Author Topic: Hard Questions for Bytemaster  (Read 32645 times)

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Offline Stan

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If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.
wow .. that's quite a good plan ..  +5% +5%

Eagerly awaiting what comes next!
Exciting times ahead

I guess you won't tell us the secret sauce on how to achieve 1 person ->1 vote without government interaction (free voting)?!

This is a great opportunity to draw a General Conclusion:

There are tons of other potential strategies that could work just like this.
Find a large group of people who care passionately about something, anything.
Talk to them about their passions.
Show how what we have can benefit what they care about.

Then, oh, by the way, you can earn 5% or more on your savings and checking account...

Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract of any kind.   These are merely my opinions which I reserve the right to change at any time.

Offline santaclause102

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Transparency plays a role in two different aspects:
1) Stating how the AGS donations are allocated: Who gets how much and for what? Meaning, did that person get it as pay for himself or is an obligation attached that those funds are solely there to grow the ecosystem? How many AGS donations are left?
2) Transparency in decision making: I say that it can harm Bitshares if important strategic decisions go back and forth (like allocations) on the forum. I would say that is is beneficial to be less transparent in the decision making process and first vet the proposal with all important players (in Virginia) and present a well thought out plan to the forum (only with respect to important strategic decision that can cause uncertainty for bts holders).
« Last Edit: December 03, 2014, 04:46:02 pm by delulo »

Offline CLains

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You are pretty good at that Stan :D

But yes, it is getting to be a full time job just linking together all the information that is scattered everywhere. The wiki was a brief effort to unite everything, but a return to the wiki and related work is soon a necessity to help everyone navigate effectively. I am happy to say that Delegate pay is the special sauce required to get others interested in this system, and I think we will see the fruits of this within a couple of months as tons of new, awesome Delegate teams compete to get elected.

Offline Stan

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I think this thread highlights a real need for more transparency which had been brought up before but sadly nothing has ever come to light. I for one would like to see

How much each person was gifted and what their task or overall objective is, past and present.

What are each persons incentives and what goals must they reach to get said incentives.



Our transparency efforts are all around you.

Look at the answers we have provided to questions in this thread alone.

Look at the Google spreadsheets that document every expenditure.

Look at the mumble session answers - taking questions from around the globe.
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10526.msg138542#msg138542

Look at our responsiveness here on the forum - we spend at least an hour here every day.

Brian has been on multiple mumble sessions describing his team's plans.

I've most recently summarized what his team is doing here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11865.msg156156#msg156156

I've summarized all the marketing initiatives here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11955.msg157631#msg157631

We explain our strategic plans and detailed thinking in blogs and newsletters here:
http://bitshares.org/bitshares-reloaded/

We described our spending strategy this year in terms even a rocket scientist could understand:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11351.msg150054#msg150054

We are even transparent about some of the reasons we can't be fully transparent:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11044.msg146487#msg146487

All the while dealing with people demanding that we "please stop" being so transparent:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11129.msg146503#msg146503

Over and over and over again...
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10866.msg143067#msg143067

Meanwhile we have been engineering the next generation of transparency where every consumer of resources is a delegate who must provide sufficient accountability and transparency just to stay employed.  Even the I3 team will be moving onto this new maximally open and transparent mode of operations.

So I believe that the only way to achieve more transparency would be to have someone spend full time doing what I just did for an hour above - researching, examining, refining, condensing and curating all the transparent information that is already out there.  If the community wants that kind of service, we have built in the mechanism for them to hire the best person they can find for that job.


Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract of any kind.   These are merely my opinions which I reserve the right to change at any time.

Offline Rune

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We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly

If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.

So this is the secret VOTE trick! I guess its a decent idea, and I imagine it could give results. However I would be much happier if it was Adam coming here and filing questions on this and explaining the strategy. It's frustrating that him and Brian are the ones being complained about and asked for transparency, yet the responsibility of defending them falls on you and other developers who have much more important stuff to do.

Offline matt608

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I guess you won't tell us the secret sauce on how to achieve 1 person ->1 vote without government interaction (free voting)?!

If it's using facial recognition software to reference databases of personal info (which I don't know how FMV would have access too...) then it could theoretically allow "illegal" immigrants and prisoners (who have their vote taken away) to register and have their vote counted.  If they don't have info in the data base they could sign up by adding their info right then and there when voting.  They can't duplicate it or the software would recognise their face.  An election that includes the voices of these silenced millions will be the biggest news in years.  I would love to write the copy for that.

What does concern me is the security of the voters info. 
« Last Edit: December 03, 2014, 03:19:52 pm by matt608 »

Offline Ben Mason

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We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly

If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.

A peaceful legitimacy transition....beautiful  +5%

Offline abit

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On my new laptop with Win7/64, i7, 8Gb, but no ssd, the experience is positive. Terrible on my old pc though, dont want to talk about it any more..
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Offline xeroc

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If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.
wow .. that's quite a good plan ..  +5% +5%

Eagerly awaiting what comes next!
Exciting times ahead

I guess you won't tell us the secret sauce on how to achieve 1 person ->1 vote without government interaction (free voting)?!

Offline islandking

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I agree I think we more transparency on where the money is going. The shareholders have a right to know. Although we can't give away all of our ideas to our competitors either. So it needs to be balanced for now at least.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2014, 03:02:51 pm by islandking »
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Offline Gentso1

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I think this thread highlights a real need for more transparency which had been brought up before but sadly nothing has ever come to light. I for one would like to see

How much each person was gifted and what their task or overall objective is, past and present.

What are each persons incentives and what goals must they reach to get said incentives.

How can we as a community try to understand the value of someone if we don't know their pay or what their actual role is?
Brain is the best example of this, He was hired as a marketing director. We start complaining and it turns out his role is actually not marketing at all but more of a talent scout and making connections.

I am sure you can see from our end how this can be rather confusing and frustrating.

It does not impact strategy 1 bit to be transparent about where money was and is being spent.

I want to point you to your own post bytemaster https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=4958.45 
I have asked Stan, Brian, and Arlen to work extra hard to clear up this and provide increased transparency on when, how, what, and why funds are being used for.    If they live up to my vision for it then you all will be very happy. 

If not I will hammer them until I get want I want to see....   just trying to avoid getting side tracked by these kinds of issues so I can focus on release.

This post is dated   June 14, 2014. At that point we at lest got a few google spread sheets now we don't even get that.
 

 

Offline matt608

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Offline bytemaster

We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly

If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it. 

 
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline GaltReport

You guys are avoiding the 500 pound gorilla in the room.  You think you can create an open source voting system, show a couple people how cool it is and then make money off it? You are entering a world you know nothing about and, FMV knows nothing about based on their résumé.

EAC, HAVA, Secretary of State, election like load testing, 3rd party testing and County acceptance are huge hurdles I don't see Bitshares clearing.

Oh, and don't think for one second that Dominion or ES&S won't jump on your open source code if it even looks like we are the slightest of competition and beat us to the punch. You are entering a world were real world money is on the line and believe me, those companies are not of the altruistic types. With cryptocurrency, you are going after states whose egos will let the little guy try there thing. But a companies earnings on line is a whole different game.

You also have nobody involved in real politics consulting or guiding you. This is your biggest mistake. In politics, things happen through and because of who you Know or because who you know is owed a favor, not because of what you think you know or what you think you can offer will change the world.

The sharedrop will turn out to be a huge mistake in hindsight as VOTE will never be what you think it's going to be unless you hire a Consulting firm, aka a lobbyist, or a seasoned insider with connections to begin pulling weight.

You could also start telling us your plans. So far, no plan that was kept secret here had ever needed to be a secret to begin with after the revelation. Saying there is a plan, or über secret stuff to come most likely means there is no good plan or stuff to come yet.

Or, I would like one reason anything on an open source project should remain a secret to the people floating your meal ticket.

...
If you think for one second our plan depends upon governments accepting what we are doing...then you have completely misjudged our strategy.   We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.

Can you elaborate please on this part.

Offline xeroc

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We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly