Author Topic: Why I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sparkle  (Read 8662 times)

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Offline Ben Mason

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 +5% loving sparkle for the potential to reunify our communities.....more and more excited about developments every day  +5%

Offline CLains

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Sparkle is PoW to BitShare's PoS!

Offline inarizushi

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Just withhold your precious bodily fluids. Whatever you do, don't hand those over!

LOL. I'd definitively buy Larimer spermCoins (I guess that's rude, sorry ! But those genes need to spread !)

I'd guess that's an inside joke, based on BM's title for this thread. The movie was "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb". If you haven't seen it, do. The crazed general in the movie is concerned with retaining his precious bodily fluids, amongst other obsessions.

Thanks for the explanation, I shall cultivate myself !
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Offline donkeypong

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Just withhold your precious bodily fluids. Whatever you do, don't hand those over!

LOL. I'd definitively buy Larimer spermCoins (I guess that's rude, sorry ! But those genes need to spread !)

I'd guess that's an inside joke, based on BM's title for this thread. The movie was "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb". If you haven't seen it, do. The crazed general in the movie is concerned with retaining his precious bodily fluids, amongst other obsessions.

Offline cass

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█║▌║║█  - - -  The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear  - - -  █║▌║║█

Offline arhag

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Thoughts?

I wrote and rewrote multiple paragraphs trying to explain my thoughts on this issue, but ultimately gave up. I will just summarize it as follows:

This is either a smart move for BTS or a suicidal one. Not sure which.

Granted even in the suicidal scenario, it is only the BTS stake that dies, not this whole community. Current AGS, PTS, and BTS holders would each have approximately an 8% fraction of the total stake after two years. Still, it would really suck to have your stake reduced by more than an order of magnitude because the BitShares community bet on the wrong strategy to grab new users.
« Last Edit: November 27, 2014, 07:37:31 pm by arhag »

Offline inarizushi

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I like the "Proof of Waste" so much. I'm all in Bitshares because of your great discussion on the unsustainability of mining. If this is the main story the BitShares community tells to attract people, and at the same time we support a PoW project, it makes the message incoherent. And if we have to mitigate the message just because someone who doesn't believe it happens to respect the social consensus, then it does hinder our power (and even our freedom of speech !).

But the OP is definitely very wise.

My original objection was that Sparkle was trying to poach the already very limited developer and other talent away from BitShares to his own project and doing so on our forum at our expense. And diluting our efforts doing so for a doomed (POW) project (and diluting our "Proof of Waste" meme).

However, your post has gone a long way to mitigating my concerns. Thank you.
+5%


Just withhold your precious bodily fluids. Whatever you do, don't hand those over!

LOL. I'd definitively buy Larimer spermCoins (I guess that's rude, sorry ! But those genes need to spread !)
« Last Edit: November 27, 2014, 07:00:44 pm by inarizushi »
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Offline Vizzini

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Just withhold your precious bodily fluids. Whatever you do, don't hand those over!
Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

Offline santaclause102

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The OP makes complete sense with respect to sparkle being good for bitshares marketing as well as it being a backup for bitshares.

Quote
Mining has been approved by governments where as delegate positions are less clear.  Having a version of BitShares based upon mining helps us achieve our real goals of a long-lasting solution by having some redundancy.     

So rather than compete with Sparkle we should attempt to give it support and respect and welcome every Sparkle user to our forums and teach them in a friendly way the benefits of DPOS over POW without deriding Sparkle.    Lets have a unified community built around extending the philosophy of freedom first and not divide ourselves on religious divides such as POW.
  +5%

I say: If sparkle should fulfill the role described in the OP it needs to go as high as possible in terms of market cap which in return only works if (future) sparkle holders have confidence that it is not only a marketing gimmick but a serious back up appraoch to bitshares as well as a real alternative for POW supporters.

I think sparkle could benefit bitshares greatly but it could also be nothing and just ignored all depending on what future perspective sparkle and his team can show to today's and future sparkle holders!

Imagine: TV Advertisements about sparkle "Bitcoin just with advances features (decentralized and fully collateralized banking). That only works if Sparkle is approached as a serious project.

To me a serious approach would necessarily include a team with talent and real world identities revealed.
« Last Edit: November 27, 2014, 07:04:17 pm by delulo »


Offline onceuponatime

My original objection was that Sparkle was trying to poach the already very limited developer and other talent away from BitShares to his own project and doing so on our forum at our expense. And diluting our efforts doing so for a doomed (POW) project (and diluting our "Proof of Waste" meme).

However, your post has gone a long way to mitigating my concerns. Thank you.

Offline xeroc

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They honor the socl consensus .. so they deserve our support ..
They will get my support ..

+5%

Offline bytemaster

I have posted before that I liked Sparkle as a concept but there are many people who still worry that it will hurt BitShares.   

Being proof of work Sparkle is fundamentally less efficient and predictable than BitShares.   Proof of work is not sustainable at large scales and of course leads to centralization and control.   Anyone who has been following BitShares long enough knows that anything based upon Proof of Work is no threat in the long term.

However, just because we know that Proof of Waste is a dead end, there are literally 10's of thousands of individuals out there who view anything other than Proof of Waste as a scam.    There are even exchanges that refuse to list any proof of stake coins.   

Sparkle gives BitShares a huge marketing opportunity because I suspect that 50% of people who investigate/try Sparkle will ultimately convert to BitShares.   In a way Sparkle is like giving away PromoShares in BitShares without having to dilute BitShares.

Lets make an assumption that Sparkle can get into the top 10 cryptos, that is good for BitShares because every Sparkle user ultimately learns about how BitAssets work.  It will then have a development budget on par with BitShares via its dilution. 

Sparkle will have a harder time forking to upgrade.  While BitShares can fork "at will" by simply voting out delegates that don't upgrade in a timely manner.  Sparkle will be mined by thousands of individual computers that will have to upgrade.   This will force Sparkle to have a slower upgrade path than BitShares and ultimately Sparkle users will switch to BitShares to get the latest features.

BitShares has lost a large portion of our user community twice:  once when we dropped mining and a second time when we introduced dilution.    Sparkle provides a way to welcome these users back into the fold because Sparkle has a hard limit on sparks and because it uses mining.   

Sparkle also has paid positions that will be able to fund development of infrastructure that will help BitShares.   If sparkle funds wallets, block explorers, marketers, etc then that is all going to help BitShares and help grow our ecosystem.

Sparkle gives our community initial control over how development funds from paid workers are allocated.   If we are wise we will hire initial workers that will fund projects that serve both our chains such as gateways and other open source items.  If sparkle manages to "grow" and "kill" bitshares, well we learned a valuable lesson.   Would you rather own a small stake in something big or a  big stake in something small?   Because we all have a stake in Sparkle we can view it as a hedge.   

Mining has been approved by governments where as delegate positions are less clear.  Having a version of BitShares based upon mining helps us achieve our real goals of a long-lasting solution by having some redundancy.     

So rather than compete with Sparkle we should attempt to give it support and respect and welcome every Sparkle user to our forums and teach them in a friendly way the benefits of DPOS over POW without deriding Sparkle.    Lets have a unified community built around extending the philosophy of freedom first and not divide ourselves on religious divides such as POW.

Some have critiqued Sparkle for having such a high dilution rate, but I contend that is necessary to grow a solid base of support.   Mining does one thing right, it only allocates stake to those who are interested in a project early on.   On day one Sparkle will have a low initial market cap, without high dilution there is little incentive for anyone to get on board such a fledgling system.  The dilution rate falls off quickly.   Bitcoin produced  5 million BTC the first year.  The second year it had 100% inflation (50% dilution).    If you look at the inflation rate from when bitcoin had 1 million until a year later when it had 6 million you are looking at a much higher dilution rate than Sparkle is planning.   

Like all things in life, perspective matters.  Proof of work isn't dead yet and therefore Sparkle may be the best marketing stunt the BitShares community could pull.   

Just an opinion, but I say we fully back Sparkle as an onramp to reach new users that we couldn't reach directly with BitShares.   

Thoughts?
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