is you can lock in your price in 10 seconds rather that waiting days for your wired funds to get there.

Instant off ramp.

Cryptosmith just announced the details here:  BitSilver to Silver Website Contstruction Has Begun

EDIT  7/30/15: 

WARNING
THE OWNER OF THIS BUSINESS HAS DISAPPEARED AND WE ARE UNABLE TO CONTACT HIM. 
I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU USE THIS SERVICE AT THIS TIME.

[StanLarimer]

Sad to see another centralized exchange get into trouble.  This hurts us all.

But this is also exactly what the BitShares Decentralized Exchange was designed to solve.  Even if you're not ready to invest in BitShares, you can still use its services to control your own destiny.

You run the exchange and control all your own keys!

You always keep your assets in your own wallet and you can then trade between them without anything leaving your wallet, accomplishing the same thing you do on centralized exchanges.  Instead of continuous 24x7 exposure of your assets to hackers on a centralized exchange, this now only happens for the few minutes you spend moving through a gateway or bridge when you want to get your hands on the actual asset.

Most of the time, you don't really want the asset, you want the exposure to that asset's price characteristics.  So you hold market pegged bitAssets that track the value of other commodities and currencies. This lets you hop around between bitUSD, bitGold, bitCNY, bitSilver, bitEUR, bitBTC and BTS without leaving your BitShares wallet.  This set will grow, but that's a pretty good mix for trading against big movements in crypto vs. fiat.

And it stays in your own wallet where moths and rust do not consume and thieves don't break in to steal.

The chances of a hacker timing their hack to the moment you are using a centralized gateway to move in and out of the BitShares Decentralized Exchange is vanishingly small.  And you can pick your gateway at the last minute from a growing list of options.

This way, you can quickly move from the BitShares Decentralized Exchange into your favorite leading coin just in time to spend it.

And earn a bit of interest in the mean time.

Details here on reddit.

[EvilDave]

Regardless of the rivalry    between NXT and BTS, I think we both agree that people in crypto should get away from the use of centralised exchanges.
Pretty much every major crypto heist can be traced back to an exchange security lapse (or theft by the operators).
De-centralised/distributed exchanges allow all the fun of crypto trading, without the risks of keeping your funds on the exchange.

Stans probably going to get drowned in NXT'ers pointing this out.......but NXT has had the MultiGateWay decentralised exchange up and running for the last 6 months, and the MGW tech has been integrated into SuperNET, offering even more trading opportunities.
For example: purchasing alt-coins with fiat via the integrated Coinomat plug-in.


NXT MultiGateWay currently supports:



And here are a few links:

http://multigateway.org/
https://nxtforum.org/nxtservices-releases/
https://coinomat.com/
http://www.supernet.org/

Cats are conclusively better than dogs, it turns out.  

[StanLarimer]

It's time that dogs and cats unite to wean the world to the wonders of decentralized exchanges.

As a peace offering, I will not publish the following graphic as originally intended.  

Once we have the world properly educated, we can resume our regularly scheduled discourse.

[EvilDave]

OMG! That is the most vicious and underhanded anti-cat FUD I've ever seen on this forum !
It's becoming obvious that Stan (if that is indeed his name) is simply a paid shill for the shadowy 'Scooby group'.

In rebuttal, according to my exhaustive research:
If we assume that there are 30 million cats in the continental USA, and (according to Stans own figures) 300 cases of rabies, then the chance of the average cat owner being savagely disembowelled by a rabid Fluffy is one in 100,000. Which is perfectly acceptable, IMHO

If we also assume that there are, lets say, 81 dogs in the USA, then we come to the unavoidable conclusion that 100% of all dogs have rabies.
As well as fleas.
And a habit of sniffing each others arses, not that thats completely wrong.

I rest my case.

[StanLarimer]

I'm still in favor of working together to convert the world into users of decentralized exchanges, but dang, we're going to have to do something about all those cats sooner or later...

[StanLarimer]

This just in about Max Wright's Amazon Number 1 Bestseller: BitShares 101:

chapter 6 and 7 both have updates.

they can be found at

www.bitshares.tv/chapter6
www.bitshares.tv/chapter7

They contain videos which are also helpful.

[StanLarimer]

Today I'd like to highlight one of the most promising applications of BitShares.
This is going to be big, so you might as well know about it now.

This is a BitShares delegate proposal from one of the biggest, most respected names in crypto-China:

Baozougongqinwang
(Rampaging Prince Gong)

His company, DACx, is going to revolutionize how new companies raise startup capital.

Hey everyone. Long time no see. I am James Gong, aslo known as Baozou (Rampaging Prince Gong) in the Chinese community.

Recently there is a lot of focus on the business of payment through cryptocurrency, though I see great potential in international payment through cryptocurrency, I still believe it will not stimulate large-scale personal demand for any application to have a sustainable growth. However the need to raise capital and to invest is there every day and numerous barriers to go from Angel, to VC, to PE and securities regulatory committee is a process only few can scrape through, if my team and I manage to shorten the tunnel and lower the cost, it would really solve problems and create values to the world.

On November 19th, the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang held the state executive conference of the state council, demanding to construct a speed micro-finance system in the capital market and first proposed a pilot program of "equity crowdfunding". In China, in order to get listed, companies need to go through years of complex procedures and limits, causing the small and medium sized companies' difficulties in capital raising, which explained a lot why all these crowdfunding platforms mushroomed in the past year. My team and I are pushing forward our own crowdfunding platform DACx, in the hope to take crowdfunding platforms to the next step: the facilitation of exit after investment.

The liquidity of capital is what investors care about the most, if an investment has very limited exit channels, or worse, when the investors are not sure how to get out later, they will not even consider this particular investment. The exit of investors is a demanding, time-sensitive and very hard job to be done. Any centralized exchange that is yet approved by the government would face huge pressure and legal risks, as evidenced in the last couple attempts occurred in China with the ending of none standing still. However, the block chain technology offers unprecedented opportunities as it will belong to no country and it has no centralized servers or operational institutions to be destroyed.

Hence, what DACx is different from all the uprising crowdfunding programs in and outside of our crypto-currency world, is that DACx not only offers platform that allows investors throughout the world to easily give in for programs on a decentralized crypto-asset platform, it gives investors the right to exit from the first day, and this might be first in the history. This feature might also attract traditional VCs and PEs as they need to go through an extended period of time in roder to get back their investment. Furthermore, liquidity adds more value to the shares. The prices of shares that can be traded in an open market is a world different from those that are not. A quick look into the legal persons’ shares or the price gap between PTS and AGS can help with the picture here.                  

DACx has done a thorough research on protocols of the decentralized crypto-assets and came to the conclusion that BitShares can best suit our purposes. First of all, on BitShares, it's easy to issue BTA (BitAssets) that can be traded globally on the decentralized built-in exchange based on the block chain technology. Secondly, BitShares holders formed a caring and hardworking community that passed many real-world tests in the process of its development. Furthermore, the circulation of BitCNY and BitUSD and other BitAssets that are pegged to its fiat counterparties made BitShares even more ideal for a global crowdfunding technology. Because investors would hardly invest using a crypto-currency like Bitcoin that is notoriously volatile, because despite all of its benefits including the convenience when making international transactions, as then they would be facing a complicated combination of two risks. BitCNY and BitUSD come in very handy in this situation as first, the investment and settlement can be done in the traditional sense of fiat currency and the value carried by them could still flow all around the world barrier-free and second, acceptance dealers would allow investors to invest without really holding a geeky wallet thus welcoming more people who are not familiar with the cryptocurrency idea.

After the crowdfunding process, investors can trade their shares on the decentralized built-in exchange on the first day. For DACx, it would serve as a supporting platform for small and medium sized companies, various projects and programs to meet their investors of a spectrum of capital size. For BitShares, DACx will take the most advantage of the protocol, profoundly promote its brand and usage.

That is why DACx will help traditional companies to issue their own shares using the BitShares technology. We have already launched the crowdfunding of the first project "BitShares PLAY" on our platform, raising more than 2,500,000 RMB in the first week. In order to legally protect our investors we need fundraisers to transfer their shares or rights to earnings to be held in trust of a equity trust company who will release issue BTA. In this case, the legal share holder of the shares given out to investors is the equity trust company, who will claim all the rights of investors.

Standing from this point of view, we believe this has a shot of becoming the killer app of the block chain. To simplify capital raising and investment in a global scale will be truly extraordinary. Fundraising globally is not a novelty in the industry of mining, but it remains too geeky to the outside world. DACx seeks to standardize and simplify the whole process to benefit more with the invention of the block chain technology by making this inside game a smooth channel for funding for more in need.

DACx will be serving the role of investment banks, providing financial service and solution package. Since DACx itself is not an exchange, so it will not bear too many legal controversies, and at the same time upon the advice of our legal team, DACx will follow the case of ADR to provide a BDR (Bit Depositary Receipt’s) to crowdfund in order to avoid unnecessary legal problems.

This project has jumpstarted in our office that is based in Xintiandi, Shanghai since last year after we got our seed investment from a world famous VC. The team consists of experts in the cryptocurrency industry, professionals from traditional investment banks like Merrill Lynch and seasoned legal team in the crypto-financial services.

On behalf of DACx, I've made the decision to run for 100% delegate. Beginning from the translation of BitShares whitepaper, I have been a believer and a promoter till now, and now combined with DACx team's contribution, what our coherent would do for the promotion and devleopment of Bitshares will be even greater in every endeavor in a very long time. I wish for the support from the community.

None of what we are trying to do can happen without the contribution of the whole community and the BitShares technology. I'd like to express my sincere gratitude.

Our Delegate: dacx.baozou

[StanLarimer]

This article, Is Bitcoin Truly Decentralized? Yes – and Here Is Why It’s Important, by Erik Voorhees in Bitcoin Magazine is several weeks old, but still worth commenting on.

The key tl;dr quote is:

So isn’t Bitcoin’s claim of decentralization a lie?

No.

And here’s why: to understand Bitcoin one must understand the difference between coercive centralization and market-based centralization. Bitcoin possesses the latter, but avoids the former, and that is a crucial distinction.

1.  I agree with its premise that there is a great difference between coercive and market-based centralization.

This is an argument useful for answering my favorite troll who tends to mix his objections to coercion with solutions that people are free to adopt or not, as it serves their needs.  

2.  I don't agree that market-based centralization is harmless.

It doesn't seem hard to imagine that big governments and institutions could at any time be controlling Bitcoin's half-dozen biggest mining operations without our knowledge. Decentralization is needed to prevent corruption that comes with the ability of people in power to seduce or coerce a small number of players.  Whether that number is small due to market forces or coercive forces, the vulnerability still exists.

Now, since decentralization has its costs, every free person must decide how much decentralization is enough.  This will vary from activity to activity.  I don't need much decentralization to buy an ebook.  I need a lot more to protect my retirement nest egg.

How to balance decentralization cost vs. immunity from corruption is the question that interests me.

I think we should be exploring many solutions.  Who knows what we will learn by comparing them in action?

[Crestington]

OMG! That is the most vicious and underhanded anti-cat FUD I've ever seen on this forum !
It's becoming obvious that Stan (if that is indeed his name) is simply a paid shill for the shadowy 'Scooby group'.

In rebuttal, according to my exhaustive research:
If we assume that there are 30 million cats in the continental USA, and (according to Stans own figures) 300 cases of rabies, then the chance of the average cat owner being savagely disembowelled by a rabid Fluffy is one in 100,000. Which is perfectly acceptable, IMHO

If we also assume that there are, lets say, 81 dogs in the USA, then we come to the unavoidable conclusion that 100% of all dogs have rabies.
As well as fleas.
And a habit of sniffing each others arses, not that thats completely wrong.

I rest my case.

Oi, you need to understand the demographic of the relationship between the dog vs. cat rationale first there bud. If we can assume X number of Cats dwell in a home compared to dogs you can then determine what your target audience should be. Say you just want to slowly weed out all the dogs and make cats the dominant species, I guess you could mess with cats DNA and breed them with tigers. Ever hear of a Liger? It's a lion and tiger mix and as big as a saber-toothed tiger, I don't know any dog that could compete with that.

[StanLarimer]

BitShares has, of course, been anticipating such a nefarious development...

[EvilDave]

Looks like we'll need to speed up our Catzilla^® breeding program.....anyone know where we can get some open source T. rex DNA?

[StanLarimer]

Top coinmarketcap.com assets by volume.

[tzpardi]

The DACx proposal sounds really interesting.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Where could I read about that DACx?

PS: I was googling for a cute puppy and found one with uncanny valley effect. Open the link only if you have very good mental health and don't mind if it visits you in a nightmare tonight - http://images.forwallpaper.com/files/images/c/c35a/c35a9122/334564/dogs-animals-computer-bald.jpg

[StanLarimer]

Now that is an enthusiastic dog!  
The keyboard has nothing to do with it.
I've seen that look before.
I can tell he just learned about BitShares!

See Baozougongqinwang a few posts above for DACx announcement.

http://dacx.com/

[Come-from-Beyond]

http://dacx.com/

LOL, I saw it 2 days ago but didn't memorize the name. Maybe it's too generic. I expected that DACx was an "extended" DAC (like DPoS vs PoS), not a company.

[StanLarimer]

Sorted alphabetically, BitShares holds all of the top 5 asset slots on coinmarketcap.com...

Just sayin'...

[Come-from-Beyond]

Sorted alphabetically, BitShares holds all of the top 5 asset slots on coinmarketcap.com...

Just sayin'...

The alphabetical sorter seems to be broken:

BitUSD
BitCNY
BitGold
BitBTC
BitSilver

We can't trust the data...

[StanLarimer]

The alphabetical sorter seems to be broken:

BitUSD
BitCNY
BitGold
BitBTC
BitSilver

We can't trust the data...

Actually  "UCGBS" are the first five characters in a very long acronym designed to help people remember that BitShares has awesome market pegged assets for USD, CNY, GOLD, BTC, and SILVER that held their pegs impressively during the recent crypto recession.

We appreciate that coinmarketcap sorts them for everyone in this easy to remember and highly pronounceable format. 

[Come-from-Beyond]

Actually  "UCGBS" are the first five characters in a very long acronym designed to help people remember that BitShares has awesome market pegged assets for USD, CNY, GOLD, BTC, and SILVER that held their pegs impressively during the recent crypto recession.

Tonight I got a revelation from Saint Bernard Puppy that it stands for United Church of God of BitShares...

[scv00]

Actually  "UCGBS" are the first five characters in a very long acronym designed to help people remember that BitShares has awesome market pegged assets for USD, CNY, GOLD, BTC, and SILVER that held their pegs impressively during the recent crypto recession.

Tonight I got a revelation from Saint Bernard Puppy that it stands for United Church of God of BitShares...

It's not an easily memorable acronym and the limited vowels don't help make real words out of it. The only word I can think of is BUGS and I doubt you would be happy with an acronym containing that. Still, CBUGS is more memorable than UCGBS.

[StanLarimer]

BitShares is getting a whole new set of wallets - web wallet, lite wallet, full wallet, and a couple more "special" wallets.

One of the nice little upgrades is that we got rid of those ugly, cat-like robohashes!

Robohashes and identicons are visual "checksums" that help you spot when you've made a typo in an account name

Robohashes are a bit more distinctive, but they tended to uglify the first impression in the wallet IMHO.

So now we use kaleidoscope-like identicons, which are much more visually appealing.

To me, it's like the difference between day and night, good and evil, dogs and cats...

What do you think?

[M28MmickT]

Firstly first few pages them dogs were adorable if i am honest, but how does a bit share love dogs and not cats!?

Cats are mythical and mysterious and have been worshiped for hundreds of years, dogs are greedy and stinky and i love them also because i have 3 of them but where is the love for our cats. They need loving too,  I feel you should love all of god creatures..

[StanLarimer]

(Don't tell the NXT guys but I have two cats too...  they like BitShares just as much as my dogs.)

[jones_]

BitShares is getting a whole new set of wallets - web wallet, lite wallet, full wallet, and a couple more "special" wallets.

One of the nice little upgrades is that we got rid of those ugly, cat-like robohashes!

Robohashes and identicons are visual "checksums" that help you spot when you've made a typo in an account name

Robohashes are a bit more distinctive, but they tended to uglify the first impression in the wallet IMHO.

So now we use kaleidoscope-like identicons, which are much more visually appealing.

To me, it's like the difference between day and night, good and evil, dogs and cats...

What do you think?

These are sort of interesting, how many types are available and how are they generated?

There was talk of pointing an nxt alias with bitmapdata to an account, so the account could have a custom image associated with it, but I haven't implemented it yet. Linking an accountid to a picture can bring that human element into a normally computer-like string of random characters.

[Bit_Happy]

Happy thread!


How many Bitshares are needed to buy a puppy?

[StanLarimer]

You shouldn't buy a puppy with BitShares because puppies are priceless.

If you have a puppy, you inherently have good karma, and BitShares come to you!

[StanLarimer]

These are sort of interesting, how many types are available and how are they generated?

There was talk of pointing an nxt alias with bitmapdata to an account, so the account could have a custom image associated with it, but I haven't implemented it yet. Linking an accountid to a picture can bring that human element into a normally computer-like string of random characters.

There is open source software out there (e.g http://robohash.org/ or Identicons) where we got it or you can track it down through the BitShares GitHub library. 

[jones_]

These are sort of interesting, how many types are available and how are they generated?

There was talk of pointing an nxt alias with bitmapdata to an account, so the account could have a custom image associated with it, but I haven't implemented it yet. Linking an accountid to a picture can bring that human element into a normally computer-like string of random characters.

There is open source software out there (e.g http://robohash.org/ or Identicons) where we got it or you can track it down through the BitShares GitHub library. 

Ok so its just a generalized library, cool still. I'll need to look into my custom icon idea more, I like this.

As you could've guessed, I develop for nxt, but I still find other systems interesting.

While I'm here I've always wondered how things like bitUSD are able to give interest. Can't seem to find where that money is coming from.

[StanLarimer]

While I'm here I've always wondered how things like bitUSD are able to give interest. Can't seem to find where that money is coming from.

Just as in most of the world's traditional exchanges, you short an asset by borrowing it to sell now with the hope of buying it back cheaper later to pay off your loan (thereby taking the savings as a profit).

So a bitUSD is just a tradable collateralized loan that represents lending of a dollar's worth of BitShares now in exchange for a blockchain enforced promise to pay back a dollar's worth of BitShares later (with interest).  The borrower puts up three times as many BitShares as she borrowed as collateral under blockchain control to make sure that there will be a full dollar's worth of BitShares available to pay off the loan  if the price of BitShares should fall.

So, the interest comes from the person who did the borrowing (shorting) and is paid to the person who did the lending. 

One fine point:  all interest is paid into a blockchain managed pool from which all interest is paid.  So the lender gets a moving average of the interest all borrowers have paid.

What makes this better than doing the same thing on a centralized exchange is that there is no counterparty risk.  The blockchain holds the collateral and will automatically pay the agreed amount to the two parties - like a robotically trustworthy third party escrow agent.

[Come-from-Beyond]

The blockchain holds the collateral and will automatically pay the agreed amount to the two parties - like a robotically trustworthy third party escrow agent.

How does the blockchain know the price?

[StanLarimer]

Elected delegates publish price feeds and the block chain picks the median value.

[StanLarimer]

Max Wright's #1 best-selling book is now available in video form.

BitShares 101 the Movie

[Come-from-Beyond]

Elected delegates publish price feeds and the block chain picks the median value.

Median value as sum of values divided by number of values?

[StanLarimer]

Elected delegates publish price feeds and the block chain picks the median value.

Median value as sum of values divided by number of values?

No, that would be called the "mean".

"Median" cannot be affected by willful outliers since it is guarded by all the other feeds on both sides.

[ThomasVeil]

If you have a puppy, you inherently have good karma, and BitShares come to you!

So that means BitShares-people kill puppies when they're about to become adult!
I knew it all along!!!

There was talk of pointing an nxt alias with bitmapdata to an account, so the account could have a custom image associated with it, but I haven't implemented it yet. Linking an accountid to a picture can bring that human element into a normally computer-like string of random characters.

Please don't do the face thing. You can see from the robots example why that is a bad idea.
The pattern is much better.
....though somehow I see near-swastikas in each of them above. Guess it confirms my earlier suspicion

[Come-from-Beyond]

....though somehow I see near-swastikas in each of them above. Guess it confirms my earlier suspicion

I see shurikens.

[jones_]

If you have a puppy, you inherently have good karma, and BitShares come to you!

So that means BitShares-people kill puppies when they're about to become adult!
I knew it all along!!!

There was talk of pointing an nxt alias with bitmapdata to an account, so the account could have a custom image associated with it, but I haven't implemented it yet. Linking an accountid to a picture can bring that human element into a normally computer-like string of random characters.

Please don't do the face thing. You can see from the robots example why that is a bad idea.
The pattern is much better.
....though somehow I see near-swastikas in each of them above. Guess it confirms my earlier suspicion

just a user-defined 16x16 pixel image, I could dynamically generate them for accounts and assets too, that might be cool.

[StanLarimer]

Here's a nice short and easy to understand explanation of What Is A BitAsset? by Kyle Torpey in the UK.

[StanLarimer]

** DISCLAIMER **

While BitShares does indeed love puppies, this is not to say that all puppies share BitShares' non-violent philosophy about how to deal with distasteful things like, say, cats.

We neither condone nor tolerate this kind of puppy behavior!

In fact, long ago (well weeks and weeks ago, actually) Bytemaster did an interview with Max Wright talking about Where Can Blockchain Technology Take Us?

It's far more than just crypto-currencies or even decentralized exchanges producing stabilized smart coins.  It talks about engineering non-violent solutions to everything.

In this video I am interviewed by Max Wright about where BitShares and blockchain technology are going to take us. I go into the importance of non violence combined with profit motive and not giving up on the search for technological solutions for securing our life, liberty, and property. 

--Bytemaster

[StanLarimer]

I enjoyed this whole thread. 
Here's an excerpt that will take you to the whole thing if interested...

I think the reason it i unlikely is the lack of leverage in the bts system.

Consider with $1million dollars you can control half a billion dollars worth of gold on the COMEX.   That is why in those markets the tail wags the dog. ie:The paper price of gold dictates the physical price of gold.

On BTS 1 million dollars would only allow you to control $500k of gold at best.   There is no chance of the tail wagging the dog on bts. But even if it did, then the COMEX and other markets demonstrate that when paper products out number physical supply the markets still function.... until they don't.

And this is how BitShares represents a fundamental new technology for the creation of honest markets,  insentivizing a higher level of honesty in all markets.

I love BitShares.

[StanLarimer]

Max Wright Does it Again

Decentralized Bitcoin Exchange

This is a great video that explains how you can trade bitcoins free of nearly all counterparty risk.

Here are a couple screen shots to pique your interest...

[DecentralizeEconomics]

[StanLarimer]

I guess my marketing guys were finally right - it was just a matter of holding out long enough!
(Rats, I lose my OP bet.)

Welcome DE - We needed some more eyeballs here.  
(The NXT guys had apparently conceded that dogs are much better judges of great crypto companies than cats.)

Nobody wants to read a thread where everybody agrees.
(Although I guess they all might agree that I would make a good used car salesman.)

"Honest Stan's Used Crypto Keys"

Hmmmm.   I like the sound of that.

 

[StanLarimer]

DELEGATE PROPOSAL OF THE WEEK

From time to time I like to pick out a great delegate proposal and highlight it here so readers can get a flavor for how much is going on with the BitShares platform.

Here's a candidate who has offered to advance the community 1 year's salary up front if he is elected as a delegate.  Essentially lending the network 1.5 million BTS to be repaid out of a delegate revenue stream.   The loaned funds allow other mini-projects to be funded up-front without having to wait for funding for them to be accumulated.  This is a great opportunity for little guys to get funded and prove themselves before they might otherwise be able to win election as a delegate themselves.  

Great business model!

Of course, anyone on this forum is welcome to submit such a proposal,
(either as a delegate like bitsharesbreakout or to work on one of bitsharesbreakout's sponsored mini-projects.)

Check out his web site at bitsharesbreakout.com

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13500.msg176337#msg176337

Delegate : fund.bitsharesbreakout

http://bitsharesblocks.com/delegates/delegate?name=fund.bitsharesbreakout

Site : http://bitsharesbreakout.com

Objective : To fund critical projects on an as needed basis without waiting for delegate funds to accrue.

Initially, as a show of good faith, there will be 1.5 Million BTS available for funding projects.

Anyone can start submitting project proposals now.  If approved, and BitsharesBreakout is elected, the funds will start flowing.
1.5 Million BTS is not a lot but its roughly 1 years worth of delegate pay.  By electing BitsharesBreakout you're making those much needed funds available now.


Update: I've begun funding projects before getting elected.  
In addition, Community members can support specific projects by sending donations to:
BTS: bitsharesbreakout
   
with a memo of the desired project to support.  

These donation will be payed back in a first in first out manner as delegate funds are receive.  
Note: there is no guarantee the delegate will be elected and therefor no guarantee your donations will be refunded.  



Funds Flow:  10% will be kept by BitsharesBreakout to cover expenses and compensate my time and service.
90% will be used to fund projects and/or repay pre-funded projects
Any funds received in excess of funded projects will be burned unless there is some reason to accumulate for a larger project.

Because BitsharesBreakout is prefunding with 1.5 million BTS.  
The community essentially has 1 year to evaluate the performance of BitsharesBreakout and its sponsored projects.

If at anytime it is deemed that BitsharesBreakout is not acting honestly or hasn't produced quality results with spent funds.  
BTS voters can remove the delegate and BitsharesBreakout will take the loss.

At this time I am the sole controlling member of BitsharesBreakout, and I consider the entire community my advisers.  
All major projects requiring a large sum, will likely be discussed with community members thoroughly before funding.  

Some initial examples of possible/probable projects that will receive funding:
Exchange integration
Gateway development
Developer incentives
Marketing projects/materials

I fully expect most submitted project proposals will not be accepted, as I am looking for high quality, critically important projects to fund.

Please visit http://bitsharesbreakout.com and submit you project for review.
*bear in mind I am not a web developer so the site is nothing fancy and currently lacking some functionality/content.

Please vote now and support this delegate : fund.bitsharesbreakout

http://bitsharesblocks.com/delegates/delegate?name=fund.bitsharesbreakout

feedback is welcomed and encouraged.  Thanks.

Community Donation Support:

* onceuponatime
* cass
* bitscape
* Aloha
* pheonike

Thank You!

UPDATES
Update#1: Funded projects : Rap Song & Info-Graphics
Update#2: Funded projects : Raffle Giveaway

[StanLarimer]

Ooops, I almost forgot.

Here a set of links to the mini-project proposals that have been submitted so far.

BitSharesBreakout Proposals Seeking Votes

Maybe it will give you some ideas?

[DecentralizeEconomics]

[StanLarimer]

I typically try to respond only to polite questions, but let's face it, the funny and creative pictures above are about as polite as DE ever gets.

So in the interest of cutting him some slack, I'll restate the implied questions above as if they came from DE's (possibly fictitious) polite and honorable non-identical twin sister.

Polite and Honorable DE:  Hey Stan, I agree with you about the relative merits of Dogs and cats, but there is something else that is really bugging me.  You guys are supposed to be passionate Austrian Libertarians yet seem to be backing away from certain forms of communication with the public all of a sudden.  I hear you've even hired a PR spokesman, how Libertarian is that?  Won't that conflict with your past reputation of trying to be the most open and transparent development team?  I really loved how you used to share every thought and idea as soon as it entered your head.  I hear some on your own forum are even upset about not having as much direct access to Bytemaster as they used to get all the time.   What's up?

Stan Larimer:  Why, thank you Polite and Honorable DE!  If you have such a question, I'll bet there are lots of other people wondering the same thing.  Below is the explanation I recently posted over on bitsharestalk.org.  I might as well post it here too, for your convenience and edification!

The Value of Public Relations

Most seem to agree that BitShares needs better public relations.  We have all seen what happens when we do it wrong!  Nobody has ever done public relations for a decentralized company before, so we have to figure it out on the fly, just like all the other things we are doing for the first time in history.  We want to preserve the decentralized nature of BitShares while maintaining a coherent public message. That is what we have been working to sort out in recent weeks.  We hope you will be patient with our temporary lull in communications while we get our coherently decentralized PR act together.

Wikipedia defines Public Relations in this way (emphasis added):

Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organization and the public.  ... The aim of public relations is to inform the public, prospective customers, investors, partners, employees, and other stakeholders and ultimately persuade them to maintain a certain view about the organization, its leadership, products, or of political decisions. ... Public relations specialists establish and maintain relationships with an organization's target audience, the media, and other opinion leaders.

Common activities include designing communications campaigns, writing news releases and other content for news and feature articles, working with the press, arranging interviews for company spokespeople, writing speeches for company leaders, acting as organization's spokesperson by speaking in public and public officials, preparing clients for press conferences, media interviews, and speeches, writing website and social media content, facilitating internal/employee communications, and managing company reputation and marketing activities like brand awareness and event management. Success in the field of public relations requires a deep understanding of the interests and concerns of each of the client's many publics. The public relations professional must know how to effectively address those concerns...

Our goal is to correctly anticipate the needs and reactions
of all of our "many publics".  

These would include:

• Those who are interested in discussing/participating in the technical developments.
• Those who are interested in the economic and libertarian ideals behind BitShares.
• Those who want to invest in BitShares without dealing with frequent unsubstantiated rumors.
• Those who just want to enjoy BitShares products and services with the same level of clear information they would have with any other business, including BitAsset users and potential merchants.
• Potential partners whose own PR image may depend on ours.
• Regulatory authorities.
• Industry opinion makers.
• Competitors and sources of deliberate disinformation.

In the past we have happily enjoyed free-wheeling interactions with a broad audience at bitsharestalk.org. This has often led to our casual forum statements being misunderstood, especially when translated into many languages around the globe or misrepresented by those seeking to cause trouble. So we are actively reworking our communication strategy by developing a formal channel for releasing information to all parts of the world simultaneously with consideration of the different demographic groups and cultures that have an interest in BitShares.

What works best for each of these groups does not necessarily work well for the others, so a few compromises will be necessary. But, we are trying to get better at meeting the needs of all.  We are currently in discussions with representatives from many of these groups and hope to reach a consensus that will satisfy them all in the near future. We're glad to say that we're making progress in formulating a better approach than we have had in the past. One that is  more fair to everyone.

In the mean time, the developers are still working hard on development.

So, nothing has changed about what we believe or where we are going.  We are just becoming a bigger family and learning how to deal with the unique needs of all of its members.

Success will be achieved when we are able to give everybody open access to all information in a form that is clear, concise, complete, current, consistent, considerate and compatible with the needs of all BitShares stakeholders.

[DecentralizeEconomics]

[fundomatic]

Here's a candidate who has offered to advance the community 1 year's salary up front if he is elected as a delegate.  Essentially lending the network 1.5 million BTS to be repaid out of a delegate revenue stream.   The loaned funds allow other mini-projects to be funded up-front without having to wait for funding for them to be accumulated.  This is a great opportunity for little guys to get funded and prove themselves before they might otherwise be able to win election as a delegate themselves.

I find this application of DPOS amazing.

[StanLarimer]

If you have a good idea, might as well contact him about it...

 

[CIYAM]

http://www.reddit.com/r/counterparty_xcp/comments/2y0apx/contract_news/

Any reaction to that (I don't believe that any puppies were hurt btw) ?

[StanLarimer]

As long as no puppies were hurt, we wish them well.

[StanLarimer]

Hey guys!  There is no better way to find out what's going on in BitShares than to check out the March Newsletter.

This newsletter is unique because it is written by the delegates themselves (developers, marketeers, and service providers). 
Each of these small businesses reports on what it is doing with their funding - which gives you an overview of the whole ecosystem.
I was amazed at the scope of projects that are now going on, with more appearing almost weekly.

(Bytemaster and I have to read the newsletter ourselves these days to find out everything that is happening.)

So our goal of a completely decentralized ecosystem is becoming more of a reality every day!

 

[Come-from-Beyond]

Hey guys!  There is no better way to find out what's going on in BitShares than to check out the March Newsletter.

29 pages and 0 pics of puppies. This is bad. Very very bad.

[HalFinneysBrain]

I just read the newsletter.  Wow, apparently there are 10x as many things going on in Bitshares as I thought there were.  I had no idea most of these projects even existed.

This activity should be the counterevidence to DecentralizedEconomics claims that Bitshares is a scam.  Might be time to buy more now that the price is low again and there seems to be a lot going on.

[EvilDave]

We need some kittens.....



There, all sorted.

[StanLarimer]

They are very cute, but that's just a disguise.

(And you must admit, they are incredibly centralized in that picture.)

Far too many cats per square mile, if you ask me.

[StanLarimer]

Hey guys!  There is no better way to find out what's going on in BitShares than to check out the March Newsletter.

29 pages and 0 pics of puppies. This is bad. Very very bad.

To restore balance to the force I include a picture of 101 BitShares puppies.
You can only make out one of them from this extreme range because the rest are decentralized.

[StanLarimer]

Oh, and by the way, BitShares stakeholders have finally sorted out how they are going to handle release of public statements in a way that seemed to satisfy most folks.

Bottom line, our self-imposed muzzle is off!  Read all about it in our March Newsletter.

[StanLarimer]

Another great source of info on BitShares
Google's BitShares Community

[StanLarimer]

Hey guys!  There is no better way to find out what's going on in BitShares than to check out the March Newsletter.

This newsletter is unique because it is written by the delegates themselves (developers, marketeers, and service providers). 
Each of these small businesses reports on what it is doing with their funding - which gives you an overview of the whole ecosystem.
I was amazed at the scope of projects that are now going on, with more appearing almost weekly.

(Bytemaster and I have to read the newsletter ourselves these days to find out everything that is happening.)

So our goal of a completely decentralized ecosystem is becoming more of a reality every day!

 

As a noob, I found that outstanding! It was a beautiful collection of summarized information that gave me an idea of what is happening in this ecosystem. In the past few weeks I've gone from "WTF is Bitshares" to "Wow, look at everything that is happening in the Bitshares world". Thanks to Bitscape & Roadscape for introducing me to this!
Rock on!

[StanLarimer]

I just added this to the info section - second post at the top of this thread...

Media Point of Contact!

Max Wright, the author of Bitshares101 and the host on BitShares.tv,
has agreed to be a contact person for media contact/inquiries.
You could forward his contact info to them:

max@bitshares.org
skype:max.bitshares.btc

[Nxtblg]

One question: essentially, the issuers of a Bitshares asset short it on 200% margin; I got that part. But, are the lifetimes of the assets limited? Are they automatically redeemed in BTS after X days, or is their lifetime forever?

This question popped up in my head as I was having a not-so-pleasant dream about issuing a hypothetical asset tied to the S&P 500 - call it BTS500 - and essentially "selling America short." This would not lead to a Black Swan event, but it would lead to someone sitting on a growing responsibility for more margin over time. How would that work for an issuer? Can he or she add more margin as time goes on, as you can for a regular stock-market account?  

Oh, right:

[StanLarimer]

One question: essentially, the issuers of a Bitshares asset short it on 200% margin; I got that part. But, are the lifetimes of the assets limited? Are they automatically redeemed in BTS after X days, or is their lifetime forever?

This question popped up in my head as I was having a not-so-pleasant dream about issuing a hypothetical asset tied to the S&P 500 - call it BTS500 - and essentially "selling America short." This would not lead to a Black Swan event, but it would lead to someone sitting on a growing responsibility for more margin over time. How would that work for an issuer? Can he or she add more margin as time goes on, as you can for a regular stock-market account?  

For posting a puppy picture you automatically qualify for one free deluxe question!

BitShares does auto margin calls under 2 conditions:
1.  If the value of the BTS collateral falls from 3x down to 2x.
2.  At the end of thirty days.

You can avoid this by adding more margin or reset back to 3x and 30 days by closing out one position and reentering a new one.

This does not affect the holders of the BitAsset, who can hold them forever if they choose.

[HalFinneysBrain]

One question: essentially, the issuers of a Bitshares asset short it on 200% margin; I got that part. But, are the lifetimes of the assets limited? Are they automatically redeemed in BTS after X days, or is their lifetime forever?

If you buy a bitAsset you can hold onto it forever if you want.

If you create a bitAsset (by 'shorting' it into existence, and providing some of your BTS as collateral), then you are forced to buy back that bitAsset within 30 days, OR if your collateral gets too low.

What is the point of this? 
It gives every bitAsset holder a guarantee that within a 30 day period, someone is going to need to buy the asset back, which means that you are able to sell your asset if you want.


One option for the 'short' to cover their position is to 'buy it from yourself', by shorting a new version of the bitAsset and selling it to yourself to cover your old asset.  This is kindof like rolling over a futures contract for a commodity, into the next period.  When you do this, you have to put in an order at the feed price (the 'fair price' of the asset).  This means that anyone else out there could offer a better price than this, and then you would have to sell to them instead. 

Usually, there is a small spread of bitassets.  For example, people are willing to sell a bitUSD for $1.005, or buy it for $.995 (worth of BTS) or something like that.  If someone puts in an order saying "I am willing to sell for $.999", which is below the feed price of $1, then within that 30 day period, when the shot needs to cover, they have to buy from that person first, before they can short a new asset to themself. 

If no one is willing to sell for a better price than the feed, then the short is free to roll over their position for a new 30 days.

This system ensures:
* Some buying power will exist every 30 days, for all of the bitAssets in existence.  This guarantees you can get out at a fair price by waiting a max of 30 days.
* The creator of the bitAsset (who shorted it) doesnt get screwed over when they have to cover their short.  If no one is willing to sell to them at a fair price, they can sell to themself.

[HalFinneysBrain]

This question popped up in my head as I was having a not-so-pleasant dream about issuing a hypothetical asset tied to the S&P 500 - call it BTS500 - and essentially "selling America short." This would not lead to a Black Swan event, but it would lead to someone sitting on a growing responsibility for more margin over time. How would that work for an issuer? Can he or she add more margin as time goes on, as you can for a regular stock-market account?  

If the S&P was going up relative to BTS, then the issuer of the asset would be losing money over time (which you would expect, they have shorted it!).  This means they would lose BTS.  When they were forced to cover their position after 30 days, they would not be able to reshort as much BTS500 next time.  If they have some extra BTS laying around, they are free to remain in the short position as long as they can afford to, by adding more collateral.

If the S&P went down relative to BTS, they would make money.  When they covered they would end up with more BTS than they started.

[StanLarimer]

Someone asked why they should own bitAssets instead of the real assets they are pegged to.

Fair question.

I like being able to go back and forth between a wide variety of assets as they cycle against each other in the market.
I can switch between exposure to BTS, BTC, Gold, Silver, CNY, EUR, and USD for about a penny in ten seconds as often as I like.
I can also create my own basket of currencies and adjust the mix as often as I like for pennies.
And I never encounter the delays, costs and risks of passing through fiat space.

Where else can you do that?

100% of all literate dogs and cats polled considered that answer to be conclusive.

[StanLarimer]

One of the things about BitShares that most excites me is how many other businesses, world-wide, are starting to develop products and services for it.

Here's a one minute proposal to the decentralized BitShares community for Bitsapphier's new Moonstone wallet - just to show you what I mean!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpoqezHMMgo

[StanLarimer]

These videos are so on point, I showed a derivatives expert the "What is the BitShares Decentralized Exchange" and "How do bitAssets like bitUSD work?" videos and he was amazed. Thank you Max.  When it's time - I can't wait to see these get marketed.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Derivatives is for girls. Derivatives of derivatives - this is what real men play with.

(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

[StanLarimer]

Our main web site is bitshares.org, but...

here is another site chock full of BitShares news:  
http://bitsharesblog.com/beyond-bitcoin-show-talks-with-bytemaster-about-bitshares-development/

[StanLarimer]

[StanLarimer]

We are having a community challenge to come up with the best "elevator speech" to explain "Why BitShares?" to someone in the time it takes to go on an elevator ride with them.

I kinda liked this one:

Re: Strengthening other people's understanding of why BitShares exists
 
We at BitShares (ok, me in particular) believe that Wall Street is broken. Banks are no longer paying us appropriately and what's worse we are now being forced to pay them. This has got to change through technology as the "Market Makers" have proven that the system is currently rewarding corruption. A DE-centralized Exchange such as BitShares(.org) is proving that decentralization removes the ability to cheat and rewards the savers and investors instead of penalizing them.

[Nxtblg]

We are having a community challenge to come up with the best "elevator speech" to explain "Why BitShares?" to someone in the time it takes to go on an elevator ride with them.

I kinda liked this one:

Re: Strengthening other people's understanding of why BitShares exists
 
We at BitShares (ok, me in particular) believe that Wall Street is broken. Banks are no longer paying us appropriately and what's worse we are now being forced to pay them. This has got to change through technology as the "Market Makers" have proven that the system is currently rewarding corruption. A DE-centralized Exchange such as BitShares(.org) is proving that decentralization removes the ability to cheat and rewards the savers and investors instead of penalizing them.

Yeah...it's a little more down-to-earth than "Bitshares helps created a decentralized peer-to-peer financial network for the future!"

[StanLarimer]

A Canadian company joins the BitShares ecosystem - ISG3D does 3D printing!

http://isg3d.com/products/3d-printed-bts-bitshares-bar

Here's a whole thread with pictures about how they do it and all the cool stuff they can do:

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=15051.msg194938#msg194938

Given that they can do Vladimir Putin, I'm sure they can do cats. 
Puppies, being much higher order beings, may take them a little longer...

[StanLarimer]

[StanLarimer]

NullStreet's new BitShares TriFold Brochure...





Download here...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1hxqfske51hxu8c/Bitshare%20TriFold%20Print%20Handout.zip?dl=0

[Come-from-Beyond]

Oh, btw, is there a working DAC somewhere in Bitshares?

PS: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=996522.0

[StanLarimer]

Wonderful Question!

From Bitcoin and the Three Laws of Robotics where DACs were first introduced:

Relentlessly honorable autonomous corporations would have many advantages in the free market.  Like Bitcoin, DACs armed with a set of inviolable Core Laws are far safer to deal with than corruptible human organizations.  Moreover, such entities have emergent characteristics with far more interesting applications than just keeping the books for a crypto currency.   Blockchain ethics allow a suitably motivated engineer to “incorporate” some or all of the following SEG-verifiable characteristics.

They are corporations – They are, and of a right ought to be, free and independent persons.
They are autonomous – once up to speed; they no longer need (or heed) their creators.
They are distributed – there are no central points of control or failure that can be attacked.
They are transparent – their books and business rules are auditable by all.
They are confidential – customer information is securely (and incorruptibly) protected.
They are trustworthy – because no interaction with them depends on trust.
They are fiduciaries – acting solely in their customers’ and shareholders’ interests.
They are self-regulating – they obey their own rules like, well, robots.
They are incorruptible – no one can exercise seductive or coercive influence over them.
They are sovereign – over their digital resources.  They don’t need governments to exist.

Of course, this is the ultimate vision behind the name but there are many viable systems worth owning that will only aim to achieve some partial mix of these characteristics.

Having spent 36+ years working on autonomous vehicles for land, sea, air, and space I can say with confidence that "autonomous" is a spectrum of automation that takes over where "teleoperation" leaves off and (hopefully) never quite reaches "unresponsive to the intent of its human designers."

Mars Rovers must navigate autonomously for considerable distances without commands from Earth - but they do pause for instructions every once in a while to give humans a chance to ask "are we there yet?".

BitShares is well on its way to its designed levels of autonomy, which is "responsive only to its shareholders".  Even now, BitShares no longer strictly needs or heeds its creators and we expect that to become increasingly true over time.

[StanLarimer]

Speaking of autonomous navigation, the BitScape.io Team is off on a Road Trip touring as many BitShares activity sites as they can cram into a 3000 mile tour of the American Northeast.

BitShares Peer-to-Peer Road Trip Daily Reports

If you are interested in sizing up the for-realness of BitShares, you might want to follow their reports over the next three weeks.

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Pretty soon we're going to see Stan on here trying to sell reverse mortgages.

[Nxtblg]

Oh, btw, is there a working DAC somewhere in Bitshares?

PS: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=996522.0

Now that you've brought up the subject: what would be a DAC in law? The law already sez that a corporation is an artificial person - but that designation takes into account the fact that a single corporation is a centralized entity. What would be the "artificial person" in the case of a DAC? It's an interesting question, and one that the legal theoreticians will have to get around to...

[StanLarimer]

Oh, btw, is there a working DAC somewhere in Bitshares?

PS: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=996522.0

Now that you've brought up the subject: what would be a DAC in law? The law already sez that a corporation is an artificial person - but that designation takes into account the fact that a single corporation is a centralized entity. What would be the "artificial person" in the case of a DAC? It's an interesting question, and one that the legal theoreticians will have to get around to...

They probably will, but my position is simply that a DAC is not a legal entity created by the state.

BitShares, INC
BitShares, LLC
BitShares, LTD

...would be legislated artificial persons created by a government to grant certain status, protections and exemptions to its owners.

BitShares, DAC

...is an engineered artificial person that seeks no such status, protection or exemptions and intended to be a sovereign entity operating in international waters.

Your actual mileage may vary.

[EvilDave]

Drops link:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/113769/cyber-fund-report-daos-will-reach-mass-adoption-disrupt-politics-and-religion-by-2025
and runs away.....

[StanLarimer]

Here's an updated version of the BitShares Brochure.  
Think of the people of dissimilar gender you could meet on street corners everywhere
if you just had a fist full of these to hand out!

***Edited version*** Please use this current updated version. Thank you TurkeyLeg for your keen eyes and catching some errors!!
Please note...I've also added an additional photo showing a printed out brochure. It shows the folds and how it should look once done. There are two ways to feature the brochure for table tops, as shown in the bottom right photo.
Again, please use only what is currently posted! Thanks
***another edit*** Just added zip file of Black and White pdf at bottom of OP.


Hello Everyone,

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you're trying to explain or showcase to someone what Bitshares is all about and what it offers?
And their only reaction was...... HUH?  

Well.... I have... and in response I've put together, along with help from the Nullstreet crew, a full color quick info BitShares Tri-Fold brochure.
This way anyone in our community can be proud to print and share this brochure to anyone and everyone they know!
Below is a preview of the brochure. Beneath the previews you'll find a provided link to a .zip file for downloading the PDF of the front and back (along with .tiff and .jpeg formats).
So printing should be easy enough for anyone.
Please keep this in mind when you print these... the front AND back pages are meant to be printed onto ONE page so it can easily be folded into 1/3 sections.
So be aware of the page orientations, so that one side isn't printing upside down from the other. Please do a test page first before printing off 100's or 1000's of these.
Also note, printing these in Black and White will still turn out good, but obviously color is the better option!  
Another suggestion when using this brochure. Please try to have people use the QR code if possible. That way we can get a count of how many people actually used this!

Thanks everyone!!












Download zip here...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/edp69vvubhnh6og/BitShares%20TriFold%20Brochure_v2.zip?dl=0

Black and White pdf of front and back...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y3va5217j01i71c/Bitshares%20B_W%20TriFold%20Brochure_v2.zip?dl=0

[StanLarimer]

Bottom line on the BitUSD peg...
What are other companies willing to accept right this minute?

What a beautiful peg!

[DecentralizeEconomics]

[StanLarimer]

This is pretty cool.  Cryptosmith (another third party BitShares business) just went live with a soft launch.
They tell me they will do a full launch next week if all goes well.

Stan

The Long Awaited Moment Has Arrived!
You can buy real gold and silver with bitGold and bitSilver - right now at cyptosmith.info.

EDIT  7/30/15: 

WARNING
THE OWNER OF THIS BUSINESS HAS DISAPPEARED AND WE ARE UNABLE TO CONTACT HIM. 
I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU USE THIS SERVICE AT THIS TIME.

[StanLarimer]

Looks like the MineBitShares pool is having some success!

MineBitShares is now listed at http://poolpicker.eu

PoolPicker is the most popular multi-pool profitability comparison site with ~2500-5000 visitors a day!

It's official! We're tied with being most profitable pool on the most days for Scrypt in the last month - see http://poolpicker.eu/table

If your a BitShares enthusiast and have been using minebitshares - do submit a review at http://poolpicker.eu/writereview to help spread the word.
Remember we've been paying out miners regularly for 6 months+.

And we're not far from having the minebitshares-reloaded delegate in the top 101 -   http://bitsharesblocks.com/delegate/info?name=minebitshares-reloaded  we're currently 146. We need your support to get int the top 100 for the pool to be able to carry on and continue getting the BitShares/BitAsset message out.

The benefits of BitShares self-funding delegate system keep rolling on...

Just wait till they finish hooking up with cryptosmith.info so you can mine directly to real physical gold and silver!
(Cryptosmith is up with a soft launch this week and a full launch next week if all checks out.  Use your bitAssets to lock in purchase of gold and silver metal instantly!)

[Come-from-Beyond]

The benefits of BitShares self-funding delegate system keep rolling on...

You took Bitcoin weakness (necessity to pay money to electrical companies) and transformed it into your strength (self-funding). That was a smart engineering solution.

(\(\
(-.-)
(")(")

[StanLarimer]

Thanks!

(But I saw you sneak that subliminal image of a cat into your signature...)

 

[StanLarimer]

Here's some recent hangout recordings on several BitShares projects:

http://beyondbitcoinshow.com/developer-hangout-with-bytemaster-march-27-2015/

http://beyondbitcoinshow.com/hangout-w-taulant-about-bitshares-music-note-snapshot/

http://beyondbitcoinshow.com/delegate-hangout-with-wackou-about-btstools/

[StanLarimer]

Gotta love watching a whole small business ecosystem develop...

So far on the 3D printing webstore we accept BitUsd and Bitshares through Shapeshift and we have 2 products exclusive to Bitshares:

http://isg3d.com/products/3d-printed-bitshares-phone-case



http://isg3d.com/products/3d-printed-bts-bitshares-bar

[StanLarimer]

The PeerTracks Team (aka BitShares Music) made their big debut at the Texas conference this weekend...  https://plus.google.com/communities/104193073958834457881

You can now trade its music currency, NOTES, on the decentralized exchange inside your BitShares wallet.
or get them at blocktrades.us:

[StanLarimer]

Episode #12 MoonStone - The application layer begins.

Max Wright interviews Taulant Ramabaja, one of the founders of Bitsapphire as he explains the #Moonstone Wallet!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sDU-ooXq-E

What is Moonstone? Where is Moonstone now? What's Moonstone's direction?
If you like what Moonstone will do for BitShares, Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, don't forget to subscribe at: https://moonstone.io/

[StanLarimer]

Oh yes, and the BitShares Peer-to-Peer Road Trip presses on in style...

BitShares in the City of BitSharely Love

Bitscape, Roadscape, Robrigo, & Riverhead show off the spiffy bts-mobile

[StanLarimer]

Cryptosmith is now open for business as an off ramp from BitSilver to real physical silver and the same for gold.

Cryptosmith http://cryptosmith.info/index.php would like to start outside testing by accepting a limited number of customers before a launch to the general public.

Couple of things to keep in mind.

-Bitsilver and Bitgold are currently the only accepted forms of payment. Their are other options listed but you will be kicked back to the start page if trying to pay in anything other then Bitsilver and Bitgold.

-All packages are shipped USPS tacked,insured and signature confirmation required. I am thinking of allowing tracked but not insured, no signature confirmation so that users can save on shipping cost's, please feel free to weigh in with your opinion on this.

-After a successful launch here in the US I will begin working to allow international orders.

If you are interested in purchasing physical gold and or silver in any amount please PM me thanks.

[StanLarimer]

Other BitShares community members relentlessly working on better decentralized exchange interfaces...

Heres another rough layout.



with this layout you could potentially make the right column and the left column popout drawers that you could push out of the way to really maximize the viewable chart.

The "order history" on the right could also be tabbed with "Your Order history"

The tabs on the top left are getting kind of cramped, there's probably a better way to do that.

Good suggestions and I really like this layout.  I was going to suggest the depth chart in that location but was worried about it looking too cramped but it looks good!  

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Oh yes, and the BitShares p2p road trip presses on in style...

Your BTS cronies look like a bunch of deranged hippies.  Why don't they get a shave and attempt to look like respectable individuals instead of spreading Communism door-to-door across America?  Someone needs to report this to Homeland Security.

[StanLarimer]

Meanwhile,  BitShares Play rears its head...

DAC Sun Never Set.

Introducing the opensource decentralized game platform PLAY.
http://www.dacsunlimited.com

The latest official release can always be found at this URL:
https://github.com/dacsunlimited/dac_play/releases/latest

Upon unleashing, decentralized technology runs on its own, just like the Internet. The power of decentralization crashes any bureaucracy or censorship that tries to stop it.

WELCOME TO THE DACPLAY WORLD!
-DACSunlimited

[StanLarimer]

We've got so much stuff going on it's like herding puppies!

Maybe even 101 puppies...

[Crestington]

Wow, so much fantastic stuff going on around Bitshares.

When are you guys going to do some Canada tours?

[StanLarimer]

Well, this trip is going so well I'm pretty sure they will do another one.

I hear the BunkerShares^TM BitShares Data Center Bunker is on their bucket list near Debert, Nova Scotia, Canada.

http://www.falloutcomplex.com/

[StanLarimer]

What's in your wallet?

The BitShares Decentralized Exchange
Smart currencies are just its product,
A safe place to trade is its business.

Everybody seems to be designing a cool contender to be the best BitShares Wallet / Decentralized Exchange Interface.

[StanLarimer]

A bit more from Dan Notestein, the blocktrades.us CEO:

If you've been interested in purchasing PeerTrack's Notes (http://peertracks.com) directly using BitCoin, but haven't wanted to go through the trouble and expenses associated with making multiple coin conversions across exchanges, BlockTrades.us (https://blocktrades.us) is offering an easy way to get started.

Blocktrades.us has just added support for buying and selling  Notes with BitCoin, BitShares, BitUSD, BitCNY, and BitBTC.  No sign up is required to purchase coins on the site, and coin purchases complete within two bitcoin confirmations (or around 30s for conversions between BitShares coin types).

[StanLarimer]

BitShares Meetup in Blacksburg, VA, USA will host the BitShares Peer-to-Peer Roadtrip Thursday.
The BitShares Dev Team, including Bytemaster, will attend.
http://www.meetup.com/Bitcoin-and-Beyond-Meetup/events/221509663/?a=ea1_grp&rv=ea1

[StanLarimer]

Bitshares ¿qué es y cómo funciona? (BTCenEspañol)

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Bitshares ¿qué es y cómo funciona? (BTCenEspañol)

[altcoinUK]

A bit more from Dan Notestein, the blocktrades.us CEO:

If you've been interested in purchasing PeerTrack's Notes (http://peertracks.com) directly using BitCoin, but haven't wanted to go through the trouble and expenses associated with making multiple coin conversions across exchanges, BlockTrades.us (https://blocktrades.us) is offering an easy way to get started.

Blocktrades.us has just added support for buying and selling  Notes with BitCoin, BitShares, BitUSD, BitCNY, and BitBTC.  No sign up is required to purchase coins on the site, and coin purchases complete within two bitcoin confirmations (or around 30s for conversions between BitShares coin types).

Hi Stan,

As we discussed it in other threads, Bitshares is a great technology and great idea, really innovative and Dan seems a nice and honest guy, but I was just wondering isn't it Bitshares fall under the illegal securities offering in the United States? I am based in the UK so I am not sure about the US regulations, but as far as I know it is illegal to offer not listd company shares in the US to not qualified investors. In the meantime you are promoting the project as a decentralized company and while I understand the Bitshares assets has a digital currency role as well, but apart from the digital currency function it is a de-facto company share too with voting rights, so don't you think you will be in trouble with the US law enforcement regarding to this project?

[Este Nuno]

A bit more from Dan Notestein, the blocktrades.us CEO:

If you've been interested in purchasing PeerTrack's Notes (http://peertracks.com) directly using BitCoin, but haven't wanted to go through the trouble and expenses associated with making multiple coin conversions across exchanges, BlockTrades.us (https://blocktrades.us) is offering an easy way to get started.

Blocktrades.us has just added support for buying and selling  Notes with BitCoin, BitShares, BitUSD, BitCNY, and BitBTC.  No sign up is required to purchase coins on the site, and coin purchases complete within two bitcoin confirmations (or around 30s for conversions between BitShares coin types).

Hi Stan,

As we discussed it in other threads, Bitshares is a great technology and great idea, really innovative and Dan seems a nice and honest guy, but I was just wondering isn't it Bitshares fall under the illegal securities offering in the United States? I am based in the UK so I am not sure about the US regulations, but as far as I know it is illegal to offer not listd company shares in the US to not qualified investors. In the meantime you are promoting the project as a decentralized company and while I understand the Bitshares assets has a digital currency role as well, but apart from the digital currency function it is a de-facto company share too with voting rights, so don't you think you will be in trouble with the US law enforcement regarding to this project?

They've apparently spent a very, very large amount of money on lawyers to help protect them from this.

[altcoinUK]

Have the lawyers changed the US regulations without the involvement of the Congress and Senate and without making the change of regulations public? Because my understanding was that the law regarding to illegal security offering is still in effect, but gain I am not familiar with the US legislative situation regarding to this.

[StanLarimer]

The company metaphor is used for pedagogical purposes to help people locked into the original Bitcoin paradigm think bigger.  We interchangebly use ten different metaphors to expand people's understanding of the potential of transparent public ledgers.  

For example, see What is BitShares?

Dr. Charles Evans wrote a great (and funny) article on letstalkbitcoin about the virtues and limits of using metaphors to describe revolutionary new products.  Remember the "Horseless Carriage"?   Here's a link:  A bitRose by any other Name.

We often describe Bitcoin itself as an unprofitable unmanned company to point out the appalling waste of POW mining as its security and distribution mechanism.  Does that suddenly make Satoshi an issuer of a security?

Anyway, we have been thoroughly instructed by five different law firms about the kind of businesses in which we can engage.  Thus far shall we go and no further.  

[altcoinUK]

All right then, and thanks for the reply. I was asking from purely investor viewpoint about this legal risk. Perhaps it would be useful if you could post more about that legality issue or why it is not an issue at all.

[StanLarimer]

From your Mighty Master of Mixed Metaphors...

BitShares was "sharedropped" into existence by dacsunlimited.com who merely recommended a publicly defined distribution list specifying a targeted demographic of other coin users (BTC and PTS). Anyone could download DAC Sun's custom version of BitShares's public domain software and claim any free tokens to which they already held the keys.  The first person to run that free software launched a new blockchain and others then joined in to form a new peer to peer network among themselves based on their shared consensus that DAC Sun's software would regulate their interactions with each other.

The resulting asset, BitShares, trades as an ordinary crypto-currency on several ordinary crypto exchanges just like Bitcoin.  As a second-generation "smart coin" it supports an enhanced set of transaction types that affect how and when the internal bookkeeping tokens are transferred among users of the distributed software according to a fixed and transparent set of rules.  External third party applications analogous to specialized bitcoin wallets use those underlying transaction types to implement whatever metaphor the application designer thinks will be useful for helping ordinary folks take advantage of these new transaction types.

• Some of these third party applications use the Bitcoin wallet metaphor (aka "skin") because that is familiar to the Bitcoin community.
  
• Others use the skin metaphor of a decentralized exchange - because that is the easiest way to visualize and specify certain transaction types.
  
• Others are planned to look like checkbooks or on-line bank accounts because many consumers are familiar with thinking that way.
  
• To some, it will have an uncanny resemblance to a public voting booth.
  
• Some interfaces won't use a computer at all - you'll have an ordinary debit card that you load and spend like any other.
  

But under it all, BitShares is just an (extra)ordinary second-generation crypto-currency with many 3rd party "skins" to help different types of people use it more effectively.

Owners of BitShares tokens get to elect service providers who represent that they are legally able to perform certain unregulated functions in their jurisdictions.  These are very simple everyday functions, like notarizing (signing) digital documents, providing public data feeds, and writing open source software.  But there is no human corporate structure in any jurisdiction that owns or controls it.  

Thus, BitShares is merely a transparent public ledger that exhibits a different customized emergent behavior made manifest to each individual depending upon the set of software that individual uses to interact with it.

[StanLarimer]

And here's what's going on with BitShares Vote team...

I promised the community that we would send out a recap of my recent visit to Norway to introduce our voting solution to the Pirate Party of Norway. To this end, we've just published a story on the Follow My Vote website that covers the event! So, be sure to check out the link below:

https://followmyvote.com/follow-my-vote-and-the-pirate-party-make-plans-for-the-future-of-voting/

We've also published another story on the BitShares Blog to maximize coverage: http://bitshares.org/blog/. As an fyi, we will be promoting these blog posts, as well as the youtube video throughout the web over this week and next and will keep the community updated on how many people we reach/views we get. We'd love your help in spreading the word as well.

[StanLarimer]

The BitShares Peer to Peer Road Trip reaches the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center...

[Zer0Sum]

Puppies won't save your Bubble.

Thanks for posting pics of the people that are your BTS "counterparty that doesn't exist"...
You guys have no idea how many US securities regulations have been breached.

[StanLarimer]

Yeah, our March Madness Blue Light Special Sale is winding down.
But if you act now, we'll throw in 5 BitShares for the price of one.
(Just pay separate shipping and handling.)

[StanLarimer]

[StanLarimer]

[StanLarimer]

This entire thread is my sadly poor attempt to show you all the energy in the tidal wave now approaching land.
If you are a wise investor, you will look at that surging energy and ask yourself,
"What will happen to that beneath-the-surface momentum when it reaches shore?"

[DecentralizeEconomics]

This entire thread is my sadly poor attempt to show you all the energy in the tidal wave now approaching land.
If you are a wise investor, you will look at that surging energy and ask yourself,
"What will happen to that beneath-the-surface momentum when it reaches shore?"

[StanLarimer]

Yes.  That's the point of the thread.  
Compiling all the evidence showing that the BitShares ecosystem is really real!

I almost chose that same picture myself (minus my smiling face).

[StanLarimer]

All Roads Lead to Blacksburg!

http://bitscape.io/all-roads-lead-to-blacksburg/

Wherein we describe the NYC to Blacksburg leg of our journey!

[StanLarimer]

APRIL 3, 2015    BY ADAM ERNEST
BitShares Worldwide Meetups: Blacksburg Edition

On April 2nd, BitShares community members hosted a meetup at NuSpark, a local entrepreneurship space in Blacksburg Virginia near the Virginia Tech campus. BitShares worldwide meetups have been growing in popularity recently. More and more people are being exposed to the BitShares blockchain and the possibilities that come with new forms of value and new businesses via BitShares. We typically get pizza and drinks and have great fellowship and discussion surrounding Bitshares.

http://bitshares.org/blog/bitshares-worldwide-meetups-blacksburg-edition/

During this specific meetup we gave updates on several Bitshares related projects. Some of the projects that were discussed were the new BitShares web wallet, Peertracks, and Moonstone. When we showed off the web wallet we demonstrated just how easy getting into BitShares can be. Along with this pitch we revealed several gateways to the Bitshares trading network. Some of the ones discussed were BlockTrades and ShapeShift. Peertracks was discussed as well, which is essentially Bitshares music. Peertracks allows for music artist and fans to connect on a whole new level. With this platform artist can be truly profitable and the fans become the biggest promoters. We then covered a new open-source light wallet called Moonstone. Moonstone aims to bring Bitshares to the masses by providing a better user experience. In just a few days, Moonstone will actually be launching a crowd-funding campaign.
 
Another highlight from the meetup was getting to hear from a Virginia Tech student who has been helping work with Bitshares. He explained what he has learned from the developers so far and what he likes about the BitShares ecosystem.
 
Additionally we welcomed the team from the Bitshares P2P Tour. Currently they are traveling around the United States meeting up and interviewing Bitshares community members. Their journey will be the subject of a film.  The story will be made into a documentary and will serve as a way to bring community members together. The stories and experiences of Bitshares early adopters and founders needs to be heard!
 
Be sure to join a BitShares meetup group so you can attend the next one! And if there isn’t one near you, ask us about starting your own.

[DecentralizeEconomics]

I'm glad you all like puppies because you're about to get crushed by the Doge.

[StanLarimer]

Wolf puppies look a lot like dog puppies, so this btswolf (Erstes deutsches BitShares InfoPortal) post still qualifies for our special "almost puppies" rate:

Happy Easter 2015


I've just started a little competition on BTSwolf.com as German Easter 2015 Special Promotion campaign.
Attendees have to find one of 10 special words on BTSwolf.com.

I will put 20 BitUSD of my own stack in the pot and it would be great if you support this campaign by donating some BitUSD too ,to "donations.btswolf" until easter monday evening.
The whole winning price 20BitUSD+Donations will be split among all valid participants.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=982444.msg10975568#msg10975568
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=15468.msg199151#msg199151
https://www.coinforum.de/topic/3785-bitshares-btswolf/#entry61737
https://twitter.com/btswolf/status/584136905635328002

Thanks for your support

Kind regards,
Tim

[StanLarimer]

Here is Fuzzy's list of cool BitShares Projects.

-MetaExchange
-3D Printing Alliance growing (ISG3D)

-Open Source Hardware
-DataSecurity Shares
-MoonStone

-CryptoFresh (bitscape & roadscape)


-LimeWallet
-Nathans Wallet
-MineBitShares
-PLAY
-MUSIC
-BitSharesTV
-NullStreet Marketers
-*CryptoSmith*
-*BeyondBitcoin.org* (when Stan gets the domain to Jabba)
 
-*BitShares Island* 



And this isn't even talking about Chinese initiatives (like selling shares in berkshire hathaway)...
And as always...there are others I am not at liberty to talk about (yet).

Admittedly, the BitShares Island and its landmark BitShares Office Tower complex pictured above are a bit further off, but you've gotta love the Marina del BitShares in the middle of the island where the BitShares catamaran fleet will drop anchor when not decentralized.

[Nxtblg]

Here is Fuzzy's list of cool BitShares Projects.

...And this isn't even talking about Chinese initiatives (like selling shares in berkshire hathaway)...

Now that is interesting...I've been whacked around by the stock market for some time, and was toying with the idea of getting into Bitshares so I could offer Assets tied to the Dow, S&P 500, and a few popular stocks.

[StanLarimer]

Yes!  Check out the earlier post in this thread from Baozougongqinwang (Rampaging Prince Gong)!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=940298.msg10530722#msg10530722

They are offering a mix of VC crowdfunding and reselling affordable micro shares out of major stocks.

[Nxtblg]

Yes!  Check out the earlier post in this thread from Baozougongqinwang (Rampaging Prince Gong)!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=940298.msg10530722#msg10530722

They are offering a mix of VC crowdfunding and reselling affordable micro shares out of major stocks.

So what you're saying is, there's no interest in a suite of Bitshares Assets that mimic already-listed major stocks. Thanks.

[StanLarimer]

Yes!  Check out the earlier post in this thread from Baozougongqinwang (Rampaging Prince Gong)!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=940298.msg10530722#msg10530722

They are offering a mix of VC crowdfunding and reselling affordable micro shares out of major stocks.

So what you're saying is, there's no interest in a suite of Bitshares Assets that mimic already-listed major stocks. Thanks.

No, just the opposite.  I'm saying your idea has been validated by other professionals who got some VC funds to try it. 
The arena is still wide open for innovation by early movers...

 

[Nxtblg]

Yes!  Check out the earlier post in this thread from Baozougongqinwang (Rampaging Prince Gong)!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=940298.msg10530722#msg10530722

They are offering a mix of VC crowdfunding and reselling affordable micro shares out of major stocks.

So what you're saying is, there's no interest in a suite of Bitshares Assets that mimic already-listed major stocks. Thanks.

No, just the opposite.  I'm saying your idea has been validated by other professionals who got some VC funds to try it. 
The arena is still wide open for innovation by early movers...

 

You mean, by issuing them and adding them to the Bitshares ecosystem? Wouldn't that require all delegates to add the stock prices to their feeds?

[StanLarimer]

It depends on how you want to do it.

If you go with Market Pegged Assets (MPA), then the answer is yes and you have a trustless decentralized asset.

If you go with User Issued Assets (UIA), then no, you back the asset with an IOU to trade it at a spread around the price of the real stock and you become a centralized point of trust.  This means success depends on your reputation or you should team with someone who has a public reputation.

The two approaches can coexist on one blockchain, giving lots of options for various business models.

With MPAs like, say, BitBTC, you need to convince the delegates that there is enough demand to be worth the effort of publishing a feed.  Over time, this will get easier.

A good approach would be to start out with a UIA, prove there is demand, then petition the delegates with that evidence to offer a MPA version.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Wolf puppies look a lot like dog puppies, so this btswolf (Erstes deutsches BitShares InfoPortal) post still qualifies for our special "almost puppies" rate:

The same about bunnies

[StanLarimer]

Oh, man!  That pegged my cute-o-meter.
You gotta warn me before you go posting something like that!

[Come-from-Beyond]

WTF is this? "BitShares loves puppies" got another meaning after





I suggest to start a new thread. FUDers have won this battle against your marketing team.

[bitcreditscc]

WTF is this? "BitShares loves puppies" got another meaning after





I suggest to start a new thread. FUDers have won this battle against your marketing team.

#shotsfired

[StanLarimer]

[StanLarimer]

-> #Bitshares2k15

Moonstone - New Bitsapphire Wallet: Fundraiser proposal
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14274.0

Cryptosmith: BitSilver to silver website construction has begun!!!
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14266.0

Mobile Wallet - Testers needed
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11902.0


[ANN] Cryptohedge Financial Services soft launch
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13904.0

January Newsletter #BitsharesMusic
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13697.0

Bitshares Client 1.0

Lightweight Client

BitSharesMusic
PeerTracks
Escrow
ColdStorage

Cryptohedge

[StanLarimer]

This is basically one hour with Bytemaster answering questions from the public and (IMHO) letting way too much slip about what's coming next.

http://beyondbitcoinshow.com/developer-hangout-with-bytemaster-april-3-2015/

[StanLarimer]

Here's Cass's latest design.  
Glad to see the BitShares GUI starting to shine.

[StanLarimer]

The Bitshares ecosystem provides a magical user experience

Guys, among all the bitching and moaning on this forum, I just wanted to share my Bitshares experience lately.

The Bitshares experience is so quick and easy that I find myself NOT using Bitcoin anymore. For example, I used to buy every Humble Bundle for Bitcoin and thought that it was easy and fast, but lately having to launch and sync that monstrosity (Bitcoin Core client) made me not want to do that. I don't trust any other wallets and syncing alone takes several hours.

Then suddenly I realized that I can spend BitUSD using Shapeshift! It took like two minutes and I spent like 10.30 BitUSD for a $10 game.

Then today I wanted to buy some factoids (factom presale tokens). I registered on koinify and instead of launching and shuffling my BTC around (witch would again take half a day) I decided to try Metaexchange. To my surprise it was even faster and easier than shapeshift! I made the transfer in the Bitshares client and BOOM the koinify page immediately says 'Congratulations, you've got yourself some factoids'.

Shuffling my assets around on the internal exchange has been a blast too. If BitBTC had any liquidity I'd happily convert most of my BTC to it.

I also just reactivated my Neteller account and the Net+ mastercard and loaded it with some BitUSD via shapeshift lens and after 7 days I will be able to take it out from any ATM for free! (not available in the US though). BitUSD really is like having an untouchable bank account in the cloud without having to worry about all the price nonsense. It's secure and accessible and you can spend it wherever Bitcoin is accepted. Pro poker players, dark market vendors, entrepreneurs in unfavorable jurisdictions, investors in unjust tax jurisdictions... Thinking how many people are DESPERATE for this product just makes my head explode.

[StanLarimer]

http://beyondbitcoinshow.com/delegate-hangout-with-gentso-about-cryptosmith-info-plus-update-about-followmyvote/

[StanLarimer]

Some of you may find this article interesting...

Gateways and Bridges

Read the rest here...

Gateways and Bridges

[StanLarimer]

BitShares Barbecue and Possum Roast Attendees

Pitchforks.
When hard forks just aren't enough...

[StanLarimer]

For completeness sake, since this is a thread about everything happening in BitShares, here is a link to what's happening with BitShares Music, aka PeerTracks!  You can trade their token right now on the BitShares Decentralized Exchange!

http://whatarenotes.info/

[StanLarimer]

Here is a fascinating new fundraising model that makes clever use of a variety of BitShares mechanisms.
Just goes to show how BitShares is changing the way things can be developed now that wouldn't have been before.
In this case, it's a way to lend a third party developer money to build the Moonstone wallet and earn a pretty nice rate of return.

https://moonstone.io/faq.php

[StanLarimer]

Great overview of BunkerShares - another company launching on BitShares

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2fcUSYiz_w

[LiQio]

No puppies there ... spiked and eaten?

[StanLarimer]

Somebody had to stay back at the office to keep up with all the press releases...

[StanLarimer]

Peer to Peer Road Trip Successfully Completed

Having driven over 4400 miles in 24 days,
while conducting over 13 interviews with community members and core devs in 7 states,
I can definitely say it was worth every mile!

It was a long and inspiring journey!
We learned so much on this trip, and captured some really great footage along the way.

Read the rest here:
http://bitscape.io/from-the-southern-wilds-to-the-north-country/

[StanLarimer]

Another great delegate report from BitShares Argentina.

Bitshares Team Argentina

Who we are:

• Francisco Osca (@fran2k). Event Organizer and Speaker on presentations. Marketing.
• Ariel Aguilar. Argentinian Bitcoin evangelist. See his Bitcoin Evangelism Plan Crowdfunding Campaign.
• Matias Romeo (@elmato) Programmer. Main developer of LimeWallet (ex BitWallet) Already delegate (elmato). Speaker on Bitshares presentations.
• Pablo Tutino (@dargonar) Programmer. Main developer of LimeWallet (ex BitWallet) Shares delegate with Matias Romero (elmato).
• Etienne Marcus (@etimarcus) Programmer & Designer. Speaker on Bitshares presentations.
  See Intro.
• Maria Palma. Photographer and filmmaker.
• Nahuel Peerz (@rnglab). Multitask. Sysadmin.

Actual Contributions:

• Monthly Buenos Aires Bitcoin meetup. This has been done in four meetups in a row since December 2014, doing three talks, one wallet workshop and three BitUSD paper wallet giveaways.
• Also in other events from or in collaboration with local Bitcoin community. We are doing monthly meetups and drinkups and one yearly conference (LaBitCoinf, next one at the end of year in Mexico), stands, talks, paper wallet giveaways + installing ElMato mobile wallet, on every suitable conference.
• Building a local Bitshares community, “Bitshares Buenos Aires”, and expand to other strategic regions when it becomes strategic as well. Creating and managing Bitshares Buenos Aires Meetup site and Facebook community / page.
• A monthly Bitshares exclusive meetup with talks, Q&A,  paper wallets giveaways, etc.
• Creation, translation and spreading of content.

• BitShares101 ebook already translated into spanish.
• Brochures, stickers, etc.
• Tri fold already translated and being printed.
• Collaboration with the video production team.
• Audio and video registration of talks and podcasts. Two already done with matt608.
• Collaboration with @elmato and @dargonar for LimeWallet (ex BitWallet) testing and diffusion (mobile wallet assisted installations on Meetups, attenders instantly redeems BitUSD paper wallet giveaways with great acceptance).
• Participation with stands  and talks in several conferences. We are teaming up with Ariel Aguilar, which is one of the principal marketers of bitcoin in Argentina, to share stands in several conferences.
• Paper Wallets: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,11847.msg188492.html#msg188492

• Our past meetups

• [2015-03-20] Buenos Aires - Paperwallets Giveaway and Install Workshop
• [2015-02-19] Buenos Aires - Bitcoin 2.0: Bitshares, Sidechains y Ethereum
• [2015-01-22] Buenos Aires - bitShares & bitUSD, DACs, Blockchain Based Apps &+
• [2014-12-11] Buenos Aires - bitShares & bitUSD Meetup

Updates on delegate team

We want to thank Mat608 for his great work as Argentina Marketing partner and his initiative on this delegate creation, wise driving and reliable administration. We are proud to have his confidence as delegate successor, and wish him the best for his upcoming projects.

We agreed with Matt on a delegate replacement for argentina-marketing-matt608, and he kindly accepted to run his delegate a couple extra months so we can prove integrity and commitment to the community while coordinating the new delegate registration and vote swap proposition.

With actual team reorganization we are working voluntarily. No one is getting paid for their contributions until we prove being valuable for the network. If a specific service needs to be paid to someone, that will be proposed in advance.

Budget allocation

Given our main goal to target already crypto-friendly public until BitShares stable release, expenses have been low. As long time active members of Bitcoin Argentina community, we already have place and resources to create Meetups and participate on many conferences and other crypto related events. Costs are many times limited just to BitUSD paper wallet giveaways, printing and little else.

Matt has around 1500 BitUSD delegate savings (plus last weeks payouts).  He has already covered his delegate registration fee.

We want to keep this direction, while making bigger plans for the upcoming times.
We would like to have some feedback at this point:

• Do you think we should keep saving as much as possible until 1.0 release?
• If so, what percentage would you like us to allocate on actual conferences as paper wallet giveaways, tri fold printing, etc?
• Should we start a discrete paid advertising campaign prior to 1.0 release?
• Should we remain filming talks at this moment?
• Would be right if we use funds to pay the delegate registration before the vote swap?
• Would you like BitShares to sponsor Ariel Aguilar Bitcoin Evangelist conferences on one of his sponsorship/pricing categories? I.e. in the 250USD we could have access to participation in stands in top tier conferences where we can giveaway paper wallets + brochures. (See his Bitcoin Evangelism Plan Crowdfunding Campaign.)
• Any other input is also welcome

We'd like to hear all views that contribute to align the community on a steady course

[StanLarimer]

Every once in a while (ok, constantly) I like to post examples that show off the best of the BitShares community in action.
The "New Money Channel" could become what people in my generation used to call "stinking cool" before we became sophisticated and erudite intellectuals.  Solomon is running for a BitShares Delegate slot.  Why aren't you?

Stan

UPDATE:

Yeah I probably shouldn't have hidden this news in the original post but just so everyone knows in request of the Bitshares community I have created this video for Bitshares community member DataSecurityNode (aka Jon) and his project Bunkershares. You can check it out here:

Bunkershares
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuW0jl1NIUA

This was to show what I can accomplish on my own with basically no budget. It was great working with Jon and I'm glad we could help each other out where it was needed. We both have powered by Bitshares projects.If you enjoyed this video and would like to see more content created from me for Bitshares please vote for my delegate.

Delegate: Sollywood.Sollars-com
http://bitsharesblocks.com/delegate/votes?name=sollywood.sollars-com

We went from position 5400 to 270 in less than 24 hours. Thank you to all who voted for me. Remember to remind your representatives in Virginia to also vote for me too. They represent you and this community. YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT. This Powered by Bitshares movement is just getting started. And I'm not just talking, I'm walking. So walk with me.

Next up I will be doing exactly what is described in March's Null Street post and that is making Sollywood TV with Sollars and Sense the killer app Bitshares needs. If you need a review you can check out the original Post of this thread. Basically the MVP for Sollywood TV w Sollars and Sense will be a kickstarter / crowdsale (with front end prototype for visually illustrating the experience).

In addition...

I will be shooting a "making of" documentary series around the kickstarter / crowdsale launch of Sollywood TV with Sollars and Sense UIA. The documentary series will explore in detail how Sollywood TV with Sollars and Sense is a practical example of how digital currencies can fix consumer pain points today and not tomorrow.

MOST IMPORTANTLY it will show the human side of currency entrepreneurship through the eyes of Solomon "Sollywood" Adekale and a lot of my daily life as an currencipreneur trying to make his American Dream happen in Chicago. I'm a very interesting person. My life is interesting and my American story is going to be something average everyday people especially my generation (millennials) will connect with.

I will be touching on various topics through out the series and giving my take on a lot of issues surrounding money and the culture (of entrepreneurship). I will be interacting and engaging with my city and the production crew and tech teams who are engaged with helping develop the prototype.

New Money is the New American Dream and I'm living it.

This series basically means what I originally came here to do is now back on. The New Money documentary series will be a powered by Bitshares piece starring yours truly. It will mostly be shot in Chicago and potentially Virginia. Full details of the KickStarter/Crowdsale and the documentary series will come. But for now this is what I've got. I'm very excited that it's going  

The series will premiere on the New Money channel I've created for this crowdsale (the channel everyone (especially millennials  ) will be subscribing too) and the pilot episode will launch when the kickstarter launches. I've already begun pre-production and am putting together my production crew for this project.

I will be shooting for a similar kickstarter campaign to Ouya I will pull off what they did and aim to raise a full seed round from those individuals who want to see a true alternative to our Cable system with New Money as a solution. And my bet is a lot of people will want that. Actually a lot of people will DESPERATELY want that. Even if its not something that will completely change the old system over night, if it even has a hint of looking like the future or a hint that it makes $ense. People will support it and its development. It is now my job to produce the content that will show them this is what they want to support as the future.

I will do that through this Crowdsale and Documentary series. Its going to be a big deal. I don't want to hype it but this is going to be a BIG DEAL. Let me know if there are any questions. If anyone wants to help out or support again this is the ground floor. We are aiming to get this kickstarter launched in the summer time. We've already begun pre-production and production starts in a couple of weeks. Look out for me. Don't say I didn't warn you  

[MadCow]

Two questions:
1- can bitshares client connect through TOR, if so how?
2- is there a bootstrap download

thanks

[StanLarimer]

I'll get you an answer when our developers wake up...

EDIT:

BitShares developers have not done any integration with TOR.
No reason why someone couldn't though...

From BitShares Developer Nathan:

I haven't attempted to connect BTS through TOR, but in theory it should work fine. Maybe try torify?

As to a bootstrap download, there's no official one but I have a personal one at https://nathanhourt.com/raw_chain.tar.xz
Unpack it into $DATA_DIR/chain/ and then open the client. It will still have to reindex, but it should only need to sync the last day or so. If connecting through TOR, this should be much, much faster.

[MadCow]

I'll get you an answer when our developers wake up...

Thanks

[StanLarimer]

I assume that's to make sure I don't forget?

[StanLarimer]

By the way, BunkerShares just launched its presale campaign...  another business using the BitShares platform.

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15816.msg203117.html#msg203117

[StanLarimer]

http://beyondbitcoinshow.com/developer-hangout-with-bytemaster-april-17-2015/

“If we do BitShares right, users will use it without even knowing they’re using it. BitShares will be like FDIC insured, that’s the kind of approach that will get the most adoption, because you don’t want to have just one thing. And it also encourages wider adoption if you have many different companies do it, and it’s seen as a neutral platform, versus BitShares being the company that’s trying to make all of the money and trying to compete with everyone else. We should allow everyone to come in [and] use BitShares. BitShares [would] be a neutral platform, utility if you will, that provides trust free settlement of orders and contracts.”

- Daniel Larimer

^^^^^ THIS.. I recall listening and when he said that I was like.. YEEEES! That's spot on the direction that needs to be taken.  +5%

[StanLarimer]

For the sake of completeness to this "historically significant" archival thread, I'll post this here too.

When you hold BitShares, this is your community:

Welcome back! This month we are bursting at the seams with BitShares projects, updates,
reports, announcements, initiatives, proposals, and editorial reflections. We encourage you
to take your time, soak it up, and reflect on the grand effort now underway by this amazing
group of dedicated professionals. If you like what you see, don’t forget to cast your votes
from within your BitShares client!

https://bitshares.org/newsletter/2015/nullstreet/the_nullstreet_journal_0-3.pdf

Lots of promising projects, worth to at least check it out  

"Perhaps the most exciting update I have for the BitShares community is in regards to Follow
My Vote’s recent visit to Oslo, Norway. As the Founder and CEO of Follow My Vote, I was
invited overseas to attend a national meeting for the Pirate Party of Norway.  Members of the
Pirate Party had recently learned about the verifiable online voting platform we are
developing in partnership with BitShares and wanted to learn more about it first hand."

"DACx (Delegate: dacx.baozou) has been a main focus in the Chinese community for a long
time for its crowd-funding platform using the BitShares blockchain. The business model was
reported on city wide TV program in Shanghai last week. Some people are even stockpiling
bitCNY in order to participate in the crowd-funding projects to come on DACx"


That's just some of the interesting stuff we have happening atm!

[StanLarimer]

Really?  You don't own a single BitShare?

[StanLarimer]

BitShares on Bitcoins and Gravy...

https://soundcloud.com/bitcoins-and-gravy/episode-64-bitshares-on-the-open-road

[MadCow]

I assume that's to make sure I don't forget?

I love puppies too

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Really?  You don't own a single BitShare?

This is a friendly reminder to all Bitshares holders that you are paying Stan to post dog pictures to this ridiculous thread.  Good investment.  Stan maybe when you're done milking this Bitshares scam for all it's worth you can get a job with the Doges.

[Bisha]

thanks for bumping de

[StanLarimer]

Special thanx need to go to @emailtoaj for the initial layout and design of these flyers.
Special thanx need to go to @cass for the design of the bitAssets, logos and a few of the other icons that I used.
 
I decided that the easiest way to allow for translation in multiple languages was to create the flyers in (open source) google docs format.
 

• Open the file in google docs
• File > "Make a copy..."
• Name the file and save it in your google drive
• Edit the BTS:kencode affiliate text to your own username
• Replace the QR code image with your own (create one here: the-qrcode-generator.com (Type:URL > Options > No margin))
• Edit the URL below the QR code to your own, or just type your email address there

 
English flyer in A4 print size (front):
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1T3mDxaa7U0IOaD251yNwNiqI_9Fier7QgtnBm3hCzyI/edit
 
English flyer in A4 print size (back):
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/10mf7scN4ldCoXy8alz7UCkzt7N3tTQwJWS81zXfNMxs/edit
 
German flyer in A4 print size (front):
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1fuFswbRGtMcciH4Ch7oY21Hrg4V0rUeD9FW5h7HbgzQ/edit
 
German flyer in A4 print size (back):
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1JzB4He0A6x2TRuW3NVT2G0KNMb81dLxo9omjOWkiHVA/edit
 
If desired, I can create your Spanish, Mandarin, French, etc versions for you. Just send me the text for each section and I'll post them here for everyone.
Let me know also if it needs to be in A4, 8.5x11, etc.

[StanLarimer]

Not sure why the authors said we were only the fourth most popular chain.
Great Grandma Larimer assures me we are the most popular.

Who are you gonna believe anyway?  Cointelegraph or her?

Anyway, here's an article with actual content!

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114033/bitshares-101-basics-of-the-worlds-4th-most-popular-cryptocurrency

[RaginglikeaBoss]

Not sure why the authors said we were only the fourth most popular chain.
Great Grandma Larimer assures me we are the most popular.

Who are you gonna believe anyway?  Cointelegraph or her?

Anyway, here's an article with actual content!

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114033/bitshares-101-basics-of-the-worlds-4th-most-popular-cryptocurrency

I enjoy BitShares, but why in the world did it have to be Amanda Johnson that decided to write this article

[StanLarimer]

I'm pretty sure this is not a puppy, but it's got that energetic puppy inquisitiveness about it, that cats find so endearing.

It's like it smells that something GREAT is in the air!

[StanLarimer]

https://beyondbitcoin.org/developer-hangout-with-bytemaster-april-24-2015/

[StanLarimer]

Latest from Max Wright...  one of his best IMHO.

Hey guys I Actually posted this a while back but forgot to tell anyone.

Here is the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbqyandddy4&index=5&list=PLjgfpSQFJTLpKmTGCG8FjvDFbfst6F-x5

Also the entire bitshares 101 series is now in HD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvrLKYbfzc0&list=PLjgfpSQFJTLpKmTGCG8FjvDFbfst6F-x5&index=1

[Chew Kok]

Did someone mention puppies?

[tokeweed]

How are the updates on the client?  The software you guys released last year was really disappointing.

[testz]

How are the updates on the client?  The software you guys released last year was really disappointing.

Check updates history here: https://github.com/BitShares/bitshares/releases

[tokeweed]

How are the updates on the client?  The software you guys released last year was really disappointing.

Check updates history here: https://github.com/BitShares/bitshares/releases

No, I mean how is it?  Any user reviews?

[testz]

How are the updates on the client?  The software you guys released last year was really disappointing.

Check updates history here: https://github.com/BitShares/bitshares/releases

No, I mean how is it?  Any user reviews?

User feedback for latest version here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15900.0.html

You can also try the web version of the wallet:
https://wallet.bitshares.org

[tokeweed]

How are the updates on the client?  The software you guys released last year was really disappointing.

Check updates history here: https://github.com/BitShares/bitshares/releases

No, I mean how is it?  Any user reviews?

User feedback for latest version here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15900.0.html

You can also try the web version of the wallet:
https://wallet.bitshares.org

Thanks.

[TonySon]

How are the updates on the client?  The software you guys released last year was really disappointing.

I know, right, you can't even use bitcoin on the decentralized exchange, you must use their collateralized version of bitcoin called "BitBTC"

In the next version you will be able to import real bitcoins into the BitShares ecosystem (and trade like you are on Mt Gox)(on the secure blockchain or through unsecured external exchanges, it will be your choice)

These completely new bitcoin/BitShares dual integrated stand alone (and web wallet versions) are due for release next month.  You will be able to do many more new and interesting things with your bitcoins with this new wallet than simply sending, receiving, and hoarding (like buying artist coins from Peertracks.com all in one easy step).

https://www.moonstone.io/

Bitcoin wallet evolution in real time:

What's your current favorite bitcoin wallet?  Is it even on the list?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=930751.0

thanks

[StanLarimer]

This Hangout is w/ Bytemaster of BitShares SuperDAC

Please ask questions here. 

Follow the twitter: @Beyond_Bitcoin
Retweet This Week's Hangout [ANN]!

Or better yet--Join us!  For updates on upcoming events, attend, record and report live from our Mumble Server!

*NEW* Beyond Bitcoin Mumble Server Setup Directions here!

Indolering (Decentralized DNS) @11EST:  retweet announcement here

Tsaishen & Bitcoin42 (GemSPACE) @12:15EST:  retweet announcement  here

DataSecurityNode (Bunkershares) @1:30EST: retweet announcement here

Please remember sharing these hangouts spreads the word about all the amazing people in our community working on interesting projects!

[StanLarimer]

https://beyondbitcoin.org/developer-hangout-with-bytemaster-may-1-2015/

[tokeweed]

But do puppies love Bitshares? 

[StanLarimer]

But do puppies love Bitshares?  

Just look at the picture in the OP.
They were all attending a briefing on the original plans for BitShares.
Can't you tell how much they loved it?
True, snacks were served, but these are sophisticated and erudite Great Pyrenees Puppies.
I'm sure they weren't unduly influenced by that.

[tokeweed]

But do puppies love Bitshares?  

Just look at the picture in the OP.
They were all attending a briefing on the original plans for BitShares.
Can't you tell how much they loved it?
True, snacks were served, but these are sophisticated and erudite Great Pyrenees Puppies.
I'm sure they weren't unduly influenced by that.

Oh not until they see this...

[StanLarimer]

Yes, they are pretty happy about that, (knowing what they know is coming this summer).

Shares are moving from weak paws into strong paws.

We already had the fairest initial distribution we could think of.
Now with these Great Depression prices there will be no way to say everyone didn't have a chance to get on board.

Strong paws will prevail.

[tokeweed]

Yes, they are pretty happy about that, (knowing what they know is coming this summer).

Shares are moving from weak paws into strong paws.

We already had the fairest initial distribution we could think of.
Now with these Great Depression prices there will be no way to say everyone didn't have a chance to get on board.

Strong paws will prevail.

Is this a good time to get in then?

[StanLarimer]

You can ask Duke, the Bush Beans dog, but he ain't talkin'

 

[tokeweed]

You can ask Duke, the Bush Beans dog, but he ain't talkin'

 

Ok...

[StanLarimer]

Ok, ok, here's just a tiny piece.  China started early with dacx.com.
This is a report on Shanghai international TV.

I bought based on this.

Saturday night, prime time segment on ICS about a BitShares related company with quite a few mentions of BitShares and cutaways of the BitShares wallet itself. I think this is probably the best media exposure BitShares has got to date.

Bought bts or the asset? isnt the asset representing apple stock, issued from dacx?

This new startup is powered by BitShares:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMbgER0BOqA&feature=youtu.be

Skip the first 30 seconds before the show starts.  This was on prime time TV in China.

Most of this is in English and already public information.

Get to meet Rampaging Prince Gong Ming.  
Just the tip of the iceberg.

[StanLarimer]

Beyondbitcoin.org

[StanLarimer]

[tokeweed]

Just wondering...  How much funding did Bitshares get (from VC's, IPO, etc..)?  I am trying to compile a list of the highest funded Altcoin and 2.0 projects here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1045967.0

[StanLarimer]

Off the top of my head in round numbers I would estimate:

  500K in VC investment
6000K in donations from supporters

(Valued at the time they were donated)

[tokeweed]

Cool. Thanks.

[tokeweed]

Off the top of my head in round numbers I would estimate:

  500K in VC investment
6000K in donations from supporters

(Valued at the time they were donated)

6 million USD total worth of donations from supporters?

[testz]

Off the top of my head in round numbers I would estimate:

  500K in VC investment
6000K in donations from supporters

(Valued at the time they were donated)

6 million USD total worth of doantions from supporters?

To be precise from 1 Jan 2014 to 19 Jul 2014 was donated by supporters: 5625.02597337 BTC and 415218.03087392 PTS
Source: http://www1.agsexplorer.com

But in November 2014 almost all PTS was returned to donators.
Source: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,11289.html

[tokeweed]

Off the top of my head in round numbers I would estimate:

  500K in VC investment
6000K in donations from supporters

(Valued at the time they were donated)

6 million USD total worth of doantions from supporters?

To be precise from 1 Jan 2014 to 19 Jul 2014 was donated by supporters: 5625.02597337 BTC and 415218.03087392 PTS
Source: http://www1.agsexplorer.com

But in November 2014 almost all PTS was returned to donators.
Source: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,11289.html

Ok.  Let's make it less confusing.  How much funding did Bitshares get in total from VC and donations.

I want this to be accurate as much as possible https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1045967.0

[testz]

Off the top of my head in round numbers I would estimate:

  500K in VC investment
6000K in donations from supporters

(Valued at the time they were donated)

6 million USD total worth of doantions from supporters?

To be precise from 1 Jan 2014 to 19 Jul 2014 was donated by supporters: 5625.02597337 BTC and 415218.03087392 PTS
Source: http://www1.agsexplorer.com

But in November 2014 almost all PTS was returned to donators.
Source: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,11289.html

Ok.  Let's make it less confusing.  How much funding did Bitshares get in total from VC and donations.

If you want to know how much USD funding BitShares gets you should know exact day and amount when BitShares team sell donated BTC (same for Etherium, etc) maybe better if you count funding in BTC?

In BTC BitShares gets donation: 5625.02597337
VC investment: 500K USD (as Stan remember)

[tokeweed]

Ok good. Thanks.

[altcoinUK]

At least unlike Supernet Bitashares released something for that 5 million $ and what Bitshares released it does work and make sense.

[Este Nuno]

At least unlike Supernet Bitashares released something for that 5 million $ and what Bitshares released it does work and make sense.

What are you talking about? SuperNET has lots of things operational.

And you say "for that 5 million" as if someone just took all the money raised. That might have happened with Bitshares, but SuperNET doesn't work like that. The money raised stays in the asset and contributes to the net asset value. When money is spent on things related to the project it's done so transparently through approvals from the funding committee.

SuperNET is the closest thing to an actual DAC that I've encountered.

[StanLarimer]

Here's a solid writeup on BitAssets...taken from a whole thread on the subject.

Thank you, Pheonike, Carpet Ride, and Ander.  That is good information.  I will list some of my current assumptions, based on my interactions on this forum, and maybe the community can confirm or deny my assumptions.

1.  Contrary to my initial thought, BitAssets is not a debt instrument.  Instead, BitAssets is a betting instrument similar to a Contract for Difference.

2.  When people participate in the BitAssets market, BitShares, the DAC (or the house, or the bucket shop, or the exchange, or whatever), takes the other side of the trade.  BitShares is the counterparty to the bet.  If Alice buys 1 BitUSD, and Bob sells one BitUSD, Alice and Bob are not trading with each other.  Instead, they are trading, separately, with BitShares.  As BitShares is a digital counterparty, it does not suffer from the human foibles of greed or caprice.

3.  The house (BitShares) likes to stay neutral.  Therefore, the BitShares protocol will only exercise pairs of trades.  If Alice, alone, wants to trade in BitUSD, she cannot do so until someone else, such as Bob, wants to take the opposite position in a trade in BitUSD.  The house will not trade with either position in isolation.  This is true when opening and closing positions, meaning that someone in a BitAssets bet who wants to close out the position may not be able to do so if there is no one in the market wanting to take the opposite position.  If someone (Bob) is stuck in a BitAssets position and gets a margin call, but cannot find an offsetting offer in the marketplace, Bob will have to put up additional collateral until such time that he can find another trader willing to offset his position.

4.  There are “gateways” in the BitAssets economy, such as CryptoSmith.  The gateways will trade physical, tangible assets such as gold, silver, and US dollars for BitAssets.  These gateways, however, are not part of BitShares (the DAC), and therefore are not under any contractual obligation to honor a BitAsset.  They do so as a business, on a for-profit basis.  They pay some amount for BitAssets which may or may not be at parity with the nominal value of the BitAssets.  These gateways, because they have no contractual obligation to honor BitAssets cannot be short squeezed.

5.  BitShares (the DAC) is also not under any contractual obligation to convert a BitAsset to its physical, tangible equivalent.  BitShares, being a digital protocol, is not in any position to deliver anything physical, as it has no fingers with which to package physical assets for shipping.  BitAssets, being betting arrangements, do not provide any mechanism for delivery of the assets underlying the bet.  Any delivery of physical assets in exchange for BitAssets are performed by ancillary businesses, and conducted according to the discretion of the ancillary businesses.  Any deliveries of physical assets by ancillary businesses do not close out BitAsset positions.  They simply transfer the BitAsset positions to the gateways which can then transfer them on from there in separate trades, or close them out with offsetting BitAssets (digital) trades.

OK, let's work with this first, and the confirmations or denials of these points will fuel more questions.  Thank you all.

[robrigo]

Have a look at these BitShares infographics created by http://backgroundstories.com

All About BitShares

[DecentralizeEconomics]

what Bitshares released it does work and make sense.

Not really.

[ThomasVeil]

Have a look at these BitShares infographics created by http://backgroundstories.com

All About BitShares

"1 BitUSD ALWAYS = 1$ (+-1%)"

?

[robrigo]

Have a look at these BitShares infographics created by http://backgroundstories.com

All About BitShares

"1 BitUSD ALWAYS = 1$ (+-1%)"

?

Theoretically at high liquidity... good catch actually that definitely shouldn't say "ALWAYS" in the current implementation of BitAssets, as we can see bitUSD is overvalued at the moment.

Looking forward to seeing how BTA 2.0 addresses the liquidity problems:

BitAssets 2.0: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16127.0.html

Response to design critiques thread: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16143.0.html

[StanLarimer]

Here's an hour where Bytemaster gets interrogated by the BitShares community and
spills the beans about an incredibly huge tiny fragment of what is coming in June.  

Bytemaster's Latest Hangout

In this week’s hangout Bytemaster talks about the 17000 lines of recent c++ code, including the witness / delegate / worker split, bitAssets 2.0 and the referral system.  He also gives some insight into the motivation and philosophy behind these changes and why the scope and details of the upcoming release is not yet public. Also featured in this hangout is a discussion on a user friendly interface and how back-end improvements as well as the referral system will improve the situation.

1:08 Introduction by Fuzzy

2:00 Bytemaster updates

No real updates that we are ready to disclose yet. The team has been working harder than ever producing more than ever.

2:30 Liondani: Contributions on github seem to fade after February, what’s going on?

Bytemaster: First, let me start by saying we have no intentions to increase the maximum supply from about 3.7 billion or increasing the rate of issuance from 5 BTS per second. Those parameters of the system are untouchable and we remain committed to that.

Second, the entire team has been doing nothing but work on BitShares. We are just not doing this work in public. We are preparing a whole lot of documentation to describe everything that we have been working on, to answer everyone’s questions, and we plan on releasing and announcing all this new information in the first part of June.

We have added over 17000 lines of c++ in our private repository. These are lines of code that do not exist in the public repository. To put that in perspective, there are 17000 lines of code in the core blockchain library that define BitShares. We have done more in the past 3 months than we have done in the 9 months before that.

So, the dev team has been working harder than ever on BitShares. BitShares is about to get a major, game-changing update in its feature set, and performance. We’re very excited about what it is going to be, but we can’t reveal the details at this time.

5:20 Liondani: Looking at Github can be very misleading for newcomers then!

Bytemaster: Yes, it would be good to put a note on GitHub or something like this to know what we are up to. But we are so close to releasing and announcing this now..

6:40 Fuzzy: What is the reason you have done this off GitHub? Competition?

Bytemaster: There are a lot of factors. There is competition, but also we wanted to focus, not having to deal with the FUD that we have been dealing in the past. For instance, there were some intermediate results could have upset some of the people out there, since we did not have all the solutions at the time, but what we ultimately came up with allows us to maintain our goal of no dilution, no changes to supply, no mergers – any of the things people were worried about. We wanted to avoid those types of things, and we’ve managed to do that and we’re were happy about that. We have been discussing some of what we have been working on – bitAssets 2.0, the referral system, paid workers / delegates / witnesses divide. And that’s part of what we have been working on, but that’s just scratching the surface.

9:10 Ben Mason: After the launch of this changes, will you be able to write a roadmap?

Bytemaster: I just wrote a roadmap yesterday.

9:23 Ben Mason: How do you feel about the present state of the ecosystem?

I feel that the ecosystem is stronger than ever. Every day I talk to people that are doing stuff, that are interested in things. Our community is unique, as far as I can tell. We have really smart people that have really strong commitment to our philosophy. And I think it unites a lot of the people who want to build on BitShares. It’s the philosophy, and the role of freedom and all the things I have expressed. It has really built a community of people that have a lot in common, and really binds us far more than whatever the share price happens to be in any given day. And that’s going to bring us through the fire. You don’t know what’s going to happen before it takes of.

I will say that if you are actively working on stuff for BitShares. There are significant API changes coming. And you should contact us and we will help you with that.

11:30 Ben Mason:  Is there a possibility Peertracks will use the BitShares blockchain?

Bytemaster: No updates at this point in time.

11:50 Do you believe FollowMyVote will deliver the value it originally believed it would?

Adam is in the office every single day, giving us business contacts. He’s reaching out to the Pirate Party, and is getting a lot of inroads there. He’s going to be building on the BitShares platform. These things always take longer than we would like, but I believe he is a valuable member of the team, and that we will see value from it.

12:35 Adam received 30 million BTS from the merger, do you have any information on that?

They have not been moved, and they are vesting, so the vast majority can’t be moved.

13:10 Will FollowMyVote sharedrop?

Bytemaster: There will be no unique FollowMyVote token, it will be on the BitShares blockchain and it will use BitShares directly.

14:00 What do you think of ItBit?

Bytemaster: I think it would be great to be involved with them. I have not had any conversations with them at this point in time.

14:40 Regulation and the Philosophy of BitShares

Bytemaster: Well, the philosophy of BitShares is flexibility. One of the things we are working toward is allowing User-Issued Assets (UIAs) to be regulatory compliant. If we can have the regulatory, completely legitimate uses, whilst still maintaining our freedoms on one platform, I think that’s the best of both worlds. But I haven’t looked at their exact details, I look at their website, it looks like they raised 25 million dollars, and are working on refining regulation, and we have a lot to offer.

But I do not want to be in the mode of handing over the keys to the kingdom to complete control. You know, we need to maintain our blockchain that’s free, with funds that can’t be seized and with no requirement to identify yourself. As long as you can maintain those things and the system is not censoring transactions, and we’re decentralized, we can stick to our principles. But I think that a free market needs a web of trust – if you will – to allow people to know who they are doing business with, to restrict access to – there is a whole market out there that we can’t tap without some form of self-regulation, and that’s where we need to go.

16:35 More discussion on compromise and regulation versus freedom.

22:00 Bytemaster on getting network effect

24:00 Witness / Delegate / Worker split

Witnesses: Elected by the shareholders. Block producers, they get paid per block.

Delegates: Elected by the shareholders. Can propose changes to blockchain fees and parameters, that are voted on by the shareholders.

Workers: Elected by the shareholders. Workers get paid each day. They specify how much they need each day.

This is really decentralization of power, and gives us more flexibility.

38:00 Referral and lifetime value of users

47:10 Where is the Light-Wallet in terms of development?

Bytemaster: We postponed lightwallet development due to some performance issues that we are working to fix on the BitShares core. So we’ve been working to specifically design for the lightwallet, and we’ll focus on this after the upcoming release.

49:45 User Interface

Bytemaster: User interfaces are hard. We got 2 people working on a userface; svk and valentine, and svk is only working part time. Building a solid user interface takes a lot of time. Building a user friendly interface is even harder. We recognize that this is required. With the new system that is coming out, with the referral system in place, there will be a huge incentive to build new user interfaces to attract users and sign them up. For instance, moonstone will have that much more incentives to build a brilliant user interface that attracts users.

55:20 How will the new features be available without a better user-interface?

Bytemaster: We will shift development to user interfaces after we got the back-end polished. A lot of the challenges we face in designing the user interface are a consequence of decisions made in the way transactions are structured, and the way data is organized in the client. It will be a lot easier building user interfaces if the data is structured and the API right, and you have the information you need to interpret it.

I can tell you the protocol is going to be easier to understand than ever.

58:10 Is any of this related to the implementation of the object graph?

Bytemaster: The concept of object graph is foundational to performance gains.

58:30 Discussion of BitAssets 2.0

Bytemaster: Concerns over premiums on BitAssets. An alternative is fee on forced redemption. We can try both. There is huge incentive to try different things.

1:04:00 Discussion of BitAssets yield

1:06:00 Will all witnesses be paid the same?
Bytemaster: Witnesses should all be the same.

[StanLarimer]

Oh, and here's the May 8 edition...

Developer Hangout with Bytemaster - May 8

[tokeweed]

Hey Stan.  Can you post a link of the Bitshares' team? 

[StanLarimer]

Hey Stan.  Can you post a link of the Bitshares' team?  

Perhaps the most authoritative source is the one maintained by the blockchain itself:

http://www.bitsharesblocks.com/delegates

Of course there are many other huge contributors who are not formal delegates, such as hero members at bitsharestalk.org and members of the http://nullstreet.com/ community marketing association.

There are also a lot of associated companies that I have mentioned from time to time throughout this puppies thread.

There is no central list because there is no central organization. Everyone associates themselves with the project as an independent agent and those come in many varieties.

[tokeweed]

I saw a page from before where you, Dan, your Chinese co-founders and your dev team were shown.  I'm trying to find it.  Can you point me to a link?  I would really appreciate it.

[testz]

I saw a page from before where you, Dan, your Chinese co-founders and your dev team were shown.  I'm trying to find it.  Can you point me to a link?  I would really appreciate it.

Many photos you can find here: https://www.facebook.com/officialbitshares/photos_stream

[StanLarimer]

There is always this classic...

Pitchforks.
When hard forks just won't do.

[StanLarimer]

If there is somebody whose picture you would like in particular, I probably have it on my hard drive...

[tokeweed]

I saw a page online that showed all the founders and the team that created BitsharesX last year.  That's what I'm looking for.  I think the page even had Li Xiao Lai as co-founder or director...? 

[StanLarimer]

I remember the page you are talking about.  
Lots of little circle shaped pictures.
I think that was lost when Invictus released BitShares to its owners.
Now there is no such central team and no Invictus web site.
Think of Invictus as just a development "contractor" that delivered its product to the world as open source and then ceased crypto operations.
So that web site has been taken down.
I'm not sure if a backup exists, but perhaps Google archives or some volunteer has it.

[DecentralizeEconomics]

I saw a page online that showed all the founders and the team that created BitsharesX last year.  That's what I'm looking for.  I think the page even had Li Xiao Lai as co-founder or director...? 

I remember the page you are talking about. 
Lots of little circle shaped pictures.
I think that was lost when Invictus released BitShares to its owners.
Now there is no such central team and no Invictus web site.
Think of Invictus as just a development "contractor" that delivered its product to the world as open source and then ceased crypto operations.
So that web site has been taken down.
I'm not sure if a backup exists, but perhaps Google archives or some volunteer has it.

Can't leave any evidence.

[tokeweed]

I remember the page you are talking about.  
Lots of little circle shaped pictures.
I think that was lost when Invictus released BitShares to its owners.
Now there is no such central team and no Invictus web site.
Think of Invictus as just a development "contractor" that delivered its product to the world as open source and then ceased crypto operations.
So that web site has been taken down.
I'm not sure if a backup exists, but perhaps Google archives or some volunteer has it.

Oh ok. Thanks.

It might be a good idea to have a page for your team, advisers, founders, etc.. at bitshares.org.

[DecentralizeEconomics]

I remember the page you are talking about.  
Lots of little circle shaped pictures.
I think that was lost when Invictus released BitShares to its owners.
Now there is no such central team and no Invictus web site.
Think of Invictus as just a development "contractor" that delivered its product to the world as open source and then ceased crypto operations.
So that web site has been taken down.
I'm not sure if a backup exists, but perhaps Google archives or some volunteer has it.

Oh ok. Thanks.

It might be a good idea to have a page for your team, advisers, founders, etc.. at bitshares.org.

That's entrapment.

[StanLarimer]

Someone was nice enough to track down this link.
It's WAY out of date and has broken links, but it is probably the one you were seeking.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141015084123/http://bitshares.org/community/team/

[tokeweed]

Someone was nice enough to track down this link.
It's WAY out of date and has broken links, but it is probably the one you were seeking.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141015084123/http://bitshares.org/community/team/

YES!  That's it..

Isn't that team the same team active at Bitshares today? 

[StanLarimer]

A lot of them are still involved in BitShares in many independent capacities.

[StanLarimer]

The latest at BeyondBitShares.org

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Someone was nice enough to track down this link.
It's WAY out of date and has broken links, but it is probably the one you were seeking.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141015084123/http://bitshares.org/community/team/

Forwarded to Homeland Security for the "Most Wanted" posters.

[testz]

Someone was nice enough to track down this link.
It's WAY out of date and has broken links, but it is probably the one you were seeking.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141015084123/http://bitshares.org/community/team/

Forwarded to Homeland Security for the "Most Wanted" posters.

Excellent BitShares PR! 

[traderman]

Bitshares Technical Analysis for 5/21/2015: http://themerkle.com/speculation/bitshares-technical-analysis-for-5212015/4774/

[StanLarimer]

Developer Hangout with Bytemaster

This one includes a complete transcript, for quick skimming.  Here's a sample:

40:10 Clip from LetsTalkBitcoin: Adam Levine on Ripple’s IOUs and black/whitelisting.

Andreas Antonopoulos concludes that with Ripple the cryptoeconomy has gone from free and decentralized to PayPal in three years. What are your thoughts on this clip?

Daniel Larimer: Adam described the situation perfectly and that the only problem people have is.. you know we need assets that can trade on a blockchain so that we don’t have centralized exchanges. Everything single time someone transfers their money to a centralized exchange they are creating Adam-bucks or Gox-bucks or Bitfinex-bucks, it’s no different. All we’re doing is having the exchange put assets on the blockchain ledger and once they’re on a blockchain that means their assets can be used in smart contracts, whereas when they’re on the ledger, there’s a lot more restrictions. If you’re on an exchange’s database you can only do what that database will allow, if you put it on the blockchain you can do anything the blockchain will allow .

It’s giving people the freedom to do both, The Bitcoin purists out there say, we’re not going to allow anything that has these features to even exist on the same protocol. It’s cutting off your network-effect, it’s cutting off your ability to integrate and is denying people a lot of value that they can have.  I think that the mistake they make is to conflate User-Issued Assets with core assets – that’s the difference between BitShares and Ripple. Ripple actually froze XRP, for some users, but in BitShares you can never have your BTS frozen, and in that sense BitShares is like Bitcoin, and the User-Issued Assets are like assets issued on CounterParty; you wouldn’t blame Bitcoin for Counterparty allowing issuers to Freeze the asset. Same thing: You don’t blame BitShares, because it is perfectly usable even if you have user-issued assets, and what he didn’t mention was that BitShares offers another option which is the market-issued asset which gives you all the price stability of these IOUs without the restriction, without having an issuer having to comply with these laws or hold the funds. So BitShares gives an option, and he didn’t describe that option, so at most he was on a mission, but what he described was perfectly accurate.

45:00 Fuzzy: It does not seem fair that they put us in there with Ripple

Daniel Larimer: I thought that was perfectly fair, they are comparing a feature of BitShares to the entirety of Ripple.. which makes us much bigger than Ripple. The fact of the matter is that when I talk to major banks, and they tell me about their efforts to integrate with .. is they are not interested in Bitcoin at all – Bitcoin does not work for them, for settlement between banks, it doesn’t work for them to integrate with them, but they do want to integrate with crypto – they want to take advantages of cryptotechnology, so we can hold your Bitcoin, and not integrate, but if you want to integrate and play you need to have a more robust feature-set than Bitcoin supports.

We discussed this last week; I am about finding free market solutions to secure our life, liberty and property, and that means that we need to have free market solutions that give us price stability, privacy, identity. And those three things we need to have solutions for, we can’t just say “whups it’s impossible” we’re not going to do it, or “sorry, we don’t have any privacy, everything has to be public”  or “sorry, no identity, everything has to be anonymous” because fact of the matter is, if anonymous currencies were the only option in the market then there are other problems that come about with kidnapping and ransoms and you know those scenarios – the free market needs to have a solution.

And I want solutions that do not require force, that don’t allow you to be coerced, and where there is no single person that can leverage you on your financial.. you need financial freedom and part of that freedom incorporates all of those things, so when someone rails against our platform having the option of having these features, you’re denying the need of having those features in a free market. It’s not the KYC process or the whitelisting process or the ability to freeze accounts that is the issue – and it’s not even companies or international companies that are the issue – it’s governments that can use coercion to compel these companies to do thing that they would not do in a free market. So I think a lot of companies in a free market, the market would probably settle on some reasonable Know Your Customer requirements – because that’s where all the money would be that’s where people feel most safe, but companies must also balance that with privacy; it will be like swiss banks where you don’t get to see who owns what and all that stuff. You can trust companies because they are competing with each other, but when you have governments coming in and coercing these companies, it’s a completely different ball-game, it’s no longer a free market.

In the free market you can trust people, because trust is a valuable commodity, and big companies are almost entirely in their trust. You buy from Apple, because of the brand, and the brand is all about the trust they have earned. And nobody is going to burn their trust to cheat one or two customers.

Right now governments and regulations create high barriers to entry which, the higher the barriers to entry, the higher these companies can abuse their power because they have already got it, but the lower the barrier to entry the more balanced the free market becomes. So I think it’s very bad to adopt a mindset that says, all these different things are just absolutely wrong and that we need complete privacy. People want complete privacy and anonymity because they are afraid of the government and companies doing that is not an issue, a blockchain that supports private entities doing that is not an issue, and fact of the matter is a blockchain that allows private individuals to self-organize and self-police without coercion is a tougher target for governments to attack than something like Bitcoin, where all you have to do is say “think of the children!” and now suddenly Bitcoin is outlawed or has negative PR, and you need to maintain a balance of these things to get wide acceptance and wide acceptance is necessary for us to actually have any freedom with cryptocurrency.

55:00 Daniel Larimer on Decentralization and Freedom

There’s always going to be blockchains that give you freedom. Obviously BitShares the core token is going to be that way. But I don’t think there is reason to fear or exclude others those who do the other things. I think bringing the others onto our platform gives users of our platform who want the privacy or don’t want to reveal their identity, the option to trade the free asset for the restricted asset, and this gives the free asset more value, versus one that does not have this option.

The fear that people have against Ripple is if they come dominant we are right back where we are today, with governments controlling access to funds just by having an account, they can cut you off financially by blacklisting you with the banks and if that becomes dominant a new system has to be bootstrapped and you have to acquire the network effect all over again, but I think that’s just going to be the nature of society. As one country evolves a tyranny a new country has to start up and there’s a revolution, and if eventually people lose sight of it and you have to do it over, and over and over again until we figure out a way to maintain freedom.

[deeprocks]

no only does bitshgares love puppies WE ALL DO

[favdesu]

BitShares Loves Puppies!

These are actual Great Pyrenees puppies raised by BitShares Founder Dan "Bytemaster" Larimer.

oh my god, they're super cute

[StanLarimer]

Latest BitShares Newsletter...

BitShares supporters,

Once again, we are excited to bring you the latest issue of the NullStreet Journal, filled with tons of updates and progress reports from across our community. If you haven’t heard yet, the BitShares core dev team will soon be announcing the results of several months of planning and coding, so be sure to tune in to www.bitsharestalk.org starting on early June to hear the news and join the conversation.  Meanwhile, please enjoy our most recent community organized effort to bring you the all the best in BitShares news.

Cass & CryptoPrometheus

Nullstreet Journal Vol. 0.4 - PDF   |   Mailchimp campaign

[StanLarimer]

[StanLarimer]

Listen Here

“Jim Willie is essentially an Icon in the new economy movement and I am not entirely certain he realizes it yet.  He brings high quality Economics forecasting content to his customers at the Golden Jackass Report’s Homepage: www.goldenjackass.com

This content is generally based on Geopolitical and Geoeconomic events, coupled with some insider leaks and a skill in data analytics that helps him paint a vivid picture of current world events.  He does so liberally with a wide and wet brush.  I’d have it no other way.

I hope everyone enjoys learning from him and also our conversations about the blockchain (with special consideration for BitShares) and the potential solutions it enables our current paradigm’s as-yet-irreconcilable problems.  This will be fun for everyone despite the dark tone of some of the forecasting because although Jim’s focus isn’t forecasting sun-shiney days, at least his delivery has a level of humor.  I hope you brought your thinking cap…and maybe a fresh pint to set the tone!” 

[favdesu]

Soon you will have an exchange that you can wire transfer USD to from anywhere in the world and then trade for BitUSD.    Also supported BitCNY and BitEUR.   

Details will be available in a few weeks, but we have a commitment and are actively testing integration and were given permission to make this post    

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16594.0.html

[Este Nuno]

“Jim Willie is essentially an Icon in the new economy movement and I am not entirely certain he realizes it yet. 

What's this about NEM? I'm confused.

[StanLarimer]

Bytemaster's Developer Hangout - 29 May 2015

Lots of flagrantly unauthorized leaks about this Summer's announcements.  Please ignore them.

 

[StanLarimer]

BitShares supporters,

Once again, we are excited to bring you the latest issue of the NullStreet Journal, filled with tons of updates and progress reports from across our community. If you haven’t heard yet, the BitShares core dev team will soon be announcing the results of several months of planning and coding, so be sure to tune in to www.bitsharestalk.org starting on early June to hear the news and join the conversation.  Meanwhile, please enjoy our most recent community organized effort to bring you the all the best in BitShares news.

Cass & CryptoPrometheus

Nullstreet Journal Vol. 0.4 - PDF   |   Mailchimp campaign

[StanLarimer]

[ANN] Limit orders added to Metaexchange - world first!

Hi everyone,

Metaexchange has become the first ever exchange to allow it's users to place cross-blockchain limit orders without registration!

What this means is that anyone with the relevant wallets can simply go to our site, enter their receiving address, price and expiry time, send a transaction and have it rest on our orderbook until it either gets filled, or expires! No need to register, no need to log in / log out, the process is totally frictionless.

We're opening this feature up on our first two markets, BTS/BTC and bitBTC/BTC, with more markets to come in the future.

New features for BTS/BTC and bitBTC/BTC markets:

*) You can now place limit orders on our using the same registration free process you're used to
*) Set your own refund address for buy orders to avoid the problem where funds are automatically refunded to an exchange's wallet in case of failure
*) Soft refund policy - orders are filled as much as possible and only the remainder is refunded instead of the entire order
*) More liquidity is available in both markets for larger orders
*) Get a quote (using the input boxes at the top) for any given order size before you place your order
*) See our full orderbooks (using Expert mode)
*) Your browser will now save your bitshares/bitcoin and refund addresses so you don't need to type them in each time

Here is a screenshot:



Needless to say this was a big undertaking, which is why there hasn't been an update from me in a while. Nevertheless, we would love to hear your feedback about the new metaexchange, so please let us know what you think!

Cheers, Paul.

[puppies]

I do indeed love BitShares. 

Also in regards to TOR, I played with it a bit in the early days.  I couldn't get torrify to work correctly.  If I remember right, it was in regards to getting the incoming connections to route correctly.  Someone with more knowledge (not that hard) might be able to get it to work.  I was also concerned, that the wallet would be leaking my real IP and wasn't sure how to entirely safeguard against that.  The solution I finally hit upon was using Whonix, I was able to not only run the wallet, but even generated a few blocks through TOR. 

[StanLarimer]

Thanks.

You're probably gonna really love what we announce on Monday.

[favdesu]

Thanks.

You're probably gonna really love what we announce on Monday.

you mean the 1000% price increase? Oh wait, I wasn't allowed to let that slip

[M28MmickT]

Thanks.

You're probably gonna really love what we announce on Monday.

you mean the 1000% price increase? Oh wait, I wasn't allowed to let that slip

I wish. I would be so rich if that happened. Do you know something about monday that I'm not aware of?

[robrigo]

Thanks.

You're probably gonna really love what we announce on Monday.

you mean the 1000% price increase? Oh wait, I wasn't allowed to let that slip

I wish. I would be so rich if that happened. Do you know something about monday that I'm not aware of?

Monday starts the first wave of summer announcements regarding the future of the BitShares project. It's going to be a doozy...

[favdesu]

Thanks.

You're probably gonna really love what we announce on Monday.

you mean the 1000% price increase? Oh wait, I wasn't allowed to let that slip

I wish. I would be so rich if that happened. Do you know something about monday that I'm not aware of?

not really. I know 2 things,
coinomat is going to add bitusd this month. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16649.0.html
and there will be another Gateway soon https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16594

[StanLarimer]

I'll post links to all the links to all the links right here - starting Monday.

"Doozy."  Now there's a word I haven't used in a while.



Ranks right up there with "swell"!



Nevertheless, they both do apply to Monday copacetically.

[tokeweed]

I'll post links to all the links to all the links right here - starting Monday.

"Doozy."  Now there's a word I haven't used in a while.



Ranks right up there with "swell"!



Nevertheless, they both do apply to Monday copacetically.

[StanLarimer]

Bitcoins and Gravy #70 Bitsapphire & the Moonstone Wallet!

On Today's show I am privileged to be speaking with Taulant Ramabaja, the CEO of Bitsapphire. Bitsapphire aims to change the face of how society works through the development of Distributed Autonomous Corporations (DAC's) and applications which utilize this revolutionary technology. We also talk about the Moonstone Wallet - a free crypto wallet that allows transfers and trades among Bitcoin, BitAssets (like bitUSD and bitGOLD), User-Issued Assets (UIA), and other tokens without the need to go through many complicated verification and validation steps.

We also talk about Bitsapphire's partnership with Factom - exciting stuff friends and as I've said many times before welcome to The Dawn of the Age of Cryptocurrencies, welcome to the future and welcome to the show.

[StanLarimer]

BitShares Music at MIDEM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggK95uVZnKs

[StanLarimer]

Oh yes, I promised to mention it here too...

BitShares 2.0

Just when you thought it was going to be a long summer!

[StanLarimer]

During yesterday's mumble [live global Q&A session with Bytemaster]. Loved it!