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 HangoutIn 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.
