Author Topic: Could bitShares allow greater value exchange between users?  (Read 2852 times)

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Offline starspirit

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In my original post, I put forward the idea of a skills market within bitShares, where users could exchange their expertise in any area for payments in BTS or bitAssets (it appears that luckybit has proposed something similar in the past). However this got me thinking on a larger idea.

Imagine there were a bitShares marketplace where the community could exchange anything they want, be it products, services, jobs etc, for payments in BTS, bitUSD or other bitAssets. The potential benefits of such a marketplace could be:

- the bitShares community by default is an early adopter, and could be the stepping stone to organically grow the market for bitAsset usage (primarily bitUSD)
- it drives early usage of bitAssets by creating willing merchants and consumers out of bitShares stakeholders, rather than just waiting for the long term path to play out where we need to convince more traditional merchants to be comfortable with crypto/BTS
- the ability for people to derive income, profit or other utility from such a marketplace could drive more outsiders to enter and grow the community (think eBay?)
- the growth of the market and steady adoption of bitAssets will then provide confidence for a wider range of merchants and consumers in the outside community to use the platform without necessarily being stakeholders (think alibaba?), and to use bitAssets for trade outside the platform
- such a platform could provide an additional income source for BTS through a cut on all sales

It's just a late-night thought, not sure if its good  ;D Let me know.

While awaiting feedback on this, I had another idea around where this marketplace could start. Scripts, or bots.

As examples, scripts to do the following functions could be in high demand in the community:

- market making on the internal exchange
- market making on external exchanges, including external bitUSD and BTSX markets
- arbitrage between internal and external bitUSD exchanges
- arbitrage between bitAssets
- relative trading between bitAssets ( e.g. technical)
- managing short positions (e.g. rolling, optimise timing of covers etc)
- algorithmic voting of delegates
- block-signing for delegates
- translations into different script languages

As these scripts can generate income or utility for people, users will be willing to pay something for them. (I for one would willingly pay right now for most of these). And rather than current bitShares developers spending valuable time on them, members of the community that have these skills can create them.

A marketplace could facilitate different transaction types (e.g. tip-based, fee-based, private contract). Other community members may set themselves up as reviewers of various scripts, and get paid tips for the quality of their reviews. DAC developers may tap the market for specific tasks. Who knows what a free market might come up with.

Each of the above examples also supports the bitShares ecosystem through better bitAsset liquidity and pegging, more voting and more delegate competition. There is a current thread complaining about the lack of peg on bitUSD in BTER ....see https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?action=post;topic=11036.15;last_msg=145237. Anything we can do to improve the effectiveness of bitAssets is a promotion for the bitShares system.

Once a free market is established for scripts/bots, there is no reason why the purpose of these scripts needs to be restricted to use in the bitShares environment. As long as  trade is taking place in internal tokens, it supports the system.

If such a marketplace is not something bitShares developers have resources or the inclination to set up, somebody may be inclined to set this up externally.

Offline luckybit

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Yes, it does sound similar to the Joblist DAC concept you raised. Though I suspect you've targeted this specifically at DAC development. I initially had in mind something more general where DAC developers would certainly use it, but any users may seek advice or services on anything at all, like an open service economy within bitShares. Its possible this may be too wide an application until the user base is much larger, but it would be interesting to test that idea because users have a stake in seeing it work, and more people may join the bitShares ecosystem for the opportunity to sell their expertise.
At the time I wasn't thinking just about DAC development but a whole new industry where people work for DACs. So of course DAC development would have to be first because without that you cannot build the new industry.

Who knows where it could lead but for now we need to build DACs.


Also I think your Joblist DAC concept suggests that the community at large manages the workflow - via up votes and down votes on the priority of DAC-related tasks to be done, determining a value criterion on which people are paid, and a review and rating system. Now with the introduction of dilution, once the community starts voting delegates and dilution levels on the basis of their delivery toward the DAC as well as block chain signing, the community is effectively doing this at the delegate level, do you agree?

Yes but I specifically wanted to avoid dilution. Bytemaster decided on dilution while I always cautioned against it. To me dilution should have been the last resort while transaction fees should be the first resort. I'm sure Bytemaster has good reasons for choosing dilution and considering how competitive the environment is becoming it may have been the correct decision but at this point in time we don't have enough data to prove one way or the other.


So then presumably the delegates could use the Joblist DAC to support their efforts, rather than the community needing to touch that level.
That isn't how I see it. I see the delegates as nothing more than entities that vote on behalf of the community. The community comes first and the delegates are merely placeholders of power and nothing more than that. In my opinion we could have cooperative delegates or algorithmic voting (with conditional preference networks) and both could be better than to have 101 individuals as delegates in the long term.

101 individuals as delegates could place us in the same long term flawed setup that traditional governments have and this is why under my point of view the delegates were "DAC operators" because there wasn't supposed to be any politics in it. Learning conditional preference networks could allow a DAC to learn to predict and suggest based on our preference history via artificial intelligence (think Amazon suggesting books) and this could dramatically improve voting by making it an algorithmic process.

I think if we are going to have voting there is no need for politics to be done in that way or for delegates to have any actual power. Algorithmic voting could take power away from delegates and put it back in the hands of shareholders by having an algorithm automatically hire and fire delegates according to a policy. Cooperative delegates could be owned by members of the cooperative which would prevent power centralization (cooperative delegates could end up becoming like political parties in the worst case I can think of).

So perhaps in light of where we are today, the skills market concept can be re-moulded?
You can do what you want once Turing complete scripting is activated.
I didn't really understand why you suggest a separate DAC rather than building in bitShares. Would you mind clarifying?
Because while you could do it on the main Bitshares X chain it might not be the best way to go about it. The Joblist DAC does not need any dilution to work at all. It would rely on Bountycoins(Job coins), an job auction system, and I would rename some stuff. I would call the delegates DAC operators and remove all the political aspects or political language from it.

You could do it on Bitshares X with Turing complete scripting but I don't see why we should because those are two different functions you're aiming for. It's up to the Bitshares team though if they want to do that or maybe when Turing complete scripting is implemented then if it's easy to do on Bitshares main then I'd go ahead and do it.
I imagine there's ultimately scope for competing delegate models here, with individuals, partnerships, companies, networks, DACs, and cooperatives all vying to produce value for the main DAC. Each of these could use a skills market to be more effective.

I don't see any long term advantage for individuals being delegates. In the short term of course individuals are going to be delegates but the market cap will reach a point where it might be safer for the network if a cooperative became the delegate. Individuals are very easily corrupted while cooperatives are far more difficult to corrupt.


« Last Edit: November 05, 2014, 01:08:23 pm by luckybit »
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Offline starspirit

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In my original post, I put forward the idea of a skills market within bitShares, where users could exchange their expertise in any area for payments in BTS or bitAssets (it appears that luckybit has proposed something similar in the past). However this got me thinking on a larger idea.

Imagine there were a bitShares marketplace where the community could exchange anything they want, be it products, services, jobs etc, for payments in BTS, bitUSD or other bitAssets. The potential benefits of such a marketplace could be:

- the bitShares community by default is an early adopter, and could be the stepping stone to organically grow the market for bitAsset usage (primarily bitUSD)
- it drives early usage of bitAssets by creating willing merchants and consumers out of bitShares stakeholders, rather than just waiting for the long term path to play out where we need to convince more traditional merchants to be comfortable with crypto/BTS
- the ability for people to derive income, profit or other utility from such a marketplace could drive more outsiders to enter and grow the community (think eBay?)
- the growth of the market and steady adoption of bitAssets will then provide confidence for a wider range of merchants and consumers in the outside community to use the platform without necessarily being stakeholders (think alibaba?), and to use bitAssets for trade outside the platform
- such a platform could provide an additional income source for BTS through a cut on all sales

It's just a late-night thought, not sure if its good  ;D Let me know.


Offline starspirit

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I have a blueprint for a DAC I called the Joblist DAC. It may be aligned with what you're thinking about:

Yes, it does sound similar to the Joblist DAC concept you raised. Though I suspect you've targeted this specifically at DAC development. I initially had in mind something more general where DAC developers would certainly use it, but any users may seek advice or services on anything at all, like an open service economy within bitShares. Its possible this may be too wide an application until the user base is much larger, but it would be interesting to test that idea because users have a stake in seeing it work, and more people may join the bitShares ecosystem for the opportunity to sell their expertise.

Also I think your Joblist DAC concept suggests that the community at large manages the workflow - via up votes and down votes on the priority of DAC-related tasks to be done, determining a value criterion on which people are paid, and a review and rating system. Now with the introduction of dilution, once the community starts voting delegates and dilution levels on the basis of their delivery toward the DAC as well as block chain signing, the community is effectively doing this at the delegate level, do you agree? So then presumably the delegates could use the Joblist DAC to support their efforts, rather than the community needing to touch that level.

So perhaps in light of where we are today, the skills market concept can be re-moulded?

I think this is why I think a separate DAC should be created for the purpose of listing jobs.

I didn't really understand why you suggest a separate DAC rather than building in bitShares. Would you mind clarifying?

I'm not certain of 101 delegates having to be 101 individuals. I'm in favor of either a Bitshares cooperative or each delegate becoming a cooperative so that there are 101 cooperatives which we can join or be invited into where members own equal portions of 1:1 (one share per human member) of the cooperative delegate. The cooperative delegate would exist on the blockchain and as a legal cooperative entity off the blockchain which would give a DAC the benefits of both worlds (at least in theory).

I imagine there's ultimately scope for competing delegate models here, with individuals, partnerships, companies, networks, DACs, and cooperatives all vying to produce value for the main DAC. Each of these could use a skills market to be more effective.

Offline luckybit

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To clarify, the idea in my original post was not limited to supporting the development of the DAC. I was actually thinking of a skills market where users could interact freely to trade expertise for personal or community endeavours. This would add to the value to the community as well as grow an internal market for usage of bitUSD or other bitAssets.

I have a blueprint for a DAC I called the Joblist DAC. It may be aligned with what you're thinking about:

There should be a decentralized autonomous job posting/listing/matching corporation.

Users pay a fee to list a task which needs to be completed along with an expiration date and the currency they'll be paying in. It can also function like a decentralized local community exchange protocol build on top of a blockchain allowing barter.

So for example if you need a website built or a programmer to help you build your DAC you could create a job listing on the Get Work DAC. You could also put your Keyhotee ID on this blockchain so anyone can track all the jobs you did for anyone else and get an idea of how much certain jobs are worth in the labor market.

Could it be built? If Keyhotee is working and Keyhotee wallet is working so we can pay people who have good reputations using some sort of multi-signature transaction, reviewing or rating system, it seems to me it could be theoretically possible.
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=998.msg42560#msg42560

This idea is revised and refined here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1413.msg15246#msg15246

A simple diagram could illustrate the conceptual infographic as:

Input: Human labor--> "Mining"
------------------------------------
DAC: Sort algorithm maintains a task list updated by humans stored in the blockchain, where the sort algorithm allows human beings to vote up or down to adjust the priority level "importance" of each task.
DAC: Value is determined by community voted task priority and popularity. If the task is very popular then "difficulty" shall rise to redirect the flow of labor to less desirable more important tasks.
DAC: Maintains a ledger or spreadsheet which constantly updates detailing which Keyhotee ID did which task.
DAC: Can hire human beings or scripts (autonomous agents) to do tasks either separately or working together. (Credits earned by a script can be used by the script to pay humans for the updating of the script)
------------------------------------
Keyhotee: Maintains reputations, allows for up or down votes, allows for notice of task completion which again receives up or down vote by a pool of trusted Keyhotee IDs to verify it as true or false. (As an administrator who verifies the work of others you would get paid to check whether or not others have completed their task and the greater your accuracy the better your credit rating or reputation for doing that particular task. You are like a referee for the system. This job may also involve preventing spammers, cheaters, other Keyhotee IDs will anonymously review your work and get paid on their accuracy as well)
------------------------------------
Output: Signature campaigns, website development, documentation, FAQs, tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook pages, memes, or anything else.

Output can be measured for success. If an output is considered a failure such as if it is spam, if someone did not follow the rules, or if it has a completely negative impact then that output can be reviewed during the verification process and credit score shall adjust based upon the result of that review. In most cases there should be nothing to review because reviewers would have to be compensated and the anonymous reviewers of those reviewers would have to get their cut as well so this action should be avoided unless a significant amount of people in the community vote for and pay for a review/audit.
------------------------------------
Social contract: Any DAC which wants to use the services of this DAC must set aside shares in their DAC to pay for its services. This DAC is to be set up for the benefit of the humans and autonomous agents who work for it and for the community as a whole to benefit from it.
Do any of these ideas look like what you'd like to accomplish? The Ideas I've presented do not require any dilution. It would require donations instead but if there are enough donations it would easily work. The way I envision it the donations could come from cryptocurrencies (blockchains) or from private/public sector partnerships via legal cooperatives.


To the extent that we are talking about contributing skills to the DAC itself, it looks like this has to go via the delegates for now. But there are 101 delegates and over 30000 BTSX accounts (bitshareblocks.com). That means delegates represent around 0.3% of the total skill base in the network, and this percentage will fall as users rise. It seems to me that delegates could potentially achieve much more and more quickly for the DAC if they could "hire" teams (or a network of experts) from within the community to achieve certain goals. There are some limiting factors, such as how much dilution there is to spread around in this manner, the quality of skills required, and practical management issues.

I think this is why I think a separate DAC should be created for the purpose of listing jobs. Some of the concept points I mentioned almost a year ago:

1) A bounty coin where the job or task is distributed according to the percentage ownership of that coin.
2) An algorithm which used voting to let shareholders decide on the priority of what must be done utilizing "Proof of Commitment/Proof of Participation". Really this is not all that different from the "Patronage Points" and "Reputation Credits" concepts I'm pushing today.
3) A job auction system where the blockchain gives the bounty coin to the participant or team willing to complete the task for the cheapest if they meet the right attributes.

There were more ideas I have put out on the forums which I intend to actually use when we have Turing complete scripting. Once we have that then I hopefully will be able to write a script or perhaps build this kind of DAC.

The world of DACs I envisioned required two categories of participants. The participants would have a subset I called the "operators" who basically keep the DAC running. These people are similar to what ultimately became the delegates. The participants basically was anyone who participated in the DAC's ecosystem (the users).

But is it possible to envision a world in the future where there are 101 delegates, each funded with millions of dollars a year in dilution (at a high enough market cap), and each with a network of potentially hundreds of people contributing from the community and getting paid for their efforts?

I'm not certain of 101 delegates having to be 101 individuals. I'm in favor of either a Bitshares cooperative or each delegate becoming a cooperative so that there are 101 cooperatives which we can join or be invited into where members own equal portions of 1:1 (one share per human member) of the cooperative delegate. The cooperative delegate would exist on the blockchain and as a legal cooperative entity off the blockchain which would give a DAC the benefits of both worlds (at least in theory).

It doesn't mean the rest of the community would want to do it like how I envision it. I put the ideas out there sometimes and then wait until people think it through and adopt or reject. It's possible that at some point many of these ideas will have to be tested out in experiments but I think cooperatives have many legal advantages. If I'm a delegate who forms a cooperative then I could let everyone who joins my cooperative get membership in it and share the dilution pay with my membership. This would make it very easy to get both votes and members while also possibly decentralizing in a way which increases security but right now it might not be the time to do it.
I think if what I have described above is possible, then it is simply a pragmatic issue for delegates to determine how much of the dilution proceeds they are willing to pay to experts employed within their network. This is like the CEO of a business. I believe that avoids the issue of the community as a whole having to decide a mechanism for fair splits, but it does make delegate positions more like businesses in their own right, which no doubt comes with other challenges.

Suppose a scenario where I start a cooperative and say anyone who has certain attributes becomes a member of my cooperative. These attributes would be you'd require a good reputation as a giver to the community, as not being a scammer, you'd have to register or verify your identification so we know you're a real person, and from here we give you a membership ID, you become part of a legal cooperative, and you can receive all the benefits from it.

That legal cooperative could be a delegate. Any member would be able to get legally vouchers, Patronage Points, Patronage Rebates, discounts, rebates, etc. So the perks for being a member of the cooperative would be high and instead of the cooperative giving millions of dollars to one person it would distribute the benefits to all the people who are members or partners with it.

In this way the cooperative could encourage the community to develop leaders with a good reputation. It would allow the community to partner with other communities, corporations which have nothing to do with the blockchain, governments, etc. A cooperative can hire people easily using regular legal contracts if people don't want to get hired by the blockchain but if they want to get hired by the blockchain they could but the blockchain would only be a gift economy.

 
« Last Edit: November 05, 2014, 08:26:13 am by luckybit »
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Offline starspirit

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luckybit, I've got some an expanded ideas on my original post which I will post afterward, but first I wanted to reply to you because of the thorough response you gave.

Once we have smart contracts then I could vote people in as a delegate who have different resources to bring to the DAC.

To clarify, the idea in my original post was not limited to supporting the development of the DAC. I was actually thinking of a skills market where users could interact freely to trade expertise for personal or community endeavours. This would add to the value to the community as well as grow an internal market for usage of bitUSD or other bitAssets.

To the extent that we are talking about contributing skills to the DAC itself, it looks like this has to go via the delegates for now. But there are 101 delegates and over 30000 BTSX accounts (bitshareblocks.com). That means delegates represent around 0.3% of the total skill base in the network, and this percentage will fall as users rise. It seems to me that delegates could potentially achieve much more and more quickly for the DAC if they could "hire" teams (or a network of experts) from within the community to achieve certain goals. There are some limiting factors, such as how much dilution there is to spread around in this manner, the quality of skills required, and practical management issues.

But is it possible to envision a world in the future where there are 101 delegates, each funded with millions of dollars a year in dilution (at a high enough market cap), and each with a network of potentially hundreds of people contributing from the community and getting paid for their efforts?

Smart contracts can be set up which adopt different value equations...

I think if what I have described above is possible, then it is simply a pragmatic issue for delegates to determine how much of the dilution proceeds they are willing to pay to experts employed within their network. This is like the CEO of a business. I believe that avoids the issue of the community as a whole having to decide a mechanism for fair splits, but it does make delegate positions more like businesses in their own right, which no doubt comes with other challenges.

Offline luckybit

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This is a loose idea rolling in my head, just throwing it out in case somebody can take it further.

Often it feels to me that because I am not in the category of a developer/marketer/delegate, my outlet to contribute development skills is limited.  As a stakeholder I am providing support in that way, but I'd rather feel more actively involved, and I do have skills in other areas.

So I'm wondering if its possible to take advantage of the fact there are users/stakeholders in this network from all walks of life, who can potentially contribute to each other in a wide range of areas. That is, a DAC feature could be developed that promotes an internal economy of value exchange between users, paid for in BTS, bitUSD or other bitAssets. This could also be another revenue area for the bitShares platform (an internal DAC).

It might be in exchanging expertise on any matter of personal or community interest, or even services or products according to demand. And/or it could be targeted at DAC development. For instance, an insurance DAC will ultimately require expertise in legal, actuarial, underwriting, marketing, and other areas on top of any coding required. DAC developers or delegates might be able to build networks of value (like companies) to support their efforts.

It would require a large enough network to function properly, and it may still be too early. Conducting a poll of to see what areas of expertise we actually have in the network already, how deep and real it is (e.g. having traded stocks does not make you a professional stock trader), and whether people in general, delegates, or developers are willing to pay for such contributions, may be a useful first step for ongoing discussion.

Once we have smart contracts then I could vote people in as a delegate who have different resources to bring to the DAC.

Smart contracts can be set up which adopt different value equations:
Quote
The value equation is the third module of a value accounting system:
contributions log
evaluation of contributions
value equation
It "dictates" how revenue is distributed to all participants (active affiliates) in a collaborative value creation process. In other words, it is used to compute a % of total revenue for every participant/contributor, taking into consideration all different forms of contributions and different modulators, and perhaps taking into consideration different cultures of constituent communities formed by participants.
The value equation describes how different types of contributions are amalgamated into a single deliverable. The output is the fluid equity piechart. It is a dimension reduction operator, taking all the complexity of contributions and customs of participants to project them onto the [0,1] real number domain. In "past looking value accounting systems" (this applies to ventures who consume resources to create market value and later exchange it against revenue) the % of total revenue for every contributor is calculated based on past contributions. In "forward looking value accounting systems" (this applies best to ventures that produce social value and accept donations/grants to realize a project) the % of total revenue for every contributor is calculated based on a projection of contributions, evaluated against a plan.
The value equation is not universal. Every project can have one. It is applied to the 'project-level' and 'open enterprise-level'.
Here is an example of a value equation: ( hours * ( rate + importance + reputation ) ) + seniority

This equation can be put into a smart contract so that everyone can vote to agree or disagree with that equation.

But as of right now we don't have the ability to determine the value to the DAC of every contribution because it's very difficult with the tools we have. We know developers are of extremely high value early on in a projects lifespan because without them the project cannot get off the ground but you need all kinds of people to make a product go viral, to educate others, to use their social capital to bring high net worth individuals or new communities of highly motivated people.

What is the value of a recruiter? An affiliate marketer? To determine value we would have to figure out what impact they have on the market cap in my opinion so the value equation for marketers would depend on market cap. For developers to me it depends on the level and quality of their innovation and how much quality (bug free) high utility code they are able to produce.  Then you have the usability people who make the GUI, the people who communicate to the public or who act as the media, all which are critical roles. There are probably a lot of other roles which I haven't been able to think of but which might also be critical.

References
http://valuenetwork.referata.com/wiki/Value#Type_of_value_created
http://valuenetwork.referata.com/wiki/The_Value_Equation
http://valnet.webfactional.com/accounting/value/2/
« Last Edit: November 05, 2014, 03:04:26 am by luckybit »
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Offline starspirit

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This is a loose idea rolling in my head, just throwing it out in case somebody can take it further.

Often it feels to me that because I am not in the category of a developer/marketer/delegate, my outlet to contribute development skills is limited.  As a stakeholder I am providing support in that way, but I'd rather feel more actively involved, and I do have skills in other areas.

So I'm wondering if its possible to take advantage of the fact there are users/stakeholders in this network from all walks of life, who can potentially contribute to each other in a wide range of areas. That is, a DAC feature could be developed that promotes an internal economy of value exchange between users, paid for in BTS, bitUSD or other bitAssets. This could also be another revenue area for the bitShares platform (an internal DAC).

It might be in exchanging expertise on any matter of personal or community interest, or even services or products according to demand. And/or it could be targeted at DAC development. For instance, an insurance DAC will ultimately require expertise in legal, actuarial, underwriting, marketing, and other areas on top of any coding required. DAC developers or delegates might be able to build networks of value (like companies) to support their efforts.

It would require a large enough network to function properly, and it may still be too early. Conducting a poll of to see what areas of expertise we actually have in the network already, how deep and real it is (e.g. having traded stocks does not make you a professional stock trader), and whether people in general, delegates, or developers are willing to pay for such contributions, may be a useful first step for ongoing discussion.