Agree. Enough visionary thinking, we need code-crunching. We've got bitUSD and bitassets and other awesome stuff. Lets get it out there.
We need both. I don't think we can ever stop innovating if you want the Bitshares community to compete with Vitalik and Ethereum. They aren't going to stop having bigger and better visions if you look at their grand designs. Vitalik is always researching, always coming up with new ideas, always willing to try new things.
POW, and the expectations from Etherium shareholders, is the albatross that hangs from Vitalik's neck. When will the blockchain hire him to implement his vision in an economically sustainable way? Would Etherium shareholders accept a consensus algorithm thats not based on proof of work? Would Vitalik be willing to switch teams in order to drop the dead weight, or does he feel imprisoned by external expectations?
The key to give Bitshares an advantage or disadvantage over Ethereum will be based on whether or not Bitshares VOTE is a success.
I think with algorithmic voting we can surpass PoW in decision making flexibility. I think CP nets (conditional preference networks) will make all the difference. I would expect that if this works then Proof of Work will become irrelevant because if you have decentralized reputation, decentralized identity, decentralized decision making, then you've got everything you need to build a decentralized autonomous society.
Algorithmic voting is perhaps the holy grail. The DACs which allow for the best decision making will have advantages over the DACs which can reach a consensus but slow, or which cannot adapt because of politics. Bitcoin has political issues because of Proof of Work creating these issues so now it cannot adapt or innovate. Ethereum if it falls into that same trap will be able to perhaps get out of it because Vitalik is forward thinking but it gives an advantage to Bitshares which is designed specifically to allow humans to operate the DAC through voting.
When we think of voting we usually think of the flawed process we call voting but Proof of Work is also a form of voting. Algorithmic voting could allow users to use a voting language to script their preferences on a range of issues so that certain votes are conditional. So you could for example abide by a smart contract which promises your votes to go down different paths depending on the conditions ( such as market conditions, events that occur or whatever).
In this case over time as the DAC gets smarter it could adjust to the preferences of shareholders ever more efficiently. That advantage is an advantage Bitcoin will never have with it's mining cartel and Ethereum could have due to being Turing complete but may not.
For example you could have your votes scripted to react to an oracle so that if share prices go up for a specific company, DAC or asset your votes will go up or down. You could have the results of a football game determine where your votes if your script chooses to use that feed. This is the sort of power you can have once you have a Turing complete voting language.
These are some of the technical examples of what the big picture could look like. Bitshares could be as big of an advance to human history as democracy was or the birth of the United States was. It sounds crazy but once you have a way for a DAC to learn the preferences of the community and adapt using artificial intelligence then traditional governments (and corporations) will not be able to keep up. Once a DAC knows your preferences due to artificial intelligence it could start recommending, suggesting how you can vote to better meet your own goals based on it's knowledge of your preferences.
Not only do I think we can't stop but I think we need to hire 100 developers so we can rush to innovate, discover, build, and implement. I also think the Bitshares team should seek advice from computer science professors who study computational voting theory.
Topic: Knowing when to stop (Read 6600 times)
